Does golf improve mental health? New scientific study reveals startling and surprising conclusions

Matt Cooper 21 Mar 2025

There has always been anecdotal evidence that golf helps mental health.

Who hasn’t felt better for stretching limbs (and even sometimes your brain) in the fresh air?

But this month a peer-reviewed study called ‘Beyond the Handicap: A Cross-Sectional Study of Mental Health Amongst Registered Golfers in Spain’ (Martín-Escudero et al., 2025) has provided academic proof of the notion.

The study digs deep to discover exactly what it is that helps our minds when clattering balls around 18 holes.

This scientific evidence is a potential game changer for the sport.

Here are a few key discoveries

Nearly one in four (73.5%) of the golfers reported that playing golf improved their mental health.

77.2% said they would recommend golf as a way to boost mental well-being.

Using the respected GHQ-28 questionnaire there was a low prevalence of distress with only 6.7% of surveyed golfers showed signs of impaired mental health.

This is typically much lower than the population as a whole.

Intriguingly golfers over 45 years old had dramatically lower rates of mental health issues (only about 4–5% of older players scored as having impaired mental health).

Golfers under 45? 28.6% showed some mental health impairment.

Married golfers had a lower prevalence (4.6%) than single, divorced or widowed golfers (14.8%).

Early morning golfers had a mental health issue rate around 3.3% versus about 10% for those who played later in the day.

The key to this study are those deep dives.

It’s not just about hitting balls.

The discovery that older adults and morning golfers have the best mental health tallies with general health trends (retirees and early birds often have less daily stress).

It also challenges assumptions that young, active people gain psychological benefits from sports.

Might it be the case that young golfers are suffering more in their golf by wanting to improve? And when the desperate quest to reduce the handicap eases off then golf becomes a pursuit more likely to keep you calm?

The authors themselves decide that the low levels of mental health problems among golfers “indicates that playing habits and characteristics may have a positive impact on the mental wellbeing of golf players.”

We have to bear in mind that golf can also screw your mind. There is unlikely to be a golfer who has not been made miserable by it at some point, but the sense of well being is also very real.