Feeling election anxiety? Here’s how to manage your stress

As Election Day quickly approaches, many Americans are experiencing election-related anxiety.
According to the American Psychological Association, 69% of American adults said that this year’s presidential election has caused them “significant stress.” That’s more than the 52% of U.S. adults who said they were significantly stressed during the 2016 election.
Seventy-seven percent of those polled this year said “the future of our nation was a significant source of stress in their lives.”
It’s clearly not uncommon to feel election anxiety, especially in today’s turbulent political climate.
Here’s what you need to know about mental health and elections — plus what you can do to curb your election anxiety.
Poll respondents said that politics-related stress leads to a variety of negative outcomes for them, including lost sleep and shortened tempers.
“There is a considerable and growing amount of evidence that politics is having a negative effect on a broad range of health outcomes,” Kevin B. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, told the APA.
He continued, “This is coming from different scholars using different data, approaches, and measures, and it all triangulates on the same inference: Politics isn’t very good for us.”
And the negative consequences aren’t limited to a specific political party — election anxiety “crosses party lines,” according to NPR.
Eighty percent of Republicans, 79% of Democrats and 73% of independents all said that politics were “a top stressor,” the article noted.
Lynn Bufka, the deputy chief of APA and a clinical psychologist, told NPR that she found the report results surprising.
“Republicans, Democrats are actually united in having concern about the future of the nation,” Bufka said. “And they’re not sure that the country’s system of checks and balances is actually working the way it should be working.”
APA’s report also found that:
Bufka told NPR that Americans don’t see the problems they face in their everyday lives “represented in the political discourse.”
“Oftentimes people are feeling concerned or stressed when they’re not seeing politicians working on the issues that really make a difference in their day to day lives,” she said.
But the survey wasn’t all doom and gloom. The APA reported that 61% of adults polled “reported feeling hopeful about the change this election is going to bring,” and 59% hope “that this election will lead to a more inclusive society.”
If you’re feeling election stress this year, here are some things you can do to ease your mind.
As Shayla Love wrote for The Atlantic, listening to and understanding your feelings surrounding the election can be a good thing — if it motivates you to be productive.
If we channel our election anxiety into positive action, Love noted, it can “reveal what we care about, and what our moral values are.”
Love cited research from Thomas Szanto, a political philosopher at the University of Flensburg in Germany, and his colleague Ruth Rebecca Tietjen, who wrote in a paper “that a political emotion is appropriate if it is functional” and “if it has a moral component that mirrors a person’s concerns about their world, and their sense of right and wrong.”
“When we experience anxiety about politics, it causes us to pay more attention, and that could have positive learning effects,” Andrew Civettini, political scientist at Knox College, told The Atlantic.
Tania Israel, professor of counseling psychology at UC Santa Barbara and author of “Facing the Fracture, How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation,” told NPR that we should put our phones down and talk to each other.
She suggested we should try “really listening to where other people are coming from and encouraging them to share more with us rather than share less with us.”
Israel continued, “Because folks are more nuanced, more complex and less extreme than we imagine them to be.”
It’s important to care for yourself both physically and mentally to combat election stress — before, during and after Election Day, according to Vox.
Per Vox, “Stressed-out Americans should pay extra care to their minds and bodies” by getting enough sleep, maintaining a healthy diet and engaging in physical activity. Additionally, try to scale back your social media and news consumption, if you can.
“Unless that’s your job,” Kristin Lewis, clinical psychologist, told Vox, “there’s no need to be that consumed with it.”
David H. Rosmarin, founder of the Center for Anxiety, suggested avoiding the news and social media “at least 30 minutes before you go to sleep.”
“You’ll wake up in the morning, you’ll find out what the story is. You watching it isn’t going to change anything,” he told Vox. “The only thing it’ll change is make you more tired and grumpy the next day.”
Israel suggested that “people to become involved in civic life or politics outside of their social media feeds,” per NPR, by participating in activities like “working at the polls on election day, volunteering in your community, coaching soccer.”
She continued, “Anything that’s working toward a common goal with other people is really not only good for that cause, but also for our mental health.”
Similarly, Lewis told Vox that “feeling supported” by your community — friends, family, etc. — can help curb your election stress.
Lewis said, “What can be helpful is feeling all emotions, feeling all the feels, with people who are going through it as well.”