A Mindful Golfer Needs A Mindful Body As Explained by The Mother of Mindfulness

So I'm vigilant. I'm focusing on those branches. Now as I ride through the woods, I may stumble over a boulder because I was not paying attention to anything but the branches. So mindfulness is different from vigilance. When you're vigilant, you have a particular stimulus in mind. When you're mindful, you're just there.

not an instructor. I'm here to learn from everybody. I'm really excited to have you on the show today.

about golf, you know. I use it as an example when I'm teaching often because when students or anybody doesn't successfully complete whatever they're trying to do, they often become frustrated. And so I raise the simple question of if you got a hole in one every time you swung the club, would that be fun? And just think about it for a second, people would realize, well, there's no game anymore.

So that when you recognize you can either do things perfectly mindfully mindlessly or imperfectly mindlessly, I think then you go a little easier on yourself. It's also you know that I've done a lot of some writing and a lot of talking about all sorts of sports, not just golf. And the thing that people don't realize is there are two general aspects to what you need to do. One is off the course, the other is on the course.

You know, so that if you didn't sleep well, if you had a fight with your spouse, all of those things are going to clearly affect your golf. And learning what mindfulness is all about will help you enormously off the court, and then of course, and then on the course, there are particular things one should be doing. You know, with any sport, people tend to think they should do it over and over and over again until they can

do it perfectly and make it second nature. And whenever you hear yourself saying anything about second nature, recognize that means you're being mindless. And so I was on this television show decades ago with Tiger Wood's father, and so when he was asked how did Tiger Woods get so good that his father's practice practice practice, And then I get on, I say, well, you know, practice often makes imperfect,

not perfect. If you're practicing to achieve the end of not having to think about what you're doing, you're going to lock yourself in and not be as good as you can be. If when you practice, your intention is each time to notice subtle difference is in what you're doing, the outcome and so on, then the practice will help.

But sadly, when most of us are taught sports instruments had to study for a test, you know that what people think they should do is repeat it, repeat it, repeat it as is so that they don't have to think about it. And also, you know, why would you want to do anything if you don't show up for it. I gave a talk the other day. Then something occurred to me that after doing this for so long, it would surprise me that it took so long for me

to come to this. But it was a talk on happiness, and what I realized was that can robots be happy? And of course not well when we're being mindless. We're no different from robots. So the answer to improved game, the answer to improved health and increased happiness is to be mindful. Now you should, now, Fred, ask me the question, so what do you mean by mindfulness?

Everything is always changing, Everything looks different from different perspectives, So you can't know now. Parents, teachers, golf instructors tend to speak in absolutes. Hold the club this way, do X, Y or Z, and that's fine in certain circumstances, but not in others. So one of the things the way I try to bring this home to people is the one thing I think everybody thinks they know is how much is one plus one? So Fred, how much is

one plus one two? No, not always. If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one cloud plus one cloud one plus one is one. The other day, somebody sent me something where if you have one pizza and you add one pizza, you have two pizzas. However, if you have one lasagna and you add one lasagna, one plus one is one. It's just a bigger lasagna. Now beyond me that when you add one plus one to

get two, you're using a base ten number system. If you were using a base two number now you don't really have to understand anything deep about this, But if you're using a base two number system, one plus one would be written as ten. And what I'm fond of saying now is the next time somebody asks you how much is one plus one, you're going to know it depends. And now you have choices. When you're mindful, you have choices. When you're mindless, you don't. Again, you're responding more like

a rather robot. So you know you could say one, ten, two, and probably other things as well. All right, So what I found over decades now, forty five years of research, sadly is that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. We're not there. But when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. But it's clear to me that this is sadly true, and the way to be there is very simple. So let's say you are going to visit me at my house right now.

I'm in Dartmouth, mass You'd walk in, you wouldn't have to practice anything. You've never been here before, so you would notice things, right. You might notice a painting and wonder if I did it in some books, see some things that seem strange to you, say, you would be being mindful, right, So when you're mindful, you're actively noticing new things. Now when you think you know, So when

I asked you how much was one plus one? You didn't do anything but just mindlessly answer to And now, knowing that things change, you take a little more time with it, only a few seconds more, and have a choice in what you're doing. So all of his research has shown me that by increasing our mindfulness, which means essentially becoming more and more aware that we just don't know, we don't have to feel bad about not knowing. Nobody

knows because things are always changing. That when we increase this act of noticing, the neurons are firing, and it's literally and figuratively enlivening very early research, we make elderly people more mindfully, live longer. Everything is better. You know. We have people performing symphonies, whether they're mindless or mindful, record the piece, play it back for people who know nothing about the study. Everybody, not everybody, but over ninety

percent of the people prefer the mindfully played piece. But I'll go back to what I said to you before, which is, if you're gonna be there, show up for it. And especially when we're talking about a sport that you're doing basically as recreation. You know, I don't think either of us right now we're speaking to the tiger woods of the world, and so if you're not going to play golf mindfully, why be there? Now?

