Election season is here and with it, a lot of polarization, hostile interactions, and strong reactions. I actually had a colleague ask me recently if “election anxiety” was really a thing. While there’s not a separate category in the DSM-V (our book of diagnoses) for it, there’s no doubt that everyone’s anxiety is just a bit more prominent right now than normal. A lot of it has to do with the amount of media we consume and the heightened sense of fear and anger that can be conveyed along with it. Fear and anger are powerful emotions that can definitely contribute to our individual and collective anxiety. There are a few reasons for that and a few simple things we can do to stay afloat amidst everything going on.

Your Body’s Survival Response

Anxiety can have many causes and one of them is being in a near constant state of sympathetic arousal. Allow me to explain:

Our bodies are pretty brilliant actually. They’re wired to keep us alive in the most dire of circumstances. When our threat response is triggered, our sympathetic nervous system mobilizes massive amounts of energy to empower us to do something like lift a car off a baby, escape a bear, or choke out a mountain lion. When we’ve (hopefully) survived and the threat is over, our bodies discharge any excess energy and we shift back into “normal” physiological functioning.

The sympathetic branch of your nervous system is a good thing and thank goodness we can enter highly sympathetically charged states when we need to but our bodies are meant to be in that state very short term. Like long enough to lift the car or choke out the mountain lion and that’s it. When our nervous systems stay there, or we are perpetually brought back to that state, it takes a toll.

In consuming media daily that evokes fear and anger, we’re constantly being bombarded by information that triggers this threat response. It shifts us into a state of sympathetic arousal but our bodies aren’t able to actually do anything with all the energy they mobilize. It stays “stuck” if you will and we find ourselves in a state we identify as stress or anxiety.

Fear, Anger, and Organizing our World

Believe it or not, fear and anger are not entirely bad things from a social perspective. When they govern our social interactions or become our predominant way of being in the world, then certainly that’s bad. But they also serve an important function in helping us organize our sense of the world around us.

Like I mentioned in the previous section, our ability to orient to and respond to threats is vitally important. Fear can give us a sense that we know where those threats are. It tells us who’s safe or not, who’s in or out. At a social level, fear helps us to organize what can otherwise feel like a chaotic and unpredictable world. Anger serves a similar purpose. One remarkable thing about anger in groups is that it can solidify our group identity. Consider our country immediately post 9/11.

The problem with fear and anger becoming the predominant organizing forces in our world is that since they’re “louder” emergency emotions, they tend to crowd out other experiences. It’s difficult if not impossible for me to cultivate curiosity, awe, or gratitude when I’m reacting to “threats” psychologically or physiologically. I’m not able to learn from and experience different ideas, cultures, or perspectives when I’m on high alert constantly.

Staying Resilient

So, how do we cultivate resilience among the onslaught of fear, anger, and polarization? Glad you asked:

• Consciously Unplug: limit the exposure your nervous system gets to that sympathetic “threat signal” and reduce the risk of ending up in an information echo chamber. Algorithms are designed to give us more of us. Sometimes what we need is to