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Various social movements in the 1960s and 70s coined the phrase “the personal is political,” attempting to broaden our understanding of what counts as political. Over 50 years later, it’s clear that for many the reverse has also become true: the political is personal.
Indeed, it may be too personal. In our recent research, we propose that politics has become a chronic stressor in many of our lives, perpetually triggering negative emotions in us, often leaving us frustrated, worried, and exhausted.
How Politics Affects Our Emotional State
To explore politics as a chronic stressor in people’s daily lives, we tracked hundreds of Americans from all walks of life and political leanings for two to three weeks. Each night before they went to sleep, we asked people about their well-being and about the emotions they felt that day in response to the day’s political events.
What we found was quite telling: Politics hits us in the gut. It evokes several negative emotions in us—ranging from anger to sadness to disgust—and these negative emotions weigh us down. In fact, in a given day, the more politics triggered these emotions in a person, the more they experienced worse mental and physical well-being that day.
This pattern was observed in Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike. Political squabbles, scandals, and incivility have become painfully personalized, seemingly for everyone, regardless of their political affiliation.
We also demonstrated this connection experimentally. We directed some participants to watch segments of a recently aired, widely viewed, political commentary show aligned with their political beliefs (i.e., Tucker Carlson for Republicans, Rachel Maddow for Democrats) and found they were worse off than participants in a non-political control condition.
How People Cope with Political Emotional Upheaval
What do people do to cope with the day-to-day strain of politics? We found that people are not sitting idly, letting politics ruin their day (or week, or year). Instead, they commonly tried to regulate the negative emotions triggered by politics.
For instance, many people tried to distract themselves from politics. Perhaps you’ve found yourself using distraction as well—watching funny cat videos instead of the news, or reading a sci-fi book instead of social media posts. In our research, people who were able to distract themselves from politics experienced somewhat better well-being.
But another strategy was consistently more beneficial: changing one’s perspective on politics. Perhaps this strategy resonates with you as well—you may have found yourself trying to minimize the personal relevance of politics (“I have more important things to focus on in my life”) or even putting a positive spin on it (“At least we’ll learn important lessons from these tough times”). Changing the way you think about a situation in this manner can be a very powerful strategy for changing your feelings, and even protecting your longer-term well-being.
In our daily experience studies, people who successfully changed their perspective on politics felt less negative emotion in response to politics and, in turn, experienced better day-to-day well-being. This was confirmed experimentally: People who were briefly trained to use reappraisal felt less negative emotion in response to the recently-aired political commentary show, which in turn predicted better well-being.
The Downside of a Changed Perspective
Unfortunately, feeling better about politics appears to create a troubling dilemma. Although being able to stay calm about politics helped people maintain their daily well-being, this came with an important cost: The more effectively people regulated their politics-related emotions, the less motivated they were to take political action.
They were less willing, for instance, to donate money to a campaign, join protests, or call up their congresspeople. By muting their emotional response, they were also muting their motivation to change the system that evoked their negative emotions in the first place. It seems that the common ways people use to comfort themselves from the stress of politics may not be helpful for the nation as a whole.
In all, we see politics as a chronic stressor taking a toll on our well-being by triggering unpleasant emotional experiences in us. As with any chronic stressor, we have options for how to cope—we can regulate those emotions, or we can use those emotions as a motivating force. It’s possible, of course, that we can find a way to balance the two.
However, our research makes one thing glaringly clear: The political has become extremely personal. The daily happenings in government, often in faraway state capitols or Washington, D.C., have a direct, personal impact. Americans are internalizing the dysfunction, the impasses, and the incivility, and it is literally harming them.
In this way, politicians have enormous power to affect the physical and psychological health of their constituents beyond any legislation they pass. Right now, they are abusing that power.