and so on. If you've played the course many times before, you may attempt to play it the same way you had the last you know, the last few times, but now you're different. The weather is different, the course is different because they're you know, even if they've just mowed it the last time you played it probably wasn't exactly the same. So you want to be present and notice these subtle differences. I think that you know, and then

the game will of course be more fun. And when you hit that golf ball and it's not a perfect shot, so what you know that if it were perfect again each time, there'd be no game. There a way I explained this to people also. So remember you were a little kid and you get in an elevator and you try to press that button, you can't reach it, and then a parent or some adult picks you up and you press the button, and then the next time you're

a little old that you still can. Eventually you're in the elevator, you press the button and you can reach it. That's the end, right, When was the last time you were excited about pressing a button in an elevator? All right? So you know, that's another example of how we should not be so frustrated with imperfection. And when you miss a shot, there's more in a stroke. There's more information

there than if you hit it correctly. You know you hit it correctly, you don't know where You're just lucky that were you were aware of why you did what you did. But if you screw up in some way, there's lots to pay attention to, and that when you've screwed up and you're now going to try to improve the next stroke, you can't be sure why you screwed up,

but it doesn't matter. You can still make corrections. So I'm not really a golfer I'm a tennis player, and so I hit the ball, and let's say that it's not a good it was a fine performance. Now, if I say to myself, remember to bend your legs, even if that bad stroke had nothing to do with whether or not my legs were ben I'm still going to set myself up to be better. And it's the same for all sports.

you're oblivious to everything else around it. So let me give a different sport as an example. I'm on horseback and I'm racing through the woods. If I say to myself, watch out for the branch, the branches you know, so I don't get knocked off the horse. So I'm vigilant. I'm focusing on those branches. Now as I ride through the woods, I may stumble over a boulder because I was not paying attention to anything but the branches. So my fullness is different from vigilance. When you're vigilant, you

have a particular stimulus in mind. When you're mindful, you're just you know there in some sense.

people do these things? So this was a time where banks closed at three o'clock and there were no cash machines. Okay, so here you have parking at the bank. Now at three o'clock, the bank isn't open, so it's okay to park there. In New York at three zho one, the spaces would be gone, but in Cambridge they were just open. I mean, it was, you know, silly things of this sort that said to me, this was something that was different from intelligence. And as I'm fond of saying, my

first work in all this was studying mindlessness. And then somebody, and I keep trying to remember who it was, but I can I don't remember, said you know you are what you study, You're something mean of that sort. So then I said, okay, and I turned it around and started studying mindfulness. And it was at that time that I became more aware of Buddhism and the Eastern use

of the term. And it was actually very exciting that through this Western scientific perspective I was coming to many of the same conclusions as the Eastern work would suggest. But again, most of that is based on meditation. And even though I studied meditation beginning and it's great practice, it's just different. The work that I do is mindfulness

without meditation, just active noticing. When you're active, you know, it's very nice people say be in the present, it's meaningless because when you're not there, you don't know you're not there, so how can you call up the instruction? But when you know you don't know, then you naturally there to find out. And when you're noticing new things, that puts you in the present, which I agree is

a good place to be. So it's easy to get there, but not get there by just deciding I'm going to be in the present.

world or meditating, that that would result in peace. You know, so meditators over there are going to influence people over here to be less aggressive. I said, okay, fine, you know I'm in Why not? I was pleased with myself, Fred, because this was the first time I was involved in something where if it worked, wouldn't you know, give me any applause? It was theirs. But what happened was at one point, so we're all over the Middle East, and a research assistant to a researchers system, to a research

you know, did something that they shouldn't do. I don't remember what it was. It was minor, but that came back to me and I said, all right, this is is too complicated. I can how can I have control over all of this? So I slowly backed out. You know, when you ask about pushback, I don't read my own reviews, you know, I don't look I don't look at my own TV shows or podcasts. That way, I can remain a legend in my own mind. So there could be pushback out there. There probably is.

