Aaron Wise is battling more than just the golf course

Aaron Wise, once one of the PGA Tour's brightest young stars, is currently engaged in a battle far more challenging than any he's ever faced on the golf course. In a candid press conference ahead of the 3M Open, Wise detailed his years-long struggle with mental health issues that nearly derailed his career.

"It's a constant daily battle out here," Wise said, emphasizing the depth of his struggles. His journey into professional golf began brilliantly: he was the 2016 NCAA champion, and in 2018, at just 21 years old, he shattered the scoring record at the Byron Nelson and was named PGA Tour Rookie of the Year. However, five years later, days before the 2023 Masters, he withdrew to focus on his mental health.

"This hurts," he wrote on his Instagram at the time. "But it's needed. See you soon."

Now 30, Wise is back competing. However, as he shared on Wednesday, there were many times over the past couple of years when he never thought he would be able to return to professional play. "It was a solid year and a half at home," Wise shared. "Probably the first six months just being off the course, the next year being on the course just trying to get to a place where I could kind of control my brain enough to do the things that I wanted to do, to hit high enough quality golf shots to even be out here."

After his breakout win in 2018, Wise's play was merely average over the next few years, with 11 top-10 finishes and 37 missed cuts. Nevertheless, he managed to reach the 2022 Tour Championship, a significant achievement for any professional.

However, what happened next was unexpected. "It was a pretty rapid decline," Wise recalled. "I felt like the Fall Series after that year I made it to East Lake, I could tell something was off but I didn’t really know what it was."

During the offseason, he tried to dismiss these thoughts and started the new year in Hawaii, but his mind still wasn't right. The situation, he says, only snowballed. At the WGC Match Play, despite playing well, he felt miserable. He remembers one evening when his now-wife's mother visited for dinner, and he had no desire to join them.

"I was just really, really not in a good place," he said. "I kind of credit that to a lot of stressful golf, a lot of maybe not playing as good as I wanted, and I just don’t feel like I really knew anything about mental health or what was going on so I just kept trying to go with the old adage of I’m going to push through it, I’m going to try harder, I’m going to keep working harder at it. When things are going south and you’re working harder and harder and as hard as you can, I think that all just snowballed into me being in a very bad place and not happy with what I was doing."

After withdrawing from the Masters, Wise returned to the Byron Nelson, the site of his only PGA Tour win, and tied for 50th. He missed the cut in his next three starts, failing to shoot in the 60s even once. The last of those tournaments was the 2023 U.S. Open. Between that week and the Myrtle Beach Classic in May 2025, Wise played just one tournament – a missed cut at the 2024 Puerto Rico Open – in a span of 22 months.

He put his clubs away. When he did play, he tried to focus on feeling like himself on the golf course again. He eventually met with sports neuroscientist Dr. Izzy Justice, who helped him understand what was happening. They developed a plan.

"He explained to me like what you’re feeling isn’t just random, it’s a culmination of what you’re doing off the course, things that have happened in your life, what’s happened on the course," Wise said. "This is kind of where your brain is and this is why you feel the way you feel and this is why you have the thoughts you’re having. He was the first person that kind of simplified all that and made it make sense to me. ... My head was very busy with a lot of thoughts, stuff you wouldn’t even think kind of played into that, whether it was like a messy home or stuff out of place or all sorts of things that your brain has to process every day. That was a big part of cleaning up that."

Wise also mentioned that they conducted a mobile EEG scan (electroencephalogram), which measures "what’s going on in your head and what thoughts are happening and how many hertz your brain is operating at." Hertz (Hz) measures the frequency of electrical activity produced by the brain. Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Wise explained he was probably at 25 or 30 Hz. Anything from 32-100 Hz represents heightened perception, problem-solving tasks, and cognitive processing. Wise says he used to be 70 or 80 Hz.

"My brain’s got half the stuff going on in its own head that it used to have and that you kind of see translate through your daily life," he said. "Obviously when I talk about like the stresses of being out here, that’s going to raise your hertz, and it’s my job to try to keep my brain waves as low as possible as the weeks go on and that’s how I’ll play my best golf."

All the time he was out, he desperately wanted to return. That's been the easiest part – he loves golf so much he wants to play it. But he needed to play better golf to do it on the PGA Tour, and for the most part, he wasn't confident it would happen.

He could play golf well at home – better than 99 percent of the people in the world – but as soon as other people joined him or watched, or other stressors popped up in his day, his game would decline. During one comeback attempt, he tried to play in a pro-am, which he said "ruined him," and he withdrew.

The whole situation was a Catch-22. When he was able to come back and get more tournament reps – he’s playing under a major medical extension – he didn’t play well enough to make cuts, which meant he wasn’t getting enough competitive rounds in to see if things had improved or rekindle that invaluable feeling of playing pressure-packed weekend rounds.

"I feel like I’m still working on it, but I’m getting to a place where the noise of like the Tour life and the Tour events and the media and the cameras, whatever it may be, I can still kind of feel like they’re not there in a weird way if that makes sense," he said. "That’s very recent and really nice."

Wise made just 12 starts last season – seven on the PGA Tour, five on the Korn Ferry Tour, and eight total missed cuts – but those starts alone were steps in the right direction.

The 3M Open is his 10th event of this season, and July has been his best month in years. He missed the cut in his first six starts of the season, but he tied for 39th at the John Deere Classic, tied for third at the ISCO Championship – which included playing his way into a final-round pairing – and he tied for 15th at the Puntacana Championship played opposite of last week’s Open Championship.

Wise hasn’t spoken much publicly about his struggles, but at the John Deere, he told CBS reporter Amanda Balionis it used to be "harmful" for him to be out there playing. Now he’s calmer, he’s enjoying it, and he has the tools to help him through it. His wife is one of them – she’s his caddie.

The 3M Open is his fourth consecutive start; he plans to play six straight. "Even though it’s stressful, we’re supposed to like being out here," Wise said Wednesday. "We started playing golf because we love the game. Kind of keep that at the forefront even when, hey, you may hit a bad shot in a very high pressure moment, but it’s not the end of the world, you know?"