7 ways to be a better sports fan

3) Stop taking everything personally

As a person, your identity — who you are, what’s valuable about you, what you have to contribute to the world — is a complex, multifaceted thing, yet sports fans tend to become so fixated on their favorite teams and players that they start to take wins and losses personally, which is not at all healthy. Being a sports fan, even a rabid one, is only part of your identity, not its entirety.

Yes, it’s hard to set aside your love for your favorite team when some knucklehead calls them “a bunch o’ losers.” It’s easy to feel like that knucklehead is calling you, by association, a loser, and it’s easy to become defensive and/or aggressive and fire back. But you are not your team. A judgement of them is not a judgement of you as a person.

This is not to say that watching sports should be an emotionless experience. It feels great to cheer wildly when your team wins the title, and it’s acceptable to feel dejected when your team chokes at the end of the big game. Those big emotional reactions are an important part of what makes watching sports so enjoyable. But if you’re still moping around the office, sniping at coworkers and neglecting personal hygiene, a week after a big loss, that’s a sign that you should probably knuckle up, shrug it off, and move on.

Of course, when it comes to taking sports too seriously, there’s another brand of seriousness that’s even more pernicious and, if I dare use the dread p-word, problematic…

Next: 4) Stop treating athletes as symbols