Anyone Can Play, Anyone Can Win (Cornholing with Michelle Hastie Thompson)

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2:08In Northern California, fires are fairly common. This is psychology PhD student Michelle Hastie Thompson. And so when I heard that there was a fire, it didn't seem that close. And so it was nothing that caused me any concern. It's like, oh, okay, another fire, whatever. That's what we do here. But Michelle's calm attitude on that fateful November morning in 2018 wouldn't last. She was getting her son Brohm ready for his usual daycare drop-off when she noticed that the sky was a bit darker than usual. With her husband already at work on the other side of town, Michelle called to compare notes and figure out how concerned they should be.

2:44You know, do I need to evacuate? Is this serious? He said, no, I'm on my way to you. You stay there. Fire is on this side of the town, so you're fine. But then Michelle got an unexpected notification. Her son's daycare was closing for the day because of the fire. I was like, well, this must be serious if the daycare close. And then I looked outside. It was about 9 a.m. and it was black as midnight. I mean, there was no light in the whole sky. And it was eerily quiet. Home alone with her two dogs and a young toddler, Michelle began to panic. And all I could hear was propane tanks exploding. but there was no sirens.

3:20There was no evacuation warnings. There was no text coming through. There was no communication as to what was going on. But my body kind of said, you need to go. She called her husband back. And he's like, I'm on my way. I said, I don't know. I don't feel safe. I'm just going to take Rome and the dogs and get out of here. And so he said, just, you know, grab the contents of the safe and grab some of my paintings because he's an artist. And that is literally all I grabbed, nothing else. And I got out of there as quickly as possible. It was very scary. Michelle corralled the dogs into the car, buckled in her son, and began driving out of town.

3:52I'm at the bottom of the town, and I looked up, and it was just straight cars, as far as you can see. My sister-in-law was only 30 minutes behind me, and she sent me a picture, and the fire was on the road, what I just drove on, traveling that quickly. Turns out the fire completely trapped everybody in the town, so I was very lucky to get out when I did. The fire would later become known as the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. It burned for two weeks straight, destroying nearly all of Michelle's town of Paradise, California. More than 50 ,000 people were displaced, and over 80 people lost their lives.

4:29I got out and I was safe, but my husband and my in-laws were all trapped all day. I had no idea if they were going to make it out. Luckily, everybody did, and we were all safe, but we did lose everything. We lost all of our homes. We were renters, so no insurance because they don't give you insurance in fire towns. And it was a really difficult process to rebuild from that. How do you cope when you and all your family and friends have lost everything? When the town that you loved and called home is now gone? When you need to start life over and build a totally new community from scratch? Would you turn to religion or philosophy?

5:04Well, Michelle turned to an unexpected solution. One that she knew could help her find connection and community during this tough time. What was Michelle's unexpected coping mechanism? Well, it was... Cornhole. Yes, you heard that right. Cornhole. Beanbag toss. Beanbag toss. Okay, yeah. And so it really is like there's a board with a hole and you're trying to get the beanbag in the hole. Yep. Michelle, who goes by the Instagram handle of Cornhole Mish, is more than just a fan of cornhole. The lawn game is also the topic of her psychology PhD dissertation. In her thesis, Michelle argues that cornhole is a surprisingly powerful way to create connection and community, a benefit she experienced firsthand long before she lost everything in that paradise fire.

5:51Cornhole was the thing. Like, our garage was open. Everybody came over. We threw bags. Cornhole was Michelle and her husband's go-to activity for bonding with old friends and connecting with new ones. It just breaks the ice. You're not just sitting, staring at each other, hoping conversation comes up. And so it made it easy to kind of invite people, hey, you want to come over and throw some bags? And so I've really found it to be that sort of connector in all different aspects of life. And so with a new home to settle into, a new routine to adjust to, and a new community to get to know, Michelle and her husband knew they could rely on this one familiar tool.

6:23We built new boards and got some bags. And then when we would be out, we would invite people to come play cornhole with us. And then ultimately, we decided to start our own club because there wasn't one in our county. Turns out Michelle wasn't the only person in the area who was stoked about cornhole. Our very first night of our very first cornhole club where we don't have a big community here that we know, we had 60 people. We were like, whoa, that's a lot of people that came and they don't even know who we are. We built that club up to over 100 people on a Wednesday night weekly. So it got really big and it created this entire family.

7:00We definitely felt like we had our people very quickly after a very tragic situation where we completely lost everything. And it would be really easy to get stuck in that and isolate yourself and just feel like, why did this happen to me? And why was my town taken? And why was my community taken? And it was easy just to go, okay, well, this is our new friends, our new family, our new community, and we're thriving. All thanks to an outdoor game with a goofy name. But is tossing beanbags really all that different from any other social activity? Michelle certainly thinks so. And in this final episode of the Happiness Lab season on creative ways to cope, we'll find out why.

