How To Wean Yourself Off Football

It struck me today that supporting QPR in the top flight in the late 80s/early 90s was great fun (little did we know how lucky we were). League One was good because it really felt like the players cared and of course a lot more games were won than lost. But this league, in two spells, has been 90% grind and drudgery. Right now, I believe that very few people in the club respect the supporters. Respect me. Briatore sure as hell doesn't. Harford made a very condescending remark about "fans will come back if the team's winning". ORLY ? Ainsworth has gone, leaving only Rowlands and Cook who have a genuine connection with the club. Far from following my advice about cutting down on loan players, the club now have so many they're not allowed to play them all and are paying two players from other teams to kick their heels about the training ground. Enough is enough.

The problem is, as mentioned in a previous post, supporting a football team is very addictive. It's a potent mix of tribal identification and randomized jolts of pleasure and pain. How to break it off ? Well, I'm finding that a few things are helping.

- Cut down the frequency of the jolts. When they're playing, ignore it until it's finished. Have a look. Lost 1-0 to Peterboro, lame. Go back to what I was doing. One jolt instead of several. Ideally I wouldn't even look but I can't go that far ... yet.

- Ignore all the guff in the press and the Internet between games. If your club sign Lionel Messi, or John Terry shags the Queen, you'll hear about it. Instead of logging on to BBC Sport to read Steve Bruce's thought of the hour, forget about it. This is a lot easier if you don't watch TV or read newspapers, but I highly recommend that too anyway.

- Meditation helps a great deal with mental training in this kind of thing. It helps you to simply stop thinking about things you don't want to think about. Cliff notes : when you catch yourself thinking about it, smile at your incessantly chattering monkey brain and stop. Don't judge, don't criticise yourself, just let it go.

You might then be surprised how soon you can go entire days without hooking your moods up to the antics of "the world's thickest millionaires", as Charlie Brooker calls them. Try it and see.