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By Sandy Dunlop — Better Game Golf
Every golfer who overthinks knows the frustration: you sense something is wrong in your swing, you try to fix it, and things get worse. The path to an effortless golf swing is not what you expect — it is not about thinking less, but about thinking differently. Golfers overthink because they know what their body is doing is wrong, and they try to intervene with top-down control from the prefrontal cortex. This invariably gets in the way. The irony is that the key to overthinking is more thinking — but thinking of a completely different type from what you have been doing. What Better Game Golf offers is a systems thinking approach that views the swing as an integrated whole, using disciplines like the Initial Alexander Technique (IAT) and Psychosynthesis to help you become "better than you ever thought you could be."
Golfers overthink because they know that what their body is doing in the swing is wrong. And they want to change it. They try to intervene. And usually things just get worse... and worse... it's really frustrating. The typical approach is to break down the swing into isolated components — a tip from YouTube, a piece of advice from a friend, a hypothesis about what you're doing wrong. You take that instruction and try to feel the move into the body. The mind gets into the body. It's a physical feeling. But this top-down control from the brain — well, the prefrontal cortex — invariably gets in the way of things.
What happens next is predictable: you create tension and disconnect instead of fostering holistic movement. You become hyper-aware of one body part while all the other parts of the integrated system haven't changed at all, and they effectively sabotage the intended change because they're still working in the old habitual ways. Often golfers only improve when they give up and stop trying to change things. Yes, giving up trying to change can change things — but only short term. Then you realise the old problems are still there. As Sandy explores in Golf Zone vs Choking — What Separates Them, the difference between flowing performance and collapse often comes down to how the mind is engaging with the body during the swing.
When you overthink, your brain defaults to familiar patterns stored in its brain maps. The way the brain works is that when you do a movement frequently — such as swinging the club — the brain stores these movements in maps. When faced with a situation again, it wheels out what you've done before, and this all happens in a split second. Let's say you're trying to change something and you've a tip or an instruction in mind. But one of the challenges is, especially when it matters, the brain will always select what it knows best. And what it knows best is not what's optimal — it's what it's familiar with.
There's a real tendency to revert. Your nervous system is set up to give you a good-enough result. This is called satisficing, and being better than you ever thought you could be is not satisficing — it's optimizing. So your human nature is not naturally going to be helpful in the quest for an effortless golf swing. What feels right is wrong, and what is wrong feels right. This is faulty sensory perception — your proprioceptive sense rewards the familiar and the comfortable, not what is actually correct. So not only do typical mental interventions not work, you have a not-fit-for-purpose proprioceptive sense going on, giving you faulty sensory information.
There are fundamental laws in systems thinking that capture these challenges beautifully. The first: the cure can be worse than the disease. Trying to implement the latest tip can throw whatever you have working for you completely out of shape. The cure also can become addictive — you just rely on tip after tip. The second: the easy way out usually leads back in. Easy, quick fixes invariably fail to understand how systems react to intervention — they resist. There's a Sufi story of a drunk looking for his house keys under a streetlight. A passer-by asks where he dropped them. "Outside the door," says the drunk. "So why look here?" "Because there's no light over there." We tend to look where the light is. The third: the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. Sometimes you try hard, then really hard, and just get more and more tense. Then perhaps you let go and things free up. It's paradoxical. These systems laws illustrate how logical, obvious interventions to our problems can often just compound them. Our challenge is to learn to think smart and think systems — which is exactly what the full mental game article library is designed to help you do.
Here is the most important distinction Sandy makes: "We want mind in the brain. We do not want mind in the body." What doesn't work is taking the mind into the body to try to feel something physical. When you feel into the body, you go down what Sandy calls the "front stairway" and head into the basement. You try to affect the change directly. This is mind in the body, and it simply doesn't work. It doesn't work because it interferes with natural ways of working. It doesn't work because it causes tension. But most of all, it doesn't work because all the other parts of the integrated system haven't changed, and they undermine the intended change.
Instead, just give the body the instruction — the direction — and trust that the body will self-organise and that it knows what to do. Delegation works. Interference does not. To use Sandy's metaphor, get out of the basement and head up to the attic. The prefrontal cortex has an absolutely vital role, but not in the way it's typically used. It's not about feeling your way into the body. It's about conscious, directed thinking that operates from above — giving the body clear, integrated instructions and then letting the body's own intelligence execute them. This is the foundation of the effortless golf swing.
