The Importance of Learning How to Lose Well

Don't Throw a Tantrum. Get Out of Defensive Mode and Into Learning.

“I can’t function as a human being after a loss. I can’t eat. I can’t shave. I can’t hug my kids.” Urban Meyer said this in 2003 when he was head coach at the University of Utah. For the next 13 years, he wouldn’t do much losing. Over that time frame, he lost on average less than 2 games per year. In seven years at Ohio State, he never lost more than two games. That all came to a crashing halt this year when he led the lowly Jacksonville Jaguars to a 2-11 record before being fired. That’s a lot of losing.

Many of us hold the same sentiment as Meyer. We walk around thinking that losing at just about anything is a sure sign that, well, you are a loser. You’re weak, must not care, and aren’t trying hard enough. The outrage experienced afterward, and the gnawing at your soul after the tough loss, are all signs that you care. Look no further than after the University of Texas lost to Iowa State

“This is real!” Bo Davis, the defensive line coach for UT shouted. “Some of you motherf—s need to get in the transfer portal. You wanna go? Get in the motherf—s! This shit ain’t a game to me! You think it’s a game? Get the f—k off of this bus! I got my ass kicked! & you motherf—s wanna laugh?” Davis’s emotional tirade on the bus ride home went viral.

Was Davis reprimanded for chewing out a bunch of 18-22-year-olds? No, he was commended for his passion. His boss, head coach Steve Sarkisian told the media, “I think you could feel the passion and the want to get it done. I think that Bo exemplifies that.”

Losing stings. When it’s something that we pour our heart and soul into, it hurts even more. But we’ve made a fundamental mistake when we prop up tirades and accept that “I can’t hug my kids” after a tough loss as being somewhat of an acceptable response. Emotional outbursts aren’t a sign of caring or passion. It’s a sign of lacking emotional control. As I discovered when writing Win the Inside Game, both the latest science and the experience of world-class performance also indicate that it hurts our team’s performance. Losing well is a skill. One that most of us fail miserably at. Let’s learn how to do better.

The Psychology and Biology of Losing

Competing is part of our deep evolution. We once competed for food, resources, and status centuries ago on the savannah. It’s ingrained in our biology. What happens when we win or lose at just about anything? We experience a particular type of stress response. The exact nature varies based on context, but to simplify, when we win testosterone tends to go up. We feel more confident, take more risks, and are primed to play better the next game.

It’s one of the reasons why everyone from your favorite NFL team to the local peewee football team utilizes hype videos. Surprisingly, those videos seem to work. One study of elite hockey players found a 44% increase in testosterone when they watched a video of previous successes. When they watched a loss? Sorry, no testosterone bump.

When we lose, the opposite effect occurs. Our testosterone levels drop, while our stress hormone levels, cortisol, rise. Our behavior follows suit. We don’t move toward the challenge, we shrink away. Our brain and body interpret the game we lost as a threat. And that effect lingers. The next time we line up at the starting line, we’re a bit more anxious, a bit more fearful. High cortisol levels color our world, making us occupy a state where everything looks a bit more threatening.

The biology ties in well with the psychology. Winning moves us up the status hierarchy. It makes us feel confident like we can take on the world. On the other hand, a loss, especially a public one, attacks our basic sense of who we are. We have a deep need to feel like we are competent, that we are pursuing a worthy goal, and have the capability to achieve it. In The Status Game, author Will Storr writes that we gain status in three areas: dominance, success, and virtue. Losing attacks two out of three. It knocks us down a peg, telling us we aren’t successful and we certainly aren’t dominant.

When our status is under threat in the public domain, we do whatever we can to protect it. It’s why we tend to blame the referees when the game doesn’t go our way. It’s easier to attribute a loss to something out of our control than face up to the fact we aren’t good enough and take that hit in our self-worth. It also explains why a college football coach might flip out, or blame the players for lack of effort. Anything that puts space between the loss and your sense of self makes the bitter pill easier to swallow.

Flipping out after a loss isn’t a sign of passion. It’s a sign of protection. That your cortisol levels are through the roof, and your underlying psychology is telling you that you aren’t successful, that you aren’t good enough. So we deal with it by posturing, by projecting a sense of caring and bravado, as if to convince our brain that this isn’t us, and it wasn’t our fault. We deflect and blame, all to protect ourselves.

How to Lose Well

When we deflect and protect, it hurts everyone’s future performance. For coaches, it puts them in a place where they are protecting their ego, and their status, instead of confronting what might have gone wrong, and what role they played in it. Secondly, yelling, screaming, and blaming players, hurts the athlete’s future performance.

