Davis, a two-time winner in America, started the year with two top-20s and a fifth in his first three events.

But he missed the next five cuts, including at the Masters, and then ground through the season before cutting his losses in August.

The 30-year-old, who won the Australian Open and made his PGA Tour debut in 2017, has returned in a better head space and is contending this weekend at the Australian PGA Championship, sitting seven under and three back from outright leader Kazuma Kobori.

"You can get bogged down in focusing on the wrong things when you play that much golf against that good competition and I needed to reset that mindset," he said.

"I'm playing golf right now in a place that I feel like I haven't been for quite a long time and it's really nice to enjoy it again.

"I got out there [the PGA Tour] pretty quickly and pretty young; that was all my teenage years and early 20s as I got started as a pro. That was the goal.

"And once I got there, I think I've spent the last six years playing to not lose my card rather than to try and keep on kicking on and succeeding.

"The pressure of trying to keep my card out there has held me back quite a lot.

"It's pretty hard to enjoy it sometimes when you feel like your job's on the line every week and every poor week that goes by is another week that you've got to work harder to try and gain it back."

Davis has twice won Detroit's Rocket Mortgage Classic, as recently as last year, but admits the big-time moments are few and far between as a non-American on Tour.

"So these weeks are majors for us; coming home, I've got family and friends here," he said.

"It's a completely different feeling to what I have most weeks on the PGA tour, where I feel like I'm kind of on my own out there."