The first critical way to use the forebrain is to do something that might seem strange: say "I am not hitting this shot." This is what's called inhibition, and it was one of the first things FM Alexander discovered. He told himself not to speak, and the minute he told himself not to speak, the tension melted away. Brian Libet's famous experiment showed that when we are about to move, the brain has already decided to move before we are even aware of it. Alexander observed himself in a mirror tensing excessively even as he began to think of speaking. In golf, the stimulus — whether it's the fear on the first tee, a hole you don't like, or the sight of water — translates into electrical pulses at a neurological level before you're even aware of it. You tighten, the body shortens and narrows, and you fall back on habitual responses.
Inhibition stops those unconscious actions that occur at a neurological level before you are even aware of them. It may seem strange saying "I'm not going to hit the shot" when you absolutely intend to, but try it. It's one step in a process of change, and if it inhibits those neurons rushing around your body at a simple thought, it's a powerful intervention. This is not about relaxing — we don't want the parts relaxed, and we certainly don't want them tense. We want them toned. Loosening is like loosening a guy rope on a tent — the whole structure becomes floppy. Inhibition is the pause that prevents the old patterns from firing, creating space for something new.
(Try: Inhibition Practice — available in the Training section of the app)
After inhibition comes direction. You learn to give new, specific directions to develop new habits — new uses of body and mind. What is critical is that you learn to give multiple directions, and at the same time. This is vital because you don't want one direction of change to be undermined by the other parts of the body movements that haven't changed. These multiple directions are also vital because the muscles and fascia need to be lengthened and stretched — like a tent — to create the stored energy that will in time be released into the ball.
It is also important to give directions that involve one part of the body moving one way while another moves in another way, or one part is still while another moves. This is the opposite of the isolated, single-tip approach. The whole approach is called Conscious Guidance and Control (CG&C). It is about a specific journey of movement experiments that are directed, practised and reviewed — video and mirrors are very central. This is a journey that involves retraining not just your body, but your mind and nervous system. Over time and repetition, the new becomes the habitual, the new becomes the default. You can then rely on the new habitual. It happens without thinking. That is when the effortless golf swing emerges — not from trying less, but from the patient work of replacing old patterns with new integrated ones.
(Try: CG&C Directions — available in the Training section of the app)
There is a place for thinking about your golf swing. Indeed, fundamental change involves confronting deeply rooted habitual movement patterns and then making changes to these. The place to do this is the practice ground — what Sandy calls the Grey Zone. What is on offer here is a way of changing how you habitually play the game. What is on offer is a journey to being "better than you ever thought you could be."
Taking it one step further, Sandy believes that the movements you make in your golf swing are totally based on how you move in everyday life. This is the Purple Zone. How you sit, stand, bend and twist in everyday life affects how you stand, bend and twist in your golfing swing. Everything is connected. This is systems thinking in action — recognising how interconnected the body is, which means a change in one part affects all other parts. It also means that the habits of everyday life affect habits on the golf course. As the legendary Shiva Irons put it in Golf in the Kingdom: "The basis for a change in the way a person plays the game must be laid in his entire life." For a deeper dive into what separates peak performance from collapse, see Golf Zone vs Choking — What Separates Them.
So being realistic — let's say you buy into this approach — you are still going to want to keep playing, whether friendly golf (Orange Zone) or competitive golf (Green Zone). Well, there is a way to stop overthinking your golf swing during actual play. Just limit yourself to one swing thought for each shot — only one. And ideally make it an integrating swing thought, such as concerning the "rhythm" of the swing, or a "follow through completion," and a level of "commitment" to the shot.
This is where Tim Gallwey's insight becomes practically useful. Gallwey called the prefrontal cortex Self One — the talkative voice in the player's head, all the time telling the person what to do in a stream of commands, and then criticising when the body fails to deliver. Self Two was the natural, automatic, unconscious process that knows exactly what to do. Gallwey's back-hit technique — calling "back" at the top of the backswing and "hit" at impact — occupied Self One in an apparently meaningless task so it couldn't interfere with Self Two. The result was invariably a dramatic improvement in performance. The inner game approach is essentially tricking the prefrontal cortex so it gets out of the way. But Sandy goes further: the prefrontal cortex is not just a hindrance to be silenced — it has an absolutely vital role in the Grey Zone work of inhibition and direction that builds the new patterns Self Two will eventually rely on.
The enteric brain — the belly brain — plays a crucial role that most golfers have never heard of. First identified by Brian Robinson in 1907 and later established by Michael Gershon in The Second Brain, this brain is a loose weave of interconnected networks with even more synaptic connections than the cranial brain. It works with what's called a central pattern generator, and it controls rhythmic movements like breathing, swallowing, walking, and jumping. It would play a huge role in all the movements of the golf swing.
