Winning an Oscar increases your lifespan by five years, compared to being nominated. We don’t have enough data to say whether this is true also of winning the Grand Slam in golf, because only six people in the world, including Rory McIlroy, have achieved this remarkable feat. But it seems plausible that the 35-year-old golfing legend will benefit from a life-enhancing release from competitive stress that will probably last for the rest of his days.
When we feel stressed, our bodies releases a hormone called cortisol, which energises us in the short term, but is corrosive of the cells in our body when sustained at high levels over long periods. The biggest source of stress for most humans is fear of the negative reactions of other people. That is because we evolved as a group species. On the savannah, being rejected from the group spelt death.
We are a competitive species and every day entails multiple mini-tournaments – the put-down smirk, the Facebook boast, the failed promotion, the nerve-racking presentation, and so on. Each one of these stressful encounters causes our body to release cortisol – millions of little spurts over a lifetime of competing.
There are, however, certain rare accolades that are so prestigious they magically lift a person above the fray of these multiple life frictions. Suddenly, you are no longer just as good as your last movie, or if you’re a scientist (Nobel Prize winners live on average 18 months longer than nominees) your last scientific paper. It is like an amazing vaccine against negative evaluation by others.
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McIlroy’s achievement is of this order – no longer does he have to sweat the memory of his 2011 catastrophic and tearful collapse at the end of that Masters. No longer does he have to read articles speculating about his mental strength and ability to avoid the dreaded choking. McIlroy has become a master of the golfing universe, lifted above the critical mutterings of doubting scribes and commentators.
How did he do this? And are there lessons for we ordinary mortals who have no such escape from the little grinding frictions of life?
One of the strangest moments in this weekend’s Masters was McIlroy’s reaction to his first hole double bogey in the final round, when he was two strokes in the lead. This hole seemed to copper-fasten his reputation as a choker, an erratic golfing genius who couldn’t deliver when it really counts.
Bizarrely, McIlroy said about this failure, “It was almost as if the double bogey at the first calmed my nerves a little bit and sort of got me into it in a funny way.” He acknowledged that this was a little weird. What was going on here, psychologically? The insights of another sporting legend – tennis star Novak Djokovic – offer a possible answer.
McIlroy navigated that primitive fear of negative evaluation by accepting and harnessing negative thoughts and emotions
Earlier in his career, the Serbian would be seized with self-doubt at crucial moments in a match like set or match point. He said that this made him freeze up when he made a mistake. But in 2012 he achieved a breakthrough in his mental game that led to his recognition as probably the greatest tennis player of all time.
[ Five things we learned as Rory McIlroy secured Masters green jacket ]
What was this breakthrough? He learned to recognise that thoughts of self-doubt were part of the game and an entirely normal response to pressure. So rather than trying to eliminate these thoughts, he just noticed and accepted them – and so he didn’t mentally run away from them, and no longer froze when he made a mistake.
This mental strategy is called “decentring” and follows the ancient Buddhist adage: you are not your thoughts. People who learn to decentre from anxious or distressing thoughts – who learn to coolly watch themselves thinking and not get caught up too much in the thoughts – learn to cope much better with stress and anxiety.
It seems to me that McIlroy – like all elite athletes – has had to learn not only to be a master of golf but also a master of his mind, and that is the secret of his “weird” response to that awful first hole performance.
Like Djokovic, McIlroy accepted failure as part of the process – like the tennis player, he seemed to have learned to expect self-doubting thoughts and the resultant choking, and so prevent the excess levels of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline sapping their performance.
McIlroy’s fellow Grand Slam icon Tiger Woods once said that the day he did not feel nervous on the golf course would be the day he would give up. He needed his “nerves” – which in effect was just the right level of noradrenaline to allow his elite sportsman’s brain to perform at its peak.
Tiger Woods’s welcoming of his “nerves” is equivalent to Djokovic’s acceptance of self-doubt and McIlroy’s “weird” response to his first hole debacle. Perhaps what we all can take from elite sports is to learn to use failure as a spur rather than to see it as something that saps us. Doing this means learning to detach a little from our thoughts and emotions and see the sting taken out of stress and perceived humiliation or failure.
McIlroy navigated that primitive fear of negative evaluation by accepting and harnessing negative thoughts and emotions. Elite sport is the most remarkable laboratory of the mind, and if we ordinary mortals learn from its practitioners, maybe we will get a little bit of that Oscar effect too.
After the final round, McIlroy revealed what he was most proud of in his performance. Funnily enough, it wasn’t his drives, chips and putts that made him most proud, it was “how I responded to setbacks”.
