Sometimes, it only takes one shot.
A drive disappears into the trees when the fairway looked impossibly wide. A four-foot putt lips out. A perfectly struck iron finds the bunker instead of the green.
The shot ended ten seconds ago. But inside the golfer’s head, it is still being played.
How did I miss that? Why do I always make the same mistake? Don’t do it again on the next hole…
That is where one of golf’s most unusual mental challenges begins.
Unlike many sports, golf gives you an extraordinary amount of time to think about what you have just done. You walk to your ball. You wait for another player. You check a yardage. You stand on the next tee for another minute or two.
A four-hour round contains remarkably little actual execution.
Between shots, your mind has all the time it needs to reconstruct the past, anticipate the worst and turn one isolated technical mistake into a much longer-lasting mental problem.
MyGolfMedia first explored this subject in 2017, when Justin Thomas had just won his first PGA Championship. Thomas was already talking about the importance of patience and about changing the way he interpreted mistakes. Earlier in his career, a bogey could feel like something capable of ruining his entire day. He gradually learned that a Sunday in contention is long, and that a great deal can still happen after one bad hole.
Nearly a decade later, the original idea remains remarkably relevant.
What has changed is the way we should talk about negative thoughts.
The traditional advice was simple:
Think positive.
Modern sports psychology suggests a more interesting question:
What if the problem isn’t having a negative thought, but allowing that thought to decide what you do next?
Golf is almost designed for rumination
One of the strongest observations in our original article was also one of the simplest: golfers have an enormous amount of time to think.
Several minutes can pass between shots. You walk to the ball, wait, calculate a yardage, select a club and prepare for the next challenge.
That makes golf particularly fertile ground for rumination.
Don’t hit it in the water.
I’m putting terribly today.
I can never hit this club.
Whatever happens, don’t three-putt.
I’ve ruined another good drive.
There is nothing unusual about thoughts like these. A golfer can understand their technique perfectly well and still find their attention gradually captured by precisely the outcome they are trying to avoid.
This is where an important distinction matters.
A thought is not a ball flight.
It is not an instruction you are required to follow.
And it certainly isn’t a prediction.
Thinking “I’m probably going to hit this into the water” obviously doesn’t mean the ball will end up there.
But if that thought dominates your attention, increases muscular tension, speeds up your routine or makes you hesitate over your target, it can begin to influence the shot indirectly.
The objective, then, probably shouldn’t be to become a golfer who never thinks negatively.
That golfer almost certainly doesn’t exist.
A more realistic skill is being able to notice:
That’s what I’m thinking right now.
And then not automatically turn that thought into the reality of the next shot.
That is an important change from what we wrote in 2017.
Back then, our advice was to replace negative thoughts with positive ones and pay attention to your internal dialogue.
Self-talk still matters. But there is little point standing over your next shot after hitting a drive out of bounds and telling yourself:
I’m playing fantastic golf.
A neutral, practical statement may be far more useful:
“That’s done. What’s my best option now?”
The bad shot isn’t always the problem. What you do with it can be
This may be the most important point in the entire discussion.
You’ve just missed a two-and-a-half-foot putt.
That mistake has cost you one stroke. That’s a fact.
But suppose you reach the next tee still thinking about the putt. You’re angry. You automatically pull driver. You shorten your routine. Your tempo gets quicker. The next ball finds a penalty area.
Suddenly, the missed putt is costing you more than one stroke.
The first shot was a golf mistake.
The second may partly be a consequence of how you processed the first.
This is also where the mental game intersects with course management.
Making a rational decision requires a certain amount of mental availability. A player who is still emotionally absorbed by the previous shot isn’t necessarily evaluating the present one in the same way.
Psychology and strategy are different subjects.
But eventually they meet.
Golf can also be particularly cruel because the immediate outcome does not always tell you whether you did the right thing.
A great swing can produce a poor result after a terrible bounce.
A bad decision can be rewarded when a tree kicks the ball back into the fairway.
If your emotional state is determined entirely by the outcome, you are giving enormous power to events you cannot fully control.