This is why Sandy insists that the brain-body relationship is a set of networks, not a hierarchy. In the era of networks and self-organising systems, power is pushed down to where the real knowledge is. Boss-like, top-down, strongman interventions in the golfing body mind invariably just get in the way of natural self-organising network systems. The effortless golf swing you're seeking already exists within these networks — it's a matter of clearing the interference so the natural rhythm can emerge. When you stop trying to control rhythmic movement from the prefrontal cortex and allow the enteric brain to do what it evolved to do, movement becomes fluid, coordinated, and instinctive.
Psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli's approach recommended in the appendix of Michael Murphy's Golf in the Kingdom, is for the relatively healthy in mind and spirit — and for this reason, it offers so much to the ambitious golfer. It approaches help you navigate the emotions encountered in competitive sport, understand the many dimensions of your personality, and recover an undivided self. As one dinner party guest put it: "What is golf but a coming together of our separate parts?"
Techniques like dis-identification help you distance yourself from reactive emotions, creating a focused and composed state. Overthinking is often driven by internal conflicts — sub-personalities that provoke anxiety, self-criticism, and second-guessing. Psychosynthesis offers ways of navigating these uncontrollable sub-personalities. When you combine this emotional integration with the physical integration of IAT, you have the foundation for genuine, lasting change. You are not just building a new swing — you are building a new relationship between mind, body, and emotion. This is the systems thinking approach in full: everything is connected, and you simply cannot separate the parts from the whole.
(Try: Dis-identification Exercise — available in the Training section of the app)
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This is Sandy Dunlop's core distinction for combating overthinking. "Mind in the body" is what happens when you take a tip or instruction and try to feel the change physically — you go down into the body and try to sense whether a muscle is doing the right thing. This creates tension, interferes with natural coordination, and makes you unaware of all the other body parts that haven't changed. "Mind in the brain" means you give the body a clear direction from the prefrontal cortex — an instruction, not a physical feeling — and then trust the body to self-organise. Delegation works. Interference does not. The mind stays in the attic, not the basement. This single shift is foundational to the effortless golf swing.
Inhibition is the practice of saying "I am not hitting this shot" — even when you fully intend to hit it. It sounds paradoxical, but its purpose is to stop the unconscious neurological responses that fire the moment you think about making a swing. FM Alexander discovered that even the thought of speaking caused his body to tense and shorten. In golf, the sight of water, the pressure of the first tee, or simply the intention to swing triggers habitual tension patterns before you're even aware of them. Inhibition interrupts this stimulus-response cycle at the neurological level, creating a gap where new, conscious directions can be inserted. It is the essential first step before giving any direction to the body.
Sandy's zone system maps different contexts of golf to different colours. The Grey Zone is the practice ground — where you do the hard work of inhibition, direction, and CG&C to change habitual movement patterns. The Purple Zone is everyday life — how you sit, stand, bend, and twist affects your golf swing because everything is connected. The Orange Zone is friendly, social golf, and the Green Zone is competitive golf. When playing in the orange or green zones, you limit yourself to one integrating swing thought per shot. The deep change work happens in grey and purple; playing zones are where you trust the new patterns and keep Self One from interfering.
Faulty sensory perception means that your internal sense of your body — your proprioception — rewards what is familiar, not what is correct. When you try to make a new movement, it feels wrong. When you revert to your old habitual movement, it feels right. This is why golfers so often revert to old patterns even when they intellectually know better. The stretch receptors in your body send feedback based on comfort and familiarity, not on optimal biomechanics. This is one of the key reasons why feeling your way into a change doesn't work — the feelings themselves are unreliable. The IAT approach of giving conscious direction rather than chasing physical sensation bypasses this problem entirely.
This is one of Sandy's core systems thinking laws applied to golf improvement. When you try hard to fix your swing — really hard — you typically get more and more tense. The body resists forced change. Then perhaps you let go, give up trying, and things paradoxically free up. This captures why effort-based, willpower-driven approaches to swing change tend to fail. The golfing body mind is a self-organising system, and heavy-handed intervention triggers resistance. The effortless golf swing does not come from pushing harder — it comes from the disciplined work of inhibition and direction in the Grey Zone, combined with trust and letting go during play.
Absolutely — and Sandy addresses this directly. While the real change work happens in the Grey Zone (practice) and Purple Zone (everyday life), you keep playing in the Orange Zone (friendly golf) and Green Zone (competitive golf). The key is to limit yourself to one swing thought per shot — only one — and make it an integrating thought such as rhythm, follow-through completion, or commitment to the shot. You are not trying to implement Grey Zone experiments during competition. You are trusting whatever level of new patterning has become habitual and keeping the prefrontal cortex from interfering with the body's self-organising processes. Over time, as new patterns become the default through CG&C work, your playing zones naturally improve.
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