7:39If you've ever been to a backyard barbecue or college tailgate, you might already know how cornhole works. But for those of you who haven't, here's a quick rundown. The game involves a pair of wooden boards, each with a circular hole near the top, and a set of four square beanbags. The rules are simple. Toss a bag toward the board, aim for the hole, and score points if the bag lands on the board, or even better, if it falls through the hole. The name cornhole comes from what used to fill the bags. Yes, back in the day, it was dried corn kernels. I don't know if they still sell them like that, but they did when we first started.

8:13We would leave them outside and the rats would eat them and we had to keep replacing them over and over and over. It was a whole thing. The origin story of cornhole is still hotly debated. There are so many stories, I honestly have no idea which one is true. One popular theory traces cornhole back to 14th century Germany. Some even suggest the game's roots go all the way back to antiquity. But the version of cornhole we know today seems to have emerged from Cincinnati, Ohio in the mid-1900s. You're going to find it in the places that have a lot of land and maybe not a lot of stuff to do. Michelle's entry into the sport that would later change her life started off unremarkably enough.

8:49Yeah, I think I started just like everybody else at someone's backyard, just at a barbecue or a party, and never really thought much of it because I was horrible. So you don't think, oh, I'm going to like make this my career. It's just this fun thing that you do, right? And I didn't really get into it until my husband was really into it. And I realized if I didn't start playing, I was never going to see him. So that's when I actually started competing was to connect with him. And also it was something to do in that sort of elusive 5 to 8 p.m., right? Like after work, you just mostly would watch TV or something like that.

9:23But he would want to go outside and throw bags. And it got us in that, you know, side by side type of configuration to have conversation. So that was a way that we really connected. At first, Michelle just played casually. But a few tips from her spouse got her thinking more competitively. And I saw an instant change in my results. And I thought, wow, if I can see an improvement that quickly with a little tweak, week. That means I might actually be able to get good at this. And it turns out some people are really good at cornhole. One of the things I did not realize, embarrassingly, maybe until I got interested in your work, is that this isn't just like the kind of thing people do in their backyards.

10:02This is actually a professional sport. You're not alone. I'm not alone. Okay. Yeah, I travel all the time. So I always talk to people at the airport and they're like, I'm sorry, what? You're going to be on ESPN? Excuse me? The game started getting a lot of attention in 2020. for a rather obvious reason. So the boards are going to be 27 feet apart, so it's quite a distance away. So this really sets it up to explode during COVID because it's naturally socially distanced. So it was one of the only sports on TV in 2020 for a period of time there, which is how it grew so fast. It was just the four players out there.

10:37And then you have your two broadcasters obviously set a ways, and that's the only people in the room, really. The big leagues of beanbags, as it were, are run by the ACL, the American Cornhole League. ACL pro players earn sponsorships and compete in tournaments all over the world. When it elevates to that next level is when you start to see all the craziness these pros can do. They push, they cut, they roll, they airmill. For the uninitiated like me, these are all just advanced techniques for getting the bag into the hole. I mean, they block. And I think what's fun about the game in terms of a spectator is it does have defense.

11:12You can play an entire defensive game. You can just try to force your opponent to miss. And I think that's a fun way that the game gets really interesting to watch and you get to see all the different strategy. And Michelle was especially excited to help cornhole players master one particular aspect of strategy, the psychological side of the game. I did food psychology. I worked with the mental part of weight and food. So obviously coming from the world of psychology, it didn't take long for me to realize that this was more mental than physical once you get past the initial mechanics. Similar to golf, right?

11:45It's a slow-paced game. And as you know, the more time you have to think, the more dangerous the mind can be, as opposed to a reactionary sport, right? You're playing football, basketball. There's no time to think. You completely rely on training. You don't have a choice. Well, as much as I tell my cornhole players to rely on their training, their brain can take over and be like, well, I better make this bag. If I don't make this bag, it's going to be bad. I'm going to lose, like all that stuff. So the mental perspective became really interesting to me. And I basically started just applying the same things I was teaching people with weight and food to cornhole.

12:21It's about presence. It's about mindfulness. It's about breathing, body awareness, your thinking, your limiting beliefs, all of that, all the things I taught there, I just brought over here. And so your path to taking part in the sport was not just sort of helping cornhole players play better using your psychology training. You also became a cornhole announcer. Tony steps up to the board. He looks like he's going to start off with a block that's a perfect block right in front of the hole. It's funny because, you know, as a kid, I did musical theater. As a seven-year-old, I wanted to be a singer.

12:51That died quickly. But I definitely loved being in front of a microphone. So it's going to make it harder for Mark to be able to slide his bag in and could kick off right. Bag kicks off right. Tony should be able to clean this up. Get two. I like to perform. Like, that's the theater geek in me still. And so I always saw myself being on a mic or in front of people. I like to speak, things like that. Never did I think I'd be a commentator, but I had started a girl's cornhole podcast and ACL heard it and then asked me to come on board because they needed a female voice. And that's kind of where it went from there.