Mental skill is therefore less about artificially celebrating every mistake than about separating three things:
what just happened, what you can potentially learn from it, and what you need to do now.
Justin Thomas was already expressing something similar when he talked about learning from weeks in which he didn’t win rather than simply treating them as failures.
It sounds like a small distinction.
But it changes the question completely.
Why am I so bad?
There is very little useful information in that question.
What produced that shot, and is there anything I should change right now?
That question might actually have an answer.
And sometimes the correct answer is simply:
Nothing.
Trying desperately not to think about trouble can give it even more attention
Imagine a par 3 with water down the right.
You stand behind the ball and your first thought is:
Whatever you do, don’t hit it right.
What should you do?
Traditional mental-game advice might tell you to replace the thought immediately with a positive statement:
I’m going to hit the green.
That may work for some golfers.
But it isn’t necessarily the only approach.
A more practical response is to accept that your brain has correctly identified the water — it exists, after all — and then redirect your attention towards useful information:
Where do you actually want the ball to go?
The water becomes part of the problem rather than the centre of the problem.
Your target might be five yards left of the flag.
Your intended shape might be a gentle fade.
Your swing cue might simply be a familiar sense of rhythm.
The specific choice matters less than what it does to your attention: it directs you towards something you are trying to produce rather than towards a consequence you are trying to avoid.
That difference can sound semantic.
It isn’t.
Don’t hit it in the water does not describe a golf shot.
Start my 7-iron at the left-centre of the green does.
That is also why the mental game doesn’t need to become mystical.
You are not trying to convince yourself that the hazard doesn’t exist.
You are deciding where to place the limited amount of attention available in the seconds before execution.
A 2026 study published in Frontiers in Psychology provides an interesting illustration of how important that pre-shot decision-making phase can be. Researchers observed 81 amateur university golfers, with an average Handicap Index of around 26, across 243 decisions on dogleg holes. When an individual golfer deviated from their usual behaviour and selected a more aggressive option, that decision was associated in this experiment with roughly half a stroke more on the hole.
The authors were appropriately cautious about generalising the result.
But the experiment illustrates an important principle:
what happens before the swing matters.
A routine is primarily a way of deciding where your attention goes
On this point, our 2017 article has aged rather well.
We argued that a routine isn’t simply a way of preparing the body. It also helps put the mind in the state required for execution — and it should be practised on the range rather than saved exclusively for the golf course.
Research on pre-performance routines broadly supports their value.
A meta-analysis covering 112 effect sizes found favourable effects on sporting performance, including under pressure. In the experimental studies analysed, the average effect reached a Hedges’ g of 0.64 under low-pressure conditions and 0.70 under pressure.
Those figures obviously do not mean that having a routine will save you 0.7 strokes.
They are statistical effect sizes used to compare performance between experimental conditions.
Golf-specific research points in a similar direction.
One experiment involving 68 participants examined wedge shots from 40, 50 and 60 metres — approximately 44, 55 and 66 yards — and compared purely physical practice with training that also incorporated a cognitive and behavioural routine.
The results were particularly favourable for non-golfers who used the combined approach, while improvements among golfers were generally not statistically significant.
That qualification matters.
A routine isn’t a universal magic formula.
It is, however, something that can be trained.
More recently, a 2026 Delphi study published in the International Journal of Golf Science proposed a routine model called “STOP S.L.O.W. GO.” The model was developed from the existing literature and then evaluated by 36 NCAA Division I collegiate golf coaches in the United States.
Overall consensus on its usefulness reached 72.73%, with five of the six stages receiving 100% agreement among participants.
But we should resist turning that finding into another dogma.
The best players do not necessarily use an identical routine timed to the second.
A study involving six elite golfers found that their routines could vary according to the type of shot they were playing.
The function of the routine may therefore matter more than its exact form.
It creates a transition between:
analysis, decision and execution.
For the amateur golfer, the mental routine can remain extremely simple.
Before approaching the ball:
What’s my target? What shot have I decided to play?
