Five Ways to Calm Pre-Election Nerves
Feeling at ease in the midst of red and blue uncertainty
Here in the U.S. many people on both sides of the political divide are feeling nervous about what might happen at the election. And in countries all over the world, this particular U.S. election has far-reaching repercussions. People in England, Australia, New Zealand, France, Portugal and Germany have told me how they are watching this U.S. election like none before.
The feelings are often complex: there is hope that ‘our side’ wins — sometimes mixed with an equal dose of dread that ‘we’ won’t. There may be anger about what the other side has done, or says it will do, mixed with fear of what the other side might catastrophically do if they get voted in. All this has been hyped by increasing divisiveness in this country, a trend that has been supported by Facebook and other social media that make billions of dollars through algorithms that reward anger and fear.
One person wrote to me yesterday: “I’m just trying to hold myself together until Nov. 4 (or 14?) because the tension is really tough to bear.” Many of us feel this to various degrees. What can we do about it?
If you fear catastrophe if the other side wins, and you can’t get this out of your mind, you might be described as suffering from catastrophic thinking. Most of us succumb to this from time to time — moments, minutes, or hours when it becomes difficult to stop thinking about a result we don’t want or dread.
But wait a minute, isn’t it a good idea to look at the worst-case scenario so that you can prepare yourself in case that scenario happens. Businesses, for example, do this in order to make detailed plans for any contingencies that may arise.
There are two crucial differences between looking at a worst-case scenario, and catastrophic thinking. When you look at a worst-case scenario, you look objectively from outside that scenario. You don’t (1) dwell on it and you don’t (2) get caught in it emotionally. When you get trapped in catastrophic thinking, on the other hand, is it hard not only to stop thinking about what might catastrophically happen, but also to stop feeling the fear or horror — as if the dreaded result had already come to pass.
Feeling the fear about something that has not happened is neither useful nor pleasant. Or, as Mark Twain put it, “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
OK, fine, but how do you stop if you get caught in these fears of the future?
There is an ancient Taoist story of a farmer who loses his stallion, his only working horse. Everyone tells him how unlucky he is. “Maybe yes, maybe not,” the farmer replies mysteriously. A month later his stallion returns with a wild mare. Everyone tells him how lucky he is to have two horses, one of them a gift from nature. “Maybe yes, maybe not, we will see,” the farmer says. He trains the new horse well and gives it to his sixteen-year-old son to ride. His son falls off the horse and breaks his leg. Everyone tells the man how unlucky he is and how the wild horse must have been a bad omen after all. “Maybe yes, maybe not, we will see,” says the farmer in response. Three days later the king demands that all young men over sixteen join the army for a forthcoming battle. But the man’s son cannot fight because he has a broken leg. All the young men are killed. Everyone then tells the man how lucky he is that his son was spared and how the wild horse must have been a good omen after all. “Maybe yes, maybe not…” The moral of the story is that we just cannot know if what befalls us is good or bad because we cannot know all life’s complexities—what will lead to what—and we cannot know what the future will bring.
In politics, what we deem to be “bad” may create a “good” reaction and what we deem “good” may create a “bad” reaction. We cannot know in advance. In a two-party system, public opinion tends to swing, like a pendulum, back and forth. It helps to take a broader view, seeing that over longer periods, despite the four-year, eight-year, or even sixteen-year swings of opinion, there are some positive movements in terms of greater freedoms for more people. For example, women can vote.
Thanks for the broader perspective, but I don’t even know that I will be alive in sixteen years, yet alone the decades it took to change things like broader enfranchisement! What can I do now? Before the 2020 election.
Five suggestions:
1: Be Clear What is Within Your Own Power
There is great relief in clearly delineating what is within your power to achieve—and what is not.
If the change you would like to see involves anyone else at all, then it is not within your power to make it happen—since other people have choices that you cannot control. This does not, of course, mean that you shouldn’t ask another person to go and vote or do anything else that you think is good. It’s just that you have no guarantee that the other person will do what you want.
We have definitive control only over our own thoughts, words, and actions. You can vote, you can encourage others to vote, you can voice your opinions, volunteer, donate to your party. But you cannot, unless you are a dictator in a pretend-democracy, control the result of the election. Anyone who tries to control what cannot be controlled is destined to be unhappy.
Even though all this might sound really obvious, reminding yourself of this clarity about what you have power over is helpful. Recognizing what is outside your sphere of control gives tremendous relief from the burden of carrying national or international situations on your shoulders. This reduces tension. Paradoxically, by recognizing that you cannot guarantee the broad changes you would like, you are then free to focus on the real changes that you can accomplish, and take actions accordingly. Taking these practical actions, even with no guarantee about the final result, is very relieving. It feels good to say: “I did everything I could.”
2: Don’t Keep Reading, Watching, and Listening to the Polls and Pundit Opinions on who is likely to Win
This is so tempting and so unhelpful. It is not going to change anything for you or for the result, but it will likely drag you down into worry or apprehension. And that leads on to the next point…
3: Change Your Thoughts
In addition to cutting down on the information you receive about polls, you can actively avoid thinking about the election. Of course it doesn’t work to tell yourself not to think about something. If you try your hardest not to think about a dancing giraffe, you’ll find that you have to think of the giraffe in order to be able to say ‘no’ to it. The trick is to think about something else. This is because the human mind is virtually incapable of consciously thinking of two things at the same moment. You can change your thought through an act of will, meditation, reading, studying, talking with others. At the very least, learning to be in greater control of our own thinking is a wonderful art to learn. The more we do this, the less we get pained by those feelings that emanate from repeated thinking about what could go wrong.
4: Do Things
When you have done everything you can and wish to do in order to create the result you want (such as vote, encourage others to vote, volunteer, donate, etc.) and you are in the situation of waiting for a result you have no control over, it’s great to keep busy. All that pent-up anticipatory energy can be used to take care of tasks, like cleaning up your house/garage/desk; going through those thousands of precious photos and putting them in some order; taking care of any of those tasks you might have been putting off but would really like to have done. Most people find that doing physical jobs works better for moving past the worry-bugs than doing mental tasks.
5: perform Aerobic Exercise
One of the best remedies for anxiety, depression, tension, dread, or worry is to move our bodies in such a way that our heart rate and breathing rate increase. By exercising our cardiac and respiratory systems, we use the fight and flight hormones (such as adrenalin and cortisol) for what they were designed for—physical movement. When we worry, we also secrete the fight and flight hormones, but it as if there is no outlet and these hormones swill around our bodies, lending emotional support to our long-term worried thinking. Long before the current understanding of these hormones, the American playwright Arthur Somers Roche described it this way: “Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
The evidence for the positive mental effects of aerobic exercise is overwhelming. The only problem is that many people don’t like doing aerobic exercise. I can relate to this. I hated jogging, I don’t know why. I still do, even though I know many people who love jogging. The easiest answer is to find a movement you love. It could be dancing, playing a ball game, watching a ball game while cycling on an exercise bike, listening to stories while using an elliptical machine, walking, hiking, biking, aerobic yoga, aerobic weight-training, belly-dancing. If you only half-like a kind of movement, you may find you get to like it more with practice. Only don’t tell me to start jogging.
Get moving and watch those cobwebs of repetitive thought get washed away! The great side-effect of regular aerobic exercise — well-verified statistically — is that you are likely to live longer.