Consider This from NPR - When Your Team Loses, Disappointment Can Lead To Genuine Grief

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Fans of the Cincinnati Bengals may be licking their wounds after Sunday's Super Bowl loss, but every sports fan can relate to the pain that follows a big game not going their way. And while it's normal to be upset, those feelings of disappointment can occasionally turn into grief and even depression. Dr. Eric Zillmer, a professor of Neuropsychology at Drexel University, explains how the pandemic and brief pause on professional sports helped him understand just how strongly we rely on those games. And Greg Miller, a licensed therapist, discusses ways to deal with grief from your team's loss in a healthy way. A lesson he's learned first hand. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org Greg Miller grew up in San Francisco, which means he has always been a fan of the 49ers. Throughout my childhood, the Niners were a great football team. They'd gone to Super Bowls. They'd won Super Bowls. But as an adult, Miller has experienced a lot of painful 49ers seasons.

So he was ecstatic when in 2013, the Niners were headed to New Orleans to play the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII. He was living in New Jersey at the time, but he wanted to watch the game with a friendly crowd. I had gone up to New York, to a San Francisco 49ers establishment where it was just all Niners fans, and we are super pumped.

We're excited. And then... The first half, they get blown out. They're losing by at least 20 points, and it's just bad. And that was the year that they had the blackout at halftime. So there's this... He is referring to what happened

after Beyonce's electrifying halftime performance when the power for half of the stadium went out for 34 minutes. And Miller thought... Maybe this is an act from God that they needed this time to clear their head and get back into the game. And they fight and they scrap

and they come all the way back and we're super excited. And fourth down in the red zone. Niners fail and they lose. And I'm in this room of just despondent Niners fans and I'm in shock. And my wife and I leave and we go to a restaurant where I'm eating the world's saddest hoagie sandwich at 1130 at night. And I'm just catatonic. And my wife is looking at me and she's concerned because she's like, I've never seen him like this. He's usually pretty level headed. I hope he's okay. She asked me, she's like, are you OK? And I'm like, no. It was the kind of gut punch that every sports fan has experienced at some point. We played the Seahawks and just got demolished. I'm watching the game in my mom and stepdad's living room. And I almost put my left hand through a wall. And my kids came into the room and I was like, you gotta go away, please. Just give me five minutes alone.

I was heartbroken, devastated. It's been eight years and I still don't like thinking about it. And this heartbreak, I'm sure, must feel particularly fresh right now for Cincinnati Bengals fans after last night's Super Bowl loss to the Los Angeles Rams. The last second loss, that's gonna hurt. That hurts. It's tough, but we're gonna be back. We're gonna be back here. Consider this. Look, it is normal to feel hurt when your team loses a big game, but sometimes that disappointment can turn into actual grief or even depression. I know this may sound extreme, but coming up, we're going to look at the real mental health impact of what happens on the field to the people watching off the field. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Monday C's apply.

It's Consider This from NPR. Before we get into the grief that can come from a team's loss, we need to look at the very real dependency that a lot of people have with their favorite sports. A dependency that became painfully apparent when the pandemic started. The NBA had shut down. March Madness ended abruptly, and then basically all sporting events came to a screeching halt. I think it's exactly like withdrawal of a substance. Eric Zilmer is a professor of neuropsychology at Drexel University,

where he focuses on sports psychology. People became depressed. They became anxious. They withdrew. They started communicating less, not more. And all of those are symptoms. I'm a clinical psychologist. Those are symptoms of mild anxiety, mild depression. He says this pause on sports revealed just how vital being a fan is to the way people socialize, even to the way they live their everyday lives. It's almost as if we learned that sports is inherent into what we do and what makes us human, and it's impossible to replace. And taking away sports, Zillner says, can almost be like taking away a part of a person's identity.

And Sigmund Freud, you know, the inventor of clinical psychology, said the hardest thing to deal with psychologically as a human being is losing something. If anything ever has been taken from you, you know that, you remember that for the rest of your life. So it makes sense that when something is integral to your identity, it's going to play with your emotions. That is exactly what Greg Miller, that 49ers fan we heard from earlier, learned when eating the world's saddest hoagie after that painful Super Bowl loss. When his wife was so concerned watching him, she asked, are you okay? And I'm like, no, I don't think I'm okay.

