Bo Nix’s busted ankle. Sean Payton’s fourth-and-one call. The season’s only white-out blizzard hitting in third quarter and ending in the fourth. That Sunday in January was ugly enough to convince more than a few Broncos fans that the football gods were against them.
But here’s the surprise: Win or lose, cheering for your team is not just fun, it’s good for your mental health. Hopefully that can be a comfort as you endure the heartache as your bracket implodes this month.
“Whenever we can feel connected socially, that’s a good thing,” psychologically, especially now, when human connection seems harder to achieve, said Shawn C. Worthy, Ph.D., Metropolitan State University professor of Human Services and Counseling.
Years of studying sports fans convinced Dan Mann, Ph.D., a Murray State University professor who specializes in sports-fan psychology, that identifying with a team is good for your mental health.
According to Mann, it doesn’t matter whether you follow your daughter’s soccer team, your college alma mater’s basketball squad, or the Broncos. The result is “lower levels of loneliness, lower levels of alienation, a higher sense of self-esteem, less social isolation,” Mann said on a recent podcast.
Harvey Milkman, Ph.D., MSU Denver professor emeritus of Psychological Sciences, called the feeling of cheering a successful team with friends a natural high.
“When your team has a winning play and you high five the person next to you, that feeling is a result of dopamine being released in the brain,” he said. When all goes well, he said, sports unleash a flood of happy-making brain chemicals, including endorphins and oxytocin, known as the bonding chemical.
The instincts behind fandom have been around practically as long as humans have existed, Milkman said. “We’re tribal people. This is a kind of tribal experience. A healthy expression of basic human instincts.”
That experience can come from many other pursuits or passions, including religion, a political cause or charity, Worthy said. But there is something special about the sports-inspired connection. “Sports is a place where people can set aside daily concerns and focus on this singular athletic event and wholeheartedly root for their team.”
RELATED: MSU Denver volleyball captures NCAA Division II national championship
Winning teams inspire community pride, Milkman and Worthy said. That pride can be for your high school, your college, or city. Or, in the case of the Olympics, your country.
Whoever created the Winter Olympics ad that proclaimed “For two weeks, we’re all on the same team” apparently understood that.
Of course, being a sports fan is not all high-fives and endorphins.
“It can get out of hand,” Worthy said, citing rioting soccer fans, those whose entire homes are done in orange and blue, and whose feelings of self-worth rise and fall with their teams win-loss record.
The sense of community and the bonding experience of fandom is the best defense against obsessive, damaging behavior, Milkman said. “If you’re a solitary, enraged sports fan, then you’re likely to build up hormones and chemicals in your body that are harmful,” like cortisol.
The same goes for fans who over-imbibe during games, or who over-indulge in sports betting, Milkman and Worthy said.
The key to healthy, and health-benefitting, sports fandom, is having a strong sense of self, they said. “We all have many identities,” Milkman said, including professional, parenting and friendship identities. “If you’re whole identity is circumscribed around a team, then you may be in trouble.”