Newcastle United boss Eddie Howe has said his side were not where they "needed to be mentally" in their 3-1 defeat to West Ham on Sunday.
Despite an early opener from Jacob Murphy, Newcastle fell away at the London Stadium, going into half-time 2-1 down courtesy of a Lucas Paquetá strike and a Sven Botman own goal.
Things didn't get much better in the second for Howe's side as they struggled to create anything of note going forward and were eventually condemned to another league defeat by Tomás Soucek, who wrapped the game up for the home side late on.
"I don't think it looked like a Newcastle team that we've seen in recent seasons," Howe told a news conference.
"I think just the body language, the collective spirit on the pitch, loads of little things that contribute to our performance wasn't there.
"I don't think that was tactical, I don't think that was necessarily technical. It was a byproduct of us just not being where we needed to be mentally. And we did a lot of work with the players in between the last game to this.
"So it's a difficult one to work out right now, but we'll go away and try and learn from today. I think it's hopefully a turning point we can use for our advantage."
In an effort to try and inject some energy into his side, Howe opted for a triple change at half-time, taking off striker Nick Woltemade, Anthony Gordon and Fabian Schär, changes that ultimately failed to have an impact.
"That was a frustrating thing about the first half. I almost could have taken anyone off and I think that was a reflection of where we were in that moment in the game and it's very, very rare for me to feel that way," Howe said.
"In fact, I don't think I have since I've been manager of Newcastle. So I felt the team needed some shaking up at half time. That's why I did what I did."
The defeat in east London is Newcastle's eighth Premier League away game in a row without a win, and Howe believes the performance on Sunday is up there with the worst of them.
"The physicality, the energy was missing in our performance and the difficult thing to sort of take from that as we obviously rotated the team a lot in midweek for freshness in the players," he added.
"So that didn't seem to be there. So yeah, hugely frustrating for us. That was a poor performance. We tried to be very open and honest with how we play and yeah, we weren't ourselves today.
"I mean obviously the numbers aren't good in terms of our away form recently. We haven't got the points that we've got at home. But I think some of the performances have been very good. We just didn't turn those really good performances into wins.
"Today was sort of a dip in terms of performance and that's the worst we've played during that run of games that we haven't won."
"And certainly a period of reflection I think for us is important."