I think I'm legitimately hurt and upset by this. He says the Niners' loss hurt for a few days, and then when he finally got some distance from it, he started to gain some perspective. Well, that perspective has now helped others because Greg Miller is a licensed therapist who has worked specifically with people struggling to manage these emotions

after watching their sports teams lose, sometimes even exhibiting signs of depression, which is what I spoke to Miller about. Let's talk about healthy versus unhealthy, because this is my question. It is completely normal for a committed fan to feel sad or disappointed when their team loses, but I guess like where is the line between just being bummed and experiencing what you might diagnose as genuine sports fan depression? Well, I think we have to kind of add a little bit to the depression piece and start just on a concept of grief. So just breaking that down, it's just the feelings of complication that come

from when something is lost or you lose something. Now, that could be a relationship. It could be a job. It could be a loved one. Or in this particular case, it's the investment in a sports season or in a team that was meaningful to you. So in this particular sense, it's more grief to begin with and what we would call acute grief, which is that initial intense feeling after a loss takes place. So that's when you get that kind of crying, like anger, frustration, disappointment, all those really complex feelings that we don't like talking about and we don't like admitting, especially when it comes to impact daily functioning, whether that's our ability to work, our ability to eat or sleep, that's when we might be starting to get into some of the depressive symptoms

or complicated grief that comes with a loss or a relationship that can impact our overall daily functioning. You know, I'm thinking about teams that are historically not very good, like a team that chronically loses. Could being a fan of a team like that cause even more severe consequences for someone's mental health? So let's take the NFL, because that's the topic that we have in hand. So we look at some of the franchises, you know, the Detroit Lions, and I know your producer Jason is a Detroit fan. So I want to be polite when I talk about this. Their last NFL championship was 1957. So they've never been to a Super Bowl. They've been to the playoffs a handful of times. They've had some of the really, truly great players in NFL

history, Barry Sanders, Calvin Johnson, and have not been able to even come close. And I think that does wear over time where you kind of start to wear it a like a badge of honor, like the Chicago Cubs used to. But I do think that it starts to become kind of identity based and you start realize like, we're never going to win. I root for this team that never wins and we're just going to own it. Now, if you own it healthy and you're like, aha, joke's on me, we're not good. Or you own it in an unhealthy way where it's like, I'm just constantly sullen and disappointed and frustrated and I'm passing it down to my children who are passing it down to their children and now it's a generational issue. How about betting? Like how does betting complicate all of this when money gets involved? Because sports betting, you know, it's legal in like half the country right now after the Supreme

Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting. I imagine having money on the line can make the mental health piece of this potentially worse. So if you think about sports fan depression or grief on its face, you root for a team, you're invested, you spend three to six months rooting for them. And at the end of the day, they don't win. There's an emotional investment. There's a psychological investment, but the physical investment outside of your time is fairly minimal. And ultimately you'll be able to walk away from it fairly scot-free. When you're talking about the financial investment with gambling and betting on games, you can get into $5,000, $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 holes. And now there's not just emotional and psychological consequences. There's physical and financial ones too.

So now it's having real life consequences that now we can actually start looking into clinical areas of depression, of anxiety, of bereavement, of all kinds of other problematic mental health issues, the financial piece exponentially makes this problem worse. Okay, so then what's the solution here? After someone has concluded that they are indeed experiencing sports fan depression, how does that person regain some balance in their perspective? But what do they do with their consumption of sports? I would say taking a step away from it and going to do literally anything else, anything else, taking some time to find something else that you enjoy, whether that's music or television

show, movie, some other type of pop culture, or just kind of unplugging from the football or sport experience to give yourself a little bit of emotional distance where you can kind of clear your head, where you're able to separate yourself, distance yourself emotionally from what's taken place. So you can be a little bit more reasonable and a little bit more understanding of, yeah, that loss was hard. I had a difficult time watching it take place and I am putting myself on a path to move forward by taking time for myself. That is Greg Miller, a licensed therapist with ThriveWorks in New Jersey. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.