At address:
One intention or familiar feel — preferably not enough information to trigger a complete technical analysis of the swing.
After the shot:
Observe it. Accept the result. Extract any useful information if necessary.
Then close it.
That last word may be the most important:
close it.
After a bad shot, allow yourself to be annoyed — just not for the next three holes
We sometimes caricature the champion’s mindset as a state of total emotional control: no anger, no fear, no frustration.
Watch almost any professional tournament and the reality is obvious.
The best players in the world miss shots. They drop a club in frustration, look away from the ball, talk to their caddie or stand motionless for a few seconds after an error.
The photograph of Justin Thomas accompanying our original article captures this particularly well.
His hands are on his head. And in some ways, that image says more about the reality of golf than another photograph of a champion smiling beside a trophy.
Even one of the best players of his generation can experience the immediate frustration of a shot that did not produce the intended result.
Thomas is no longer the young prospect we were writing about in 2017. At 33 in September 2026, he has built a career that includes 16 PGA Tour victories and two PGA Championships.
That hindsight makes his example more interesting.
Learning to deal with frustration, impatience and mistakes isn’t something golfers graduate from once they become good enough.
It remains part of the job.
The difference may lie less in whether the emotion exists than in how long you allow it to live.
You are allowed to be furious after missing a putt.
The objective isn’t to deny the emotion.
But somewhere between that green and the next tee, something needs to end.
Some players put the putter back in the bag and use that action as a symbolic full stop.
Others take a deep breath.
Others deliberately talk to their playing partner about something completely unrelated.
The ritual itself matters less than its purpose:
to create a boundary between what can no longer be changed and what can still be influenced.
This is probably where we would most strongly rewrite our advice from 2017.
Back then, we wrote:
“Turn negative thoughts into positive thoughts.”
In 2026, we would rather say:
Don’t necessarily try to turn a negative thought into a positive one. First, learn not to obey it.
An exercise that is much harder than it sounds
You can test this during your next round.
For nine holes, don’t try to stop having negative thoughts.
Do the opposite.
Notice them.
Whenever an intrusive thought appears, ask yourself one simple question:
Is it about the past, the future or the shot I am actually preparing?
How did I miss that putt?
Past.
If I make another bogey, my scorecard is ruined.
Future.
I’ve got 158 yards, a slight breeze into me, target left-centre of the green.
Present.
You may be surprised by how much of a round of golf is mentally played somewhere other than where your ball actually lies.
Then add one rule.
Once your pre-shot routine begins, you are no longer trying to solve the past and you are no longer calculating future consequences.
The analysis is finished.
There is now one shot.
One target.
One intention.
Do the same thing on the practice range.
That was already one of the recommendations in our original article: don’t practise only the movement. Practise the mental sequence that accompanies it.
Instead of hitting thirty consecutive 7-irons from the same mat, take a smaller number of balls and treat each one as though it matters.
Pick a different target.
Step behind the ball.
Decide on the shot.
Go through your routine.
Hit it.
Observe the result.
Then start again.
You are no longer practising only your 7-iron.
You are practising your ability to return to the present shot.
You will never defeat every negative thought
That may ultimately be the biggest change between the article we published in 2017 and this one.
At the time, we concluded that repeatedly creating positive sequences in negative situations would gradually make a golfer mentally stronger.
There is still something valuable in that idea.
But today it deserves a less binary formulation.
Golf is not divided neatly between positive thoughts and negative thoughts.
There are mainly thoughts that help you perform the task in front of you — and thoughts that pull you away from it.
You can be afraid and hit a brilliant shot.
You can feel completely confident and make double bogey.
You can stand on the 18th tee convinced that your driver has betrayed you all day and still find the middle of the fairway.
Mental toughness, then, probably isn’t the almost mythical ability to remain positive for four straight hours.
It is closer to the ability to notice that a thought has appeared, decide whether it is useful and, when it isn’t, redirect your attention towards what you can still control.
Your target.
Your decision.
Your routine.
Your next shot.
The previous one is already over.