THAT'S MEN:BACK IN the day, the Catholic Church was so obsessed with the danger of people having sex and enjoying it that they made even thinking about it with pleasure a sin. (If you think this is yet another rant against the Catholic Church, it's not. There is something in this article for golfers, drinkers and smokers too, not to mention chocoholics, so stick around.)
If you died unexpectedly after having had "bad thoughts", you could end up doing eternity in hell for the offence. It turns out that the joke was on the reverend gentlemen who came up with the idea of making the having of "bad thoughts" a spiritual capital offence.
Lots of evidence has now accumulated to suggest that if you try to suppress your thoughts about something you're interested in, like sex and chocolate, those thoughts will come back stronger than ever, much more strongly than if you had not suppressed them. What's more, you are more likely to engage in a behaviour that you suppress all thoughts about.
So all those people going around trying not to have "bad thoughts" of the carnal nature were more likely to end up having unapproved sex than those who allowed their thoughts to come and go without resistance.
Psychologists James Erskine and George Georgiou have written a fascinating article on this topic in a recent edition of The Psychologist.
They report that smokers asked to suppress their thoughts about smoking subsequently smoked far more than those who were asked to think actively about smoking or those who were given no instructions. Similar effects have been found in relation to deliberately not thinking about drinking or about eating desired foods.
Some years ago, an AA member remarked to me that alcoholics who returns to drinking after a period of abstinence seem to "make up" for all the drinks they did not have by getting deep into the drinking very quickly.
I wonder now if this was also an example of people suppressing thoughts of drinking and thereby unwittingly increasing their chances of falling off the wagon?
What seems to be happening here is that if, say, you try to limit your chocolate intake by not thinking about chocolate, your brain begins to monitor itself for any forbidden thoughts about chocolate.
This has the effect that your brain is all the time thinking about chocolate because checking again and again that you are not thinking about chocolate necessarily involves thinking about chocolate.
This monitoring is happening below the level of awareness - but it keeps your inner glutton primed to dive into the next box of chocolates that appears.
What, you may ask, do drinking, smoking, sex and chocolate have to do with golf? Just this: as with these other activities, all less interesting than golf, the effect on players of suppressing thoughts of overputting the golf ball was measured.
And as with all the others it turned out that those who attempted to suppress thoughts of overputting were more likely to make the error than their colleagues who did not engage in suppression.
Psychologist Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, used a technique called paradoxical intention with patients obsessed by thoughts.
To use this technique, you pretend to want to do the thing you fear. So if you have a fear of blushing you actually tell yourself before going to a party that you have every intention of blushing, so much so that you are actually going to light up the room on your own.
When you do this, the fear is no longer crippling. It seems to me that this technique is based on not suppressing thoughts but allowing them and, instead, having a laugh at them.
So there it is. Let your thoughts of smoking, drinking, sinning and overputting golf balls come and go as they please. It's when you try to lock them up in the cellar that they turn nasty.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas.