Eight Questions That Can Help You Survive Election Stress
Americans are stressed out by their presidential election. These questions
will help you check in with yourself—and perhaps boost your resilience.
How
are you doing?
For Americans facing the COVID-19 lockdown and
economic instability through the spring and summer, that became a difficult
question to ask—and to answer. Things were already pretty bad. And then the
presidential election began in earnest.
By Jeremy Adam Smith, Jill
Suttie
A lot of us are feeling scared and helpless. And there’s good reason to believe we might look back on the election as a traumatic event.
What can we do to stay resilient in the face of this election? One way is to check in with ourselves daily to make sure we’re doing the things that sustain our health and well-being, while remaining empowered to make a positive impact on the election itself. To come up with reflective questions to ask yourself, we looked back on our articles about surviving stressful times, and we consulted psychologists affiliated with the Greater Good Science Center.
We hope these questions will help you make it through the election…and beyond.
1. What’s happening in my body and mind today?
Sometimes, our feelings sneak up on us, and our body can experience emotions before our conscious mind is aware of them. That’s no surprise: The body is a big place, with a lot going on inside of it. So, you might break your inquiry down into even more specific questions, as suggested by UC Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner and Colorado State’s Michael Steger:
- Is the election disrupting my sleep?
- Is it interfering with my ability to concentrate?
- Do I feel breathless, or feel any
pressure in my chest?
You can also look to your mind for
information:
- Is the election bringing back bad memories—for example, of abusive men in your life?
- Do thoughts of the election intrude or arise when you wish they wouldn’t?
- Do you find yourself thinking of
the election even when you would rather be thinking about other things?
Answering
these questions for yourself—or perhaps with another person, like your spouse
or a good friend—will help you to understand what you’re feeling, particularly
if those feelings were happening below conscious awareness. This allows you to
name emotions like anger, grief, or anxiety—and naming them is the first step
toward feeling more in control of your life.
2. If I’m feeling
distress, what can I do to soothe myself?
When you have named your
negative emotions, it’s important to not feel bad about having them. When UC
Berkeley researchers studied more than 1,300 adults in a 2017 study, they found “that people who commonly resist acknowledging their darkest emotions,
or judge them harshly, can end up feeling more psychologically stressed.”
In
other words, please try to avoid feeling bad about feeling bad about the
election. Instead of pushing down any negative feelings, ask what you can do
to soothe yourself. Therapist Linda Graham suggests these techniques for
calming yourself down when everything feels like too much:
- Breathing. Deep belly breathing activates the parasympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system and slows down your reactivity. Breathing slowly, deeply, can de-escalate a full-blown panic attack in a matter of minutes. Remembering to breathe throughout the day de-stresses you, and helps you install calm as your real baseline, not stress as the new normal.
- Hand on the heart. Neural cells around the heart activate during stress. Your warm hand on your heart calms those neurons down again, often in less than a minute. Hand on the heart works especially well when you breathe positive thoughts, feelings, images of safety and trust, ease, and goodness into your heart at the same time.
- Meditation.
Sylvia Boorstein’s book Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There, speaks to our
instinctive and socialized tendencies to do, to act (fight-flight). Following
her instructions on compassionate mindfulness meditation is a gentle way to
calm the mind and body and let things simply be, over time generating a steady
inner calm that sustains you over the long haul.
You can also do
things like just asking for a hug from someone in your pandemic pod. “We are
hardwired to be soothed by touch,” writes Graham. “Warm, safe touch is a
stress reducer because it primes the brain to release oxytocin, the hormone of
safety and trust, of calm and connect. Oxytocin is the brain’s direct and
immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol.” If there is no one you can
touch right now, call a friend—they might be struggling, too.
3. Am
I getting enough good news?
We may think that by staying abreast of
the latest news developments we get a clear-eyed picture of the world. But
there’s a problem: The news is overwhelmingly negative. That’s because news
sources assume there’s more money to be made by featuring alarmist headlines,
which keep our eyes on the page (due to our brain’s negativity bias) by
hijacking our attention.
