Research on professional rugby players found that watching what they did wrong after a game led to elevated cortisol and worse performance the next game. Watching what they did well had the opposite effect: a bump in testosterone and better performance in the games that followed. It’s not that we want to avoid criticism forever. It’s that after a tough match, we are in a sensitive period. Our brains are looking to validate our feeling that we are a bit useless. We are hypersensitive to any sign of a threat.
