Sports can be a conduit for the satisfaction of social and emotional needs, as well as a cathartic freedom to express an array of typically abnormal, yet in the sports context appreciated, behaviors.

Sports fans experience exhilaration, heartbreak, and everything in between in the course of any season, and sometimes in the course of a single game or match. Sports fans are a wonderfully quirky bunch, embracing superstitions, engaging in extreme overt emotional expression, wearing outlandish outfits and body paint, and experiencing intense social contact on a regular basis with people they’ve never met before. Since the rules and play of many specific sports are universal, you don’t even have to speak the same language as the person sitting next to you to bond with, or become mortal enemies with, over a sport. The rituals of sports represent and contain many necessary and positive aspects of life.

Sports provide not just entertainment, distraction and one-time stress relief, but meet deeper human needs such as socialization and affiliation. If you have a strong connection to your home team, for example, you have a natural anchor, even when you aren’t physically home. Using major league baseball as an example, during the baseball season, baseball fans literally have something to come home to and look forward to almost every night given that there are games every day. The health benefits of being a sports fan can be enormous — and it doesn’t matter what sport. Follow what interests you, be it cycling, golf, field hockey, football, soccer, volleyball, gymnastics, baseball, tennis, swimming, lacrosse, cricket, and so on.

Let’s examine some of the ways being a sports fan can maintain and even improve psychological health.

Being a sports fan is one way to support a healthy brain.

Learning the rules and intricacies of a sport supports brain health, through activation of neural networks involved in language. Think about the complexity of any sport and sports team. To follow the sport, you have to learn the rules and maintain sustained attention to watch for adherence during games; to follow a team, fans learn about each player on the team, their records, strengths, weaknesses, positions played, etc. And then a sports fan will elevate this to how each player functions in the context of other players and teams, etc. The cognitive load of being a sports fan can be quite impressive. Additionally, the often unpredictable nature of individual feats and overall outcomes stimulates cognitive processes associated with cognitive flexibility, memory and dopaminergic systems (dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with such neural activities as mood, motivation, memory, and attention).

Being a sports fan is one way to enhance psychological health.

Being a sports fan comes with enormous potential psychological health benefits. Attending sporting events has been shown to enhance mood, general well-being, and life satisfaction. Just imagining an upcoming game or season and the potential outcomes, and/or replaying a game or season in your mind can have positive impacts on self-esteem.

Watching sports is also associated with the release of neurochemicals responsible for mood, pain tolerance, and immune system functions. Simply watching a favorite person (the noted study looked at actors but this seems to be generalizable to famous athletes) can stimulate these systems, so watching favorite athletes can have positive psychological effects. My own favorite athlete sustained an injury a few weeks ago and hasn’t returned to play yet. I don’t know this person in real life, but in my sports fan life, he means a lot to me (and hundreds of thousands of other people, who are helping me cope with my temporary loss).

Being a sports fan is one way to increase feelings of social connectedness.

Attending sporting events increases opportunities for socialization and decreases feelings of loneliness. In the course of viewing a game with others, you immediately become a part of the group, and enjoy social connectedness, belonging, and affiliation. It doesn’t matter if you are cheering on your local high school team, your favorite college team, or any of the professional teams. A win is a group victory and a loss is a shared defeat. Fans rooting for the same team, regardless of whether they’ve met before, share a common bond and language, and thus sports can fulfill some of our needs for human connection.

However, there can be a fine line between fandom and fanaticism and as with all things that are good only in moderation, sports fandom can have a dark side. Being a sports fan does not equate to oneself being active or making healthy choices. In fact, a lot of sports rituals involve copious amounts of alcohol and unhealthy food, and some people struggle with a gambling problem. And then there is the over-expression of anger and frustration which sometimes occurs. Consequently, it is important to “keep your eye on the ball” and focus on a healthy dose of sports fandom for your psychological health and well-being.