Repeatedly consuming negative news stories
is detrimental to our health, too. It keeps us in a constant state of alert,
which is damaging to our bodies. It can also tear at our social fabric,
leading to more distrust and negative feelings about other people and
communities. We can also miss a lot of good in the world.
To keep
up with what’s happening in the world without being overwhelmed by it, we need
to be conscientious about counterbalancing negative news with more positive,
hopeful news.
Of course, Greater Good is a good place to start, as
we tend to feature the more positive aspects of human nature (and how to
decrease the negative). But you can also look to places like the Solutions Journalism Network—an organization that encourages in-depth journalism,
highlighting not just problems, but the people and programs finding
solutions.
4. When do I feel good about the election?
Here’s
another way to counter all the negativity: Michael Steger suggests searching
for evidence in the news, or in the world around you, that there are still
good people. When do you find yourself tearing up, or smiling? Who is working
for goals that you think are important, who seems to be effective and
successful? Where are the solutions? Perhaps you heard a speech that inspired
you—or maybe you read about a court decision that makes you breathe a sigh of
relief. It could be that a candidate’s platform gives you hope, but hope could
also come in a gracious moment, when you see a candidate do or say the right
thing.
When you find good news, then let yourself feel good about
it. You’re searching for “moral elevation”—that’s the warm feeling we get when
we witness someone engage in courageous acts.
“Moral elevation not
only boosts our positive emotions, but it also promotes our love for our
fellow human and inspires us to be better people,” says University of Portland
researcher Sarina Saturn. “Indeed, making an effort to experience more moral
elevation will restore our faith in humanity and encourage us to help other
people.”
Moral elevation is also contagious. In one 2011 study, for
example, participants read articles and watched videos depicting acts of
common or uncommon kindness—and the results show that hearing about these good
deeds made the participants more likely to give away their money.
“Moral
elevation has been shown to promote altruism,” Saturn says. “So, make an
effort to shine some light on some of the wonderful things the human condition
is capable of doing.”
5. What am I grateful for today?
This
may seem like the wrong question for the times. With so much negative stuff
going on, why focus on what we’re grateful for?
But, as gratitude
researcher Robert Emmons writes, “In the face of demoralization, gratitude has
the power to energize. In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to
heal. In the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope.”
Focusing
on what we’re thankful for helps us be more resilient when times are tough. If
we turn toward appreciating the good in our lives, it lessens our anxiety and
depression, so we can stay calmer in the face of uncertainty. And it can keep
us from burning out.
Gratitude is also a premier social emotion
that binds us to other people, strengthening our relationships. Cultivating it
in ourselves inspires us to help others in need, even when giving help is
costly to us—something we could use in these difficult times when we need to
come together.
So, what can you be grateful for? Besides the
everyday things—like family, health, the food on our table, or a beautiful
sunset—we can be grateful for living in a democracy where we get a vote. You
might be thankful for the many activists who secured suffrage for women and
African Americans. In the present, you might find gratitude for the groups now
marching in the streets, calling attention to social and environmental wrongs
and demanding change.
6. How can I connect with other people?
Yes,
this election is stressful—and stress can trigger the fight-or-flight
reaction. It’s natural to feel angry or defensive, or to simply want to run
away, but there’s more to stress than this simple dichotomy.
Researchers
Laura Cousino Klein and Shelley Taylor have identified another kind of
response to stressful events: tend-and-befriend, when people can become more
trusting, generous, and willing to risk their own well-being to protect
others.
Why would stress lead to caring? As Kelly McGonigal writes
in Greater Good:
From an evolutionary point of view, we have the
tend-and-befriend response in our repertoire first and foremost to make sure
we protect our offspring. Think of a mama grizzly protecting her cubs, or a
father pulling his son from the wreckage of a burning car. The most important
thing they need is the willingness to act even when their own lives are at
risk.
