About Super Bowl Suffering…and Stress Attacks

To reduce Super Bowl-related stress and reduce the potential effects of Football Attention Neurosis (or F.A.N.), the article recommends these mostly tongue-in-cheek tactics to deal with the F.A.N. in your life:

• PREGAME: Establish a Therapeutic Alliance. Establish trust by sitting with the sufferer and his or her feelings. This may involve asking the F.A.N. to do things that may be frightening or profoundly uncomfortable, like sitting quietly with eyes open as an erratic kicker attempts a late field goal.
• FIRST HALF: Evaluate the Severity of Impairment. The severity of the disorder will usually reveal itself early in the first half of the football contest. Some patients will exhibit physical symptoms, including flushing, heart palpitations, chest pain, even a choking sensation, when their team chokes. Others may show psychological signs, like disorientation, a numbed trancelike state. Caution: Do not approach patients in these moments. They are fragile and prone to hurling nearby objects, including mini-bagels, plastic cups, pigs in a blanket — even themselves, in extreme cases, to the floor.
• HALFTIME: Formulate Treatment Plan. Patients ritually leap to their feet and disappear at halftime. This break allows the therapist time to develop an intervention for the second half, when symptoms are most severe and disabling. The goals of treatment are the same for all patients: to reduce anxiety, to eliminate avoidance behaviors, to soothe physical symptoms like sleep loss, chronic groaning and cursing at the TV and the pets.
• SECOND HALF: Administer Therapy. The notion that world will end if the patient’s team loses — catastrophizing, as this sort of thinking is known — does not stand up to the evidence. Remind the patient: Life resumed after each previous loss that the team suffered. And, in time, taste returned to food, colors became visible, feeling returned to extremities. Breathing exercises are highly recommended and become increasingly important as the football contest nears the fourth quarter, when events on the field are likely to prompt strong physiological reactions, like a pounding heart, hyperventilation, even dizziness.

Of course, if everyone in the household has a case of F.A.N., all bets are off.

But seriously, be aware of the potential for symptoms of heart attack. As the researchers of the death-and-Super Bowl study say, no one knows exactly why the extra deaths occur. It could be due in part to the usually high-fat, high-sodium, high-alcohol diet on game day. Or, it could be that the stress of watching your team lose (and perhaps losing money through gambling) is enough to push people with fragile health over the edge. The results were the same for men and women, which shows either that both sexes are equally invested in the Super Bowl, or that an uninvolved spouse reacts emotionally to the general high psychic pain that comes with a major loss.

It would be futile to ask you to keep the lid on your emotions this coming Sunday. But if you experience symptoms of heart attack, play it safe and call 911.