The longer we live in a heightened threat state, and let our high cortisol levels linger, the more our brain learns that we should do whatever it takes to avoid this state. No, that doesn’t mean winning so we avoid it. It means defaulting to fear and protection. If we copy Urban Meyer and let it stew, making us feel like we can’t eat, we give more power to the thing. Some might argue that avoidance drives some towards success.

But it’s ingraining a much more fragile motivation, and the wrong kind, one that is both primed to push us towards throwing in the towel when things get tough while simultaneously fostering a fragile sense of self. There’s a difference between wanting to win and being obsessed. You might think the latter is desirable, but when we are obsessively passionate about something, decades of research tells us we start playing out of a place of fear. We care so much, that we tie our entire identity, our entire self-worth around this singular pursuit.

That might seem like going ‘all-in’, but what it is, is making you fragile. After all, if you lose, it’s not that you lost at a game, it’s that you, yourself are a loser. Obsessive passion is tied to everything from burnout to poorer performance, to the likelihood of cheating. After all, if our sense of self is on the line, then our willingness to cross ethical barriers goes up, because it may feel like it is truly life or death. We want people who are incredibly driven but are motivated out of a desire to perform, a want to, not a have to.

If losing poorly leads to so many bad outcomes, then how do we lose well?

Get Out of Stress and Protect Mode

After a tough loss, players’ cortisol levels are already high. They feel disappointed, they feel like they let their teammates and coaches down. We need to get out of a threat state and back into a challenge. What do you think happens if we double down, screaming at the players they don’t care? It certainly doesn’t help their underlying biology.

In a study on professional rugby players, when coaches went over what the players did wrong after a game, the athlete’s cortisol levels went home, and then, more importantly, they played worse the next game several days later. Reviewing the plays that went well had the opposite effect, a bump in testosterone and improved performance.

This doesn’t mean never reviewing bad plays. It means that the first priority after a lost or poor performance the key is to get a player out of stress and protect mode before you dig into what went wrong. After a tough loss, especially for teens or young adults who take losing hard, your primary goal is to move out of stress and protect mode and get back to baseline. In high-level performers, resilience is tied to an efficient termination of their stress response. Who can get back to normal quickest?

One of the best ways to move from stressed to relaxed is to do exactly what the Texas football coach told his players not to do: laugh and joke around. In research spanning college soccer and professional rugby players, socializing flips our hormonal switch. After a game, when we spend time with friends, good things happen. Testosterone goes up, cortisol goes down, and we’re able to process and let go of whatever just happened.

Psychologists believe this happens for many reasons. First, decompressing with friends helps us make sense of what just occurred. It provides a safe space for us to vent, release our frustration, and ultimately move on. Researchers found that the hormonal switch doesn’t occur if we’re left to hang out with a stranger after a tough loss. It only happens with friends. Second, chatting with friends tends to release a different hormone, oxytocin, which is tied to affiliation and bonding. We feel connected, like we’re part of the group, and we’re more likely to help others.

Losing Well

The goal isn’t to stew on a loss, to feel it in your bones. Losing sucks. We already know this. The goal is to let go. To get out of a state where you’re ruminating on what went wrong, and to a place where you can clearly, logically evaluate what you need to take away from the performance, and then move forward. The quicker we can get someone out of stress and protect mode, the better off we are, and the more likely we’ll be motivated for the next game.

After all, in one study, which way testosterone went, predicted whether or not participants wanted to play again. If testosterone went up, they wanted to play another game. If it decreased, forget it, they wanted to move on. Losing well influences not only performance but how motivated athletes are to suit up next week.

Getting out of stressed and depressed mode after losing allows us to bounce back to a state of mind where we can not only move on, but also see clearly what we can learn from the failure, and see how we can grow. Creating space between who you are and what you do allows you to occupy a place where of course you want to get better, but it’s not the end of the world if you suffer defeat. You are motivated by desire, not fear.

We hold on to this idea that we should hate losing. The myth is that all the best of the best are pushed to a state of despair after defeat, but what I consistently found among the best athletes and business leaders in writing Win the Inside Game is that they didn’t wallow or take losses personally. They were able to absorb the lesson from the loss, and then move on quickly. We do our best when we are challenged, but not threatened. Let’s stop setting up ourselves (and others we lead) to live in a world of threat.

This post was adapted from my new book, Win the Inside Game. Please check it out if you found this article of value!