Why not just go for a walk?
Well, you definitely should go for a walk: walking is good for you (and even better with a dog).
What I’m doing there, though, is saying the quiet part out loud, asking the question that will appear in many minds when looking around the mentalitee website and reading our endorsements of golf as a route to better mental health.
Surely you could just go for a walk. In fact, didn’t Mark Twain famously say golf is actually ‘a good walk spoiled’?
It turns out he probably didn’t. The earliest attribution Quote Investigator has found dates back to 1897, and not to the US but to London, in the Morning Leader newspaper. What’s more, they were reportedly the words of a golf advocate, claiming it was anything but a good walk spoiled. But if you’re still reading, chances are you want convincing further.
Jump forward from 1897 to World Environment Day 2020, when Syngenta Growing Golf broadcast a feature with leading environmental psychologist Professor Jenny Roe from the University of Virginia. She observed how contact with nature – the kind you usually enjoy when out golfing – slows down our stress response and induces calm. “There is evidence to show this is happening in our biological system. It promotes stress resilience; it improves our mood, decreases our risk of depression, and increases our social wellbeing, particularly on a golf course where you are interacting with other members of that community.”
This takes us a step beyond simply being out in green space and towards some intrinsic elements of the game of golf as the basis for its potentially positive impact on our mental health: interaction with a like-minded community. However, other communities socialise outdoors…your local rambling society, for one, and the only stick-like objects they’re carrying are trekking poles.
And here we are, back once more at just going for a walk. But I am not deterred.
Picking up with Professor Roe again, I think her observation about resilience is where things get really interesting.
It’s no secret golf is a tricky sport in which to achieve consistently successful results, from scores on a card right up to the more fundamental challenges of repeating an effective swing each time you try to hit a ball. You make mistakes – lots of them – but you enjoy hundreds of little triumphs as well, and meeting these ups and downs with humility and patience is good for mental strength. This applies on a course with friends or at the driving range by yourself; golf offers new, unique challenges in a way few other sports can. As esteemed performance psychologist Dr Bob Rotella said back in 1995 in his book Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect (click here for our *cautious* review), “A golfer has to learn to enjoy the process of striving to improve. That process, not the end result, enriches life.”
Now, if you’re thinking all of this sounds well and good, but a bit heavy on anecdotal evidence, that’s a fair observation, so helpfully there’s a growing body of scientific research linking golf to improved mental health and well-being, too. In 2016, a scoping review was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the objective of which was to assess the relationships between golf and health generally. The study examined sources on participation in all forms of golf by all age groups and sexes, reported evidence highlighting positive associations between golf and mental wellness, and concluded that research into the links between golf and mental health should be a priority. In 2021, the International Journal of Golf Science published a comparative study on the association of golf participation with health and wellbeing, and intriguingly the authors reported golfers demonstrating higher levels of interpersonal trust versus the wider UK population: thought to be due to the game’s requirements for players to record their own scores, and call penalties on themselves. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport reported that golfers in Australia experience lower levels of psychological distress than the broader population. With findings and recommendations like these, the scientific debate looks set to continue and strengthen.
I’ve certainly not proved anything beyond doubt here. What I hope to have done is take you another step toward giving golf a try. Rather than a spoiled walk, it’s the best kind: one with lots of time-outs, puzzles to solve, and tiny challenges to overcome, all of which matter as much or as little as you choose to let them. As the conversation around golf and mental health develops, we plan to make the views and experiences of mentalitee users an integral part of it. We’d love for yours to be one of those voices.
