Do you support a football team? The reason why it’s a health risk.

Supporting a football team can damage your health.

This is the finding of a recent study, which has discovered that people suffer from losing a game for a lot longer than they enjoy winning one.

And so while a win is quickly forgotten, a loss lingers.

Sir Alex Ferguson famously said that he was happy for about ten minutes after the winning the Premier league – which doesn’t seem a great pay-off for ten months intense work.

But that’s how many of us are; a negative incident is remembered much longer and more deeply than a positive.

Supporting a team has other human benefits, like a sense of belonging.

But unless your team always wins, so the study says, it will bring more unhappiness than joy.

How humans process negative outcomes varies a great a great deal. Some of us are able to move through them and onwards more quickly than others.

It is said a child needs nine affirming remarks for every negative one. If the balance in our childhood was different, it will make us vulnerable to negativity, and degrees of depression.

My best rule for dealing with disappointment is to name it, to speak it out loud.

Don’t blame anyone else – whether it’s the referee or a friend. And don’t let it fester inside.

Take responsibility for this moment. Speak how you feel, get it out of your body, it’s allowed.

And this too shall pass.

But we can’t say ‘goodbye’ to something until we’ve said ‘hello’ to it.