And in addition to that, so that's top down. If you know you don't know, and how ubiquitous uncertainty is, then you naturally tune in when you think you know, and then all you need to do is notice three or four new things about this thing you think you know, and you come to see you didn't know it as well as you thought you did, so your attention that naturally goes to it. I mean you can do that, you know, with your spouse, a friend, Notice three new

things about them. There's there are always new things, and then that's exciting. You know. This act of noticing is the essence of enjoyment. It's the essence of engagement. So we have a study we ran a long time ago. We'd have people doing they'd be listening to classical music, listening to loud music, which kind, looking at paintings, watching football, you know, all sorts of activities in one of three ways that we would tell them, just do it. So

they just watching the football. These are women who hate football. Notice two new things about it, Notice four new things about it, Notice six new things. And it turns out the more you notice, the more you like the thing you're noticing. You know. So anybody can enjoy golf, anybody can enjoy anything by just doing this active noticing. And too many of us, you know, wait for something to grab us rather than actively. But you know, so we don't have nuggets of mindfulness or it's all just this

process of noticing. One of the important ways I think that people can be more effective and happy in whatever they're doing is to reduce the stress they experience. And stress is mindless. And whether you're on the golf course or you're at a cocktail party, stress is not doing you a good service. So I just say to people quickly, you know, just ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience because almost never, you know, I missed, you know,

I hit the bowl in the sand. You know, so what, it's not a tragedy, and so you recover quickly, more quickly. But stress is mindless because stress is the view that something terrible is going to something's going to happen, and when it happens, it's going to be terrible. Now, it turns out that we can't predict what's going to happen. So if you just said to yourself, we give yourself

three reasons why this thing probably won't happen. So you went from thinking it's definitely going to happen, you're going to miss the shot, you're going to make a fool of yourself, you're going to get fired from work, whatever it is, three or four reasons why it's not going to happen. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But now's the fun part. Turn it around, and let's say it does happen. How is that actually an advantage? People don't realize events themselves are neither good nor bad. It's our

views of the events that make them good or bad. Now, the more mindful you are, the more choices you have for how to view situations. And if some of these views feel better, clearly those are the ones you're going to gravitate too. But when you think X is awful and you're about to experience it, you know you're setting yourself up. It's interesting. I think it was Mark Twain who said, you know, most of the things we worry

about never happen, which is also true. So if you just thought about the last three times you were stressed and did the event happen, chances are not. But even if it did, then you see you got through it, so it all becomes less scary. And so once we're not and people in this world, I think, or at

least in this country, believe that life is stressful. I don't think so, you know, I don't think it has to be, but certainly everybody if they employ the sorts of things that I talk about in The Mindful Body can reduce the amount of stress that they're experiencing.

very different health effects than most of us assume. I mean, and I'm not even suggesting which we have data that I told you, you make people more mindful, they live longer. But let me give you an example. So this work. A lot of the book, but not all of it, for sure, is about mind body unity. You know, I thought about it. I felt a mind body they're just words. And if you have a mind and a body, then you have to figure out how do you get from a thought to the body doesn't follow naturally and put

them back together, and then it's one thing. Then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So we have lots of I think, interesting studies testing this. The first one was the counterclockwise study. So we took old men and we had them live in a retreat that we retrofitted to twenty years earlier, and we had them live there as if they were the younger selves. So they would be talking about past events as if

they were just unfolding and so on. And in a week these old men their hearing improved, their vision, their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger. Now in the book, I have many men these studies. I'm just let's see, I don't know trying to think of any particularly relevant to golf. But people can deduce whatever they want. The next study in the series with Ali Crumb was we took chamber maids and first asked them how much exercise

do you get? Oh, it is relevant to golf, how much? And they said they don't get any exercise because they thought exercise is what they do after work, because that's what the surgeon general says, who sits behind a desk all day. So we simply had them change their minds. We taught them that work was exercise. That's all, just changing their minds. So working on at the gym making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym,

and so on. So now we have two groups. One group that realizes they work is exercise, the other group that doesn't. We find the groups are not eating any differently, they're not working any harder. You know, either group is not spending more effort than the other. However, the group that now sees their work is exercise lost weight. There was a change in body mass index, wasted hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down just by changing their minds.

So if you are a golfer, you know, I think that you should pay some attention to all the exercise you're getting, rather than assume because you're driving in the cart there's no exercise. There's still exercises. Can only take the cart so far, and there may be benefits to that. And another study, we had people in a sleep lab and they wake up. We have, without them knowing, change

the clock. So one group thinks they got two hours more sleep than they got, one group thinks they got two hours fewer than they got, and one group the amount of sleep they got turns out on the measures we took, biological and cont a function follow perceived amount of sleep. The last most recent study with Peter Ungle, we inflict a wound minor wound, but a wound, and we put people in front of a clock and big on clocks. I guess and unbeknownst to them the clock

is rigged. So for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time, for a third of the people, half as fast as real time for a third of the people real time. Now, most people would assume that that wound is going to heal. When that wound heals, what's the difference with the clocks is. But it turns out that the clock time that your perceptions of perception of how much time has passed actually

determines healing time. So so many of these sorts of studies that are fun and suggest the amount of control we have over our health is enormous. And in addition to that, we have a part of the book that deals with chronic illness. And most people, when they are diagnosed with a chronic illness, assume their symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. They assume that