13:29And Sidelin reporting came after that. It seems like you've become a bit of a big celebrity in a very tiny world. That's exactly it. In a very small world. But Michelle got more than small world glory out of her love of the sport. When we get back from the break, we'll dig into the surprising psychological benefits of cornhole. And why what looks like a simple lawn game might be the key to greater presence, play, and even self-compassion. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

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17:20A recent poll from the American Psychological Association found that 76 % of U.S. adults are so stressed that it's affecting their health, leading to things like headaches, fatigue, anxiety, depression, and trouble sleeping. I know that when I hit a point of extreme stress, I just want to shut off my brain. And that's when I tend to reach for mindless scrolling, even though I know that it usually amplifies my stress rather than fixing it. But researchers have found that there's one powerful way to reduce stress that we often forget about. That stress remedy is simply having fun. Professional American Cornhole League announcer Cornhole Mish, a.k.a.

17:58Michelle Thompson, is writing her PhD dissertation on the psychological effects of cornhole. And fun is something that she thinks about a lot. So going back to when I was in the wellness community, I would work with mostly middle-aged women. and they came to me because they were struggling with weight and they had tried everything and nothing was working. They were eating healthy, they were moving, the weight wouldn't budge. And I would work with them and I would immediately notice what was lacking was play, hobbies, social, all of that. It was like their life was just about maybe their families, their work, and the obsession with their bodies and being thinner and being fit.

18:35It's so easy to get sucked into that external world when you don't have all that passionate stuff happening, the soulful hobbies, if you will. But I didn't have a solution back then. I just knew they needed it. So that's why when I first started Cornhole, I was like, this is it. Instead of focusing on every calorie you burn and everything you eat and what your body looks like, you're going into a room with people and you're just having fun on a Wednesday night. Don't put all your energy into obsessing about your body. Go have some fun. But all that energy to trying to throw the bag in the hole.

19:10It's a lot healthier. It makes sense that Michelle made this connection. Psychologically speaking, the most effective fun activities tend to be ones that are social, a little physical, maybe a tad thrilling. Our usual mindless scrolling doesn't qualify as fun in any of these senses. And unlike screen time, true fun tends to get us out of our heads. That low-stakes challenge of trying to land a beanbag into a hole can help us snap out of negative self-talk. Michelle seemed so confident that cornhole was the ultimate solution to stress, I had to check it out myself. My husband Mark and I drove to Burlington, Massachusetts, where the Boston Cornhole Group was having their weekly tournament.

19:48All right. Look at this. Oh, this is like where it's happening. There's a bunch of people here. Yeah. I don't know about our chances. Mark and I did end up playing, more on that later. But we also had the chance to speak with some of the local competitors. And a lot of them mentioned that stress relief was their main reason for showing up week after week. Some players even used cornhole to cope with big life changes. Take one guy I spoke with, Matt. He started playing cornhole after joining the military and moving very far away from home, all the way to Kuwait. So I was deployed overseas with the Army, and the USL ran cornhole tournaments every Thursday.

20:28It was a great, like, reliever. It's honestly probably what I look forward to every week. It was very hot, but the boards were very sticky. It was like 130 degrees. So a little bit different playing back in New England, but yeah, that's how I got into it. So the stress-relieving fun of the game is one big psychological benefit. But Michelle argues that cornhole can also make players more present. You cannot play your best game if you're not present. Probably my favorite part, because I was a yoga teacher for many years. Now, let's not beat around the bush. There is a component of cornhole that is connected to alcohol.

21:02I know. We can't pretend that's not there. I know that's not the healthiest component of cornhole. I heard it's called throwing juice. Is this right? Yeah, aiming juice. Aiming juice. That's what my co-commentator calls it. So that's there. And I always tell people, look, the mindless state is going to be when you're consuming alcohol. And that's okay. That's what you want to do that night. And you don't care about throwing your best. You just want to have a few beers and throw bags. And that's the night you want. You can have that. But if you want to really compete. You cannot successfully do that if you are not in the flow or the play state.

21:35And both of those states require presence. You have to be in the body. You have to be aware of when your nervous system changes because it impacts your physiology. And when you're in a game, an accuracy game, if your physiology changes by a teeny tiny amount, your bag is going to go somewhere else, not center. You've also talked about how cornhole can be a way to practice being kinder to ourselves. What do you mean by that? Yeah, as humans, we're sort of meaning making machines. So I use cornhole as a way to teach my players not to make so much meaning out of things, because immediately what they do is they let's say they miss a bag.

22:13Oh, that means I'm off. That means I'm horrible at this. Oh, that means I lost it. And so I've taught them don't make meaning out of it. Because the truth is, even our top pros don't make every bag in the hole every game. You're not going to make every bag in the hole. But once you make meaning out of it, well, that means I'm off and then they can spiral. So if we can stop making meaning out of everything, we're going to play a lot better. And guess what? That's pretty helpful for life as well. I got to see this helpful aspect of cornhole firsthand because even with the addition of a little aiming juice, I was pretty bad at my first cornhole attempt.