Has Sports Lost Its Luster in a Divided America?
Personal Perspective: Chaos and turmoil take the joy out of the ordinary.
Updated February 13, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
I’m a huge Seattle Seahawks fan. When I lived in Seattle from 2000 to 2009, I held season tickets on the 60-yard line. I watched Matt Hasselbeck promise a win during the overtime coin toss in the 2003 NFC playoffs, only to lose to Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers. I sat in the stands in 2006 when Seattle beat Carolina to go to the Super Bowl against Pittsburgh.
I’m a Winter Olympics fan too—especially skiing and ice hockey. One of my earliest boyhood sports memories is the 1980 Miracle on Ice, when the U.S. amateur team beat the mighty Soviets, who hadn’t lost since 1968. A few years later, in the NHL, I watched Wayne Gretzky score a hat trick in his last-ever playoff game—a win for the New York Rangers over the Philadelphia Flyers in 1997. By now, I was a full-grown man, but it still made my day. Most boyhood sports fans are sports fans for life.
Given my fandom, I was astonished last Sunday by my own reactions to the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics. I only watched the first quarter of Seattle’s win over New England, and the one time I looked up to watch the Olympics, which was on TV the whole day in our house, was when Lindsey Vonn crashed. No one yet knew whether she’d live or die. Beyond that, I just didn’t care. What happened to this sports fan for life?
I can only conclude that I’m worn down. That day after day of five-alarm fires and conflict among fellow citizens have taken something out of me. I didn’t feel depressed or especially sad, but rather detached in a way there’s no perfect word for. I thought of what science has taught us about our body’s response to chaos—how unpredictability and turmoil “tune” our stress response systems by first strengthening them, then later dialing them back.
Cortisol is a hormone that helps our brains and bodies restore depleted energy reserves and begin to heal injuries after the adrenaline dump into our bloodstreams during stress. Children who grow up in unpredictable, chaotic, and traumatic environments have their cortisol systems triggered over and over again, often several times a day.
In the short term, their cortisol systems become sensitized, firing repeatedly to the smallest of stressors, just in case one of those stressors marks bigger things to come. Their bodies and brains become vigilant, and things that would normally capture their interest and demand their attention don’t. They become despondent with all things ordinary because they have bigger fish to fry.
In the long-run their cortisol systems burn out , becoming less responsive to stress over time. The system activates less intensely and more slowly than it should, altering normal healing in ways that can hasten diseases like obesity, certain forms of cancer, and type II diabetes. Their bodies and brains get tired, and they can’t see what should be good about life—the same kind of reaction, albeit at a larger scale, that I had to sports. Football and hockey just aren’t that important when the nation’s on fire.
I have no way of knowing how my stress hormones are doing, and I don’t mean to minimize childhood trauma. At the same time, what I’ve learned from science worries me about all of us who are paying attention to the political maelstrom playing out around us every day.
Our political divisions aren’t new, but our curated media feeds are. And let’s be honest, many Americans hate each other, and we seem to be moving in the wrong direction. As actions and rhetoric ramp up, it’s difficult, even as a psychologist, to see a way out, except to detach. But then, like others I know, I feel guilty for not doing more.
I’m rarely short on ideas, but I see nothing practicable to fix what looks hopelessly broken, and it seems important to be honest about that. One thing’s for sure—browbeating my neighbors who view the world differently than I do won’t work.
I looked up yesterday’s Winter Olympics results before drafting this post. I don’t recall much of what I read, but the word “united” in United States seemed so out of place it nearly jumped off the page. It’s that—not my reaction to sports—that makes me sad.
Perhaps I’ll watch the Super Bowl on tape this evening, but probably not.
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Ted Beauchaine, Ph.D., is a former professor of psychology at Ohio State University and Notre Dame. He’s now in clinical practice at Radically Open Connections and works with homeless residents of Columbus, Ohio, fighting addiction.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.