there's nothing they can do about it. They feel helpless. Okay, so what we do is we have a treatment for people where basically what you're going to do is we're going to call you periodically and ask you how is a symptom now, is it better or worse than the last time? And why several things happen now? The first,

because you're engaged in this, you don't feel helpless. Second, by us asking you to compare how it is now with before, you're going to recognize that it's not stable and sometimes you actually feel better, so that then you're going, in a larger sense, feel better. Third, and most important is that when we tell you ask you is it better or worse, we ask you why, and that instigates a mindful searche for why, and mindfulness itself is good

for your health. And then, finally, I believe you're more likely to find a cure if you're looking for it. So make this simpler. Fred. Let's say you're lets you stress. Since we talked about it, you think you're always stressed. Nobody is always anything, okay, because when you're not stressed, you're not thinking about being stressed, okay, and then you're stressed again. So it seems like this is the way you willway. So we call you periodically and Fred, how

are you now? Is it better or worse than before? And why we do this over time? It doesn't have to be very long, two weeks a week. And then what we find out is, and you're saying why now are you stress? You discover you're stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Well, then the cure is easy, right, stop talking to me or talk to me differently, right.

And this has been phenomenally effective. We've got positive of results using this attention to symptom variability with people at Parkinson's stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, big things that were psychologically under their control. And then of course you have the thought part of this, that our thoughts, because mind and body is won that when we keep ourselves stress free and we keep ourselves happy, we're healing our bodies.

So the book really is about how to tap into all of the control we have over our health and well being to which most people are oblivious.

medical or what have you. But I spoke to many of them afterwards, and you know, they were very supportive because they know they don't know, and you know, and these are very smart, well meaning people. I'm not diminishing the effectiveness of medical intervention. What I'm saying is there's still a great deal we can do for ourselves, and even at the least, you know, if we go back

to this attention to symptom variability. While you're waiting to find out the results for the biopsy, you know, you're waiting the three weeks to see the doctor, you certainly don't have to sit there being stressed. There are things you can do for yourself. You know. I think that the medical world, and for many of whom in it, I have an enormous respect. But I think that on occasion, maybe more of an occasion, not infrequently, they say things

that they shouldn't say. You know, they might tell you have six months to live. There's no way they can know this. See. A piece of all of this that helps people understand the uncertainty that should be part and parcel of their existence in some sense is science doesn't give us absolutes. Science gives us probabilities that say, if we were to study this again in the same way, we're likely to still get an effect where most people respond in a particular way, not everybody. Okay, so let

me go back half a step. It was a straight A student. I was the one. You hate it, okay, And I was at this horse event and this man asked me, can I watch his horse because he wants to get his horse a hot dog. Horses don't eat meat, right, I say sure. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized

everything I thought I know could be wrong. You can't do an experiment that's going to prove horses don't eat meat because you're only going to be able to use so many horses, so much meat mixed with so much grain that can vary, how hungry the horse is, how big. All of this will determine, and so what you end up getting in such a study is most of the horses like this being fed in this way don't eat meat. That's very complicated. So it's just easier to say horses

don't eat meat. It's like one in one is two, Yeah, right, Matt. What we're taught is an easy way of giving us science most of the time. But you know, I think that we would be better off if we were told most horses don't eat meat, or it seems that horses don't eat me, or one in one could be two rather than is. As soon as we have the is, we mindlessly accept it as true. We don't pay any attention to the times that it's not true.

as you can possibly be at that time. And if you, in being mindful now are also paying attention to how you feel. The example I gave before, you're you know, you didn't sleep that well, so your shoulder hurts a little, so you change the way you're standing slightly. You make adjustments to take advantage of who you are right at this moment. So off the course is basically too. You know, if one reads the mindful body, they'll have a good sense of how to become more mindful off the course.

And then you're on the course and the mindfulness is the same, but the things you're mindful of very slightly. You know, off the course you're not paying attention to the wind, you know, unless you're asking yourself should you put on a heavier sweater or jacket. But on the course you want to be actively noticing things about the course itself, things about your body itself, ways that you

could vary the way you hold the club. You know, the five iron was good the last time, but now the seven iron might be a better choice for you because of whatever things have changed. So, you know, we want to understand that we should be guided by our rules and routines the way we've done things before, but they shouldn't govern how we do things, because right now is different from yesterday and we'll be different again tomorrow.

And even if you were a professional golfer. Look, I'm a professional psychologist and I still do my psychology mindfully. I enjoy it and if you're not enjoying it, then you're being mindless. So and if you're enjoying it, then the outcome will typically be better. But even if not, it doesn't matter that much, you know, so to do it tense and follow all those rules that you mindlessly

learned and then screw up. God, it's terrible. But if you're enjoying yourself and you screw up, at least you had a good day.

then they're destroyed by it. Why, I mean, it's kind of crazy. Why expect perfection.

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