To make sure we have the courage to protect our loved ones,
the tend-and-befriend response must counter our basic survival instinct to
avoid harm. We need fearlessness in those moments, along with confidence that
our actions can make a difference. If we think there’s nothing we can do, we
might give up. And if we are frozen in fear, our loved ones will perish.
At
its core, the tend-and-befriend response is a biological state engineered to
reduce fear and increase hope.
In facing this year’s election—and
the barriers imposed by COVID-19—don’t let your stress cut you off from
others. Allison Briscoe-Smith, a clinician at the Wright Institute, suggests
aiming to move “from self-care to community care.” In other words, yes, take
care of yourself first, but when you feel strong enough, reach out to those in
need—and ask, “What is one small, tangible thing you can do to help someone
feel better today?”
7. In light of this election, what are some new
ways I can use my special skills or talents to make a difference in the
broader world?
When UC Claremont’s Kendall Bronk and her colleagues
studied youth during the 2016 election, they found that the election actually
inspired purpose. “People saw problems in the broader world and they were
inspired to take action,” she says. This might help explain the surge in
political activism we’ve seen during the past four years, from the student-led
movement for greater gun safety to Black Lives Matter protests.
Jim Emerman of Encore.org, an organization that helps seniors find new purpose in
life, suggests asking three questions to help you find your own sense of
purpose:
- What are you good at?
- What have you done that gave you a skill that can be used for a cause?
- What do you care about in your
community?
Purpose—the drive to make a difference in the world—is
intimately related to meaning—a sense that what’s happening to you, and around
you, matters in some way. While the ultimate outcome of the election will
change its meaning, we won’t stop trying to make sense of what happened. When
Michael Steger studied college students’ experiences from the 2016 election
and the 2018 midterm elections, he found that their sense of meaning did
decline if their candidate lost—but then seemed to rebound within a week.
There’s meaning in a loss—and purpose, too, if you can find a way to put your
talents to work in making a difference beyond just one election.
8.
What future would I like to see—and what steps am I taking today to make that
future happen?
GGSC senior fellow Christine Carter suggests
thinking now about how you’re going to take care of your own well-being over
the long run: What healthy habit are you nurturing now that will be with you
after the election? What do you have in your life right now because of this
tumultuous time that you hope to still have in your life later?
Those
might seem like hard questions to ask yourself, and it might seem even harder,
right now, to think of our collective well-being in the future. But, when we
look to the future—a process scientists call “prospection”—the present moment
actually becomes more meaningful. Though it might be hard right now to think
beyond November 3, it’s worth trying. Numerous studies show that envisioning a
positive future makes it more likely to come to pass—and prospection can make
us more resilient in the present.
But how? In Greater Good’s Purpose Challenge, designed by Bronk and her team, high school seniors were
asked to think about the world around them and visualize what they would
change if they had a magic wand. Afterward, the researchers asked the students
to map out steps they could take toward that ideal.
What would you
change, if you had a magic wand? Perhaps you wish people would just be kinder
to each other. Or maybe you think wealthy people should have less power in
government—and poor people should have more. If economic and social
disparities between white people and everyone else enrage you, then a future
of racial equality is what you want most. If you’ve spent the past four years
remembering the current president’s misogynistic comments about women, you
might feel driven to spend the next four years working for gender equality. A
positive future depends on many different people working for many different
goals for the betterment of humankind.
We don’t have a magic
wand—and we don’t know what will happen on November 3. But we do know that
there will be a November 4, and we know that we are all going to have to get
out of bed and do what we can to make the world a better place, no matter who
is in the White House. We might feel powerless, but we’re not. We can vote, we
can donate money and march—and we can help the people whose lives we touch.
And, maybe, four years from now, when we ask a neighbor or a coworker or a
friend how they’re doing, they’ll be able to say, “Great!”