Why Losing at Fantasy Football Can Actually Ruin Your Week

The NFL season has just four weeks left, but fantasy football players are already heading into the playoffs. That might be great news if your roster is racking up points, but if you're the hard-luck Chip Kelly of your league, the season's end might come as a welcome respite after weeks of crushing losses.  According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, an industry-financed group, 57.4 million people played at least one type of fantasy sport in the US and Canada in 2016. Of those, 73 percent played fantasy football. That adds up to a lot of glum faces heading into work on Monday mornings in the fall, trying to figure out why they started Carson Wentz over Matt Ryan.

But why do we really care? It's one thing to be a lifelong Browns fan, watching the team you cheered on with your dad suffer loss after loss. Your fantasy roster, on the other hand, is just some group of guys whose stats you liked, and who happened to still be undrafted when your turn came around. Unless you're in a dynasty league, next year you'll draft an entirely new team. Surely there's no reason to let the yardage of your eighth-round pick who plays for an NFL squad you couldn't care less about determine your happiness.

As it turns out, a few quirks of human psychology make it easy for fantasy sports to take over your brain. "Fantasy, originally, was a new way of restoring our connection to the sport itself, but not necessarily to one team," says psychiatrist Timothy Fong, co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program. "If it can give you pride and joy and a sense of inspiration—not to be hyperbolic, but it's true—then that's what it's supposed to do." While that may all be the case if you're picking winners, a loss means those lofty emotions come crashing down.

Your obsession begins with the research and planning you put into your fantasy squad. The time spent—in addition to the cash you threw in the pot—constitutes a significant investment, which makes us want to feel good about our choices. "It's the same way that we justify buying a house in a certain neighborhood, buying one car versus another, or buying shoes," says Renee Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester and a fantasy sports columnist for ESPN and Rotoworld. "You start out with an open-minded view, whether it's fantasy players, or towns, or cars, or shoes, but once you choose, you've invested in that choice and it becomes part of you."

Psychologists call this the "endowment effect." That means you value an object or an idea more after you invest in it than you did before you made that choice. You go into a draft with your top picks, thinking, "I hope I get Julio Jones, but if I get Antonio Brown I'm still going to be happy."' Once you draft your fantasy team, and as you make agonizing choices each week to trade players and set your starting lineup, your thought process about those players changes. You feel more and more like Brown's yardage on Sunday reflects personally on you. "When they do well you feel good about yourself, and when they do poorly, you think, 'Why was I so stupid?'" Miller says.

After you've forged that personal relationship with your fantasy team, you're primed for the roller coaster ride of wins and losses for the season. Of course, that's not automatically a bad thing. The unpredictability is the whole reason why fantasy sports—and sports in general, along with just about anything else in life worth doing—is any fun at all.

In terms of brain chemistry, a win for your fantasy team releases dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that makes you feel elated. (Snorting a line of cocaine triggers the same reaction.) Dopamine also plays a role in depression. Your mood drops when your dopamine receptors aren't stimulated; people with clinical depression typically suffer from dopamine disruptions in their central nervous system, explains Paul Hokemeyer, an addiction therapist at Caron Treatment Centers.

And then there's the mitigating effect of sharing your frustrations with your friends in the league, which may increase levels of oxytocin. That compound, sometimes called the "love hormone," makes you feel connected to others. "Fantasy sports, by their nature, provide the participants with an intense hormonal experience from both winning and losing, as well as from the security and comfort of being a part of a community," Hokemeyer says.

For most fantasy players, riding those waves of hormones—even when you lose—is enjoyable enough to keep you signing up season after season. Some people, however, feel those highs and lows more acutely than others.

You can see this most plainly in gambling addicts. For gamblers who really can't pass up a blackjack table or a favorable point spread, the game is less about the money won and lost (although that's the part that tends to ruin lives) and more about chasing the neurochemical high of winning. "We call it 'pathological wanting,' the idea that you're very much jonesing and having a preoccupation that isn't pleasurable," Fong says. Gambling may or may not still be fun for the addict at that point, Fong explains, but they return to it because they can avoid life's other responsibilities and nestle into a familiar feeling.

Fong is among the addiction experts who believe that fantasy sports—particularly daily fantasy websites like Fan Duel and Draft Kings—present a dangerous lure for problem gamblers. It's not yet a widespread problem: Fong says that out of the roughly 2,000 patients who sought treatment for a gambling addiction at the UCLA last year, only about 1 percent cited fantasy sports as their main problem. But he also worries that because daily fantasy sites work hard to avoid the "gambling" label, lest they run afoul of state gaming regulations, fantasy players with a legitimate gambling problem may not realize it or seek help. (If you think that does describe you, call the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline for advice.)

Even a typical season-long fantasy league, with a moderate cash pot doled out at the end, can become problematic for people with an unhealthy approach to gambling. "The promise of a reward at the end of a long, emotionally volatile season is a force that pulls people into a deep and dark vortex," Hokemeyer says.

Another key difference from other forms of gambling is that a fantasy league throws your successes and failures up in front of the other players in your league—probably your close friends or family. Fantasy sports are a bigger thrill if you can lord your success over your buddies and give them a gentle ribbing for their failures. But feeling like you're under a microscope drives up the pressure on yourself to perform.

Even though professional coaches are under intense media and fan scrutiny, they don't have to face it alone the way fantasy players do in a league group text. "In the locker rooms, they take the attitude of, 'Nobody knows what we're doing in here, we trust the people in here,'" says sports psychologist Eddie O'Connor,  founder of the Performance Excellence Center at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Michigan. "So there is an 'us versus them' mentality."

Ultimately, you may have to realize—as the most successful coaches do—that you can't control how your players perform on game day. The reality is, while you may have pored over stats all week to set our lineup, you still have even less influence over a QB's arm or how a kicker handles a crosswind than do the coaches drilling those guys day after day.

Go ahead and get emotional about your team, O'Connor says, just don't let it take over your life. "It's not like you want to be a tightly controlled fantasy football player," he says. "Some of the fun is losing your mind."