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Key points
- The election is here and so is election anxiety.
- Most people will advise you to avoid these feelings.
- There's no reason to fear election anxiety.
- We're anxious when things we care about are uncertain.
Tomorrow Americans are set to go to the polls for the presidential election. For many people across the political spectrum, it's a scary time. It feels like the fate of the country is hanging in the balance and the stakes are high. Naturally, many people are anxious.
If you Google "election anxiety," most of the articles you'll find give you advice about how to cope with it. One common piece of advice is to exercise. Exercise can help alleviate all kinds of stress. It's also an important part of many people's self-care routines, which are good ways of ensuring that you don't let the election consume your life.
Another common bit of advice is to limit your time scrolling on social media or watching television. Anyone in a swing state is probably sick of the endless stream of political ads, robocalls, and text messages that teem with urgency over the fate of the nation. Social media is no better. Of course you have to confront all the sponsored posts by both campaigns that pop up in your news feed. Add to that all the posts and news articles from your friends and acquaintances and you’re probably begging for a recipe or a cat video.
Most of the advice you get on coping with election anxiety is about how to avoid it. Exercising and staying off social media is meant to put distance between you and election news so that you don’t have to think about it. All this advice shares a common assumption: election anxiety feels bad, so you should avoid it.
But why should you try to avoid election anxiety just because it feels bad? Negative emotions like anxiety are surely unpleasant, but it’s not always a good idea to try to avoid every unpleasant feeling. Asking your boss for a raise will likely make you nervous, but you shouldn’t avoid the conversation just to avoid the bad feelings. Having a tough conversation with your spouse about the bills might make both of you angry, but again, it’s probably not a good idea to avoid the topic just to avoid the emotions that come with it.
The idea that we should avoid election anxiety usually comes from two sources. First, people will say that being anxious about the election is unhelpful or unproductive. Other than making sure you vote, there’s nothing you can do to control the outcome. If you can’t do anything about it, why worry?
Built into this thought is the idea that it only makes sense to worry about something that we can influence, but that defines the purpose of anxiety too narrowly. Our emotions constitute our investment in different parts of our lives. Put simply, if something matters to you, you’ll have feelings about it. Election anxiety reflects the concern that people have for the future of the country. Being invested in your country’s future means you’ll be anxious about what that future might hold. If it’s reasonable to care about where the U.S. is headed, it’s reasonable to be anxious about an election that might determine its direction.
The other reason people assume we should avoid election anxiety is because we don’t want people to be overwhelmed by it. If you’re lying in bed in the dark, scrolling through social media and unable to complete your daily tasks, that seems like the kind of thing we should avoid. But the problem here isn’t election anxiety itself; the problem is getting consumed by it.
Being consumed by anything to the point where you can’t live your life is a problem, even if that’s something positive. If I was madly in love, so much so that I couldn’t get out of bed or go to work, that would be bad, but we probably wouldn’t conclude that I should try to avoid love.
Election anxiety works the same way. Negative emotions all by themselves don’t keep us from accomplishing our regular day-to-day activities. After all, even when a loved one dies, we eventually have to go back to work, but that doesn’t mean our grief is gone. People tend to assume that if you let yourself feel something negative, you’ll get stuck in an endless spiral of fear. But that’s an exaggeration. Most of the time we feel bad for a while and then we stop—that’s just how emotions work. We rarely feel anything forever. We live with our negative emotions all the time, and we can do the same with election anxiety.
So if you’re feeling anxious about the election, that’s fine! You feel anxious because you care about the future of the country and there’s nothing wrong with that. Election anxiety might not be a good feeling, but life doesn’t always feel good. We’re living through uncertain times and it’s normal to be afraid when you’re not sure where the country is heading. Instead of exercising or avoiding social media to cope with election anxiety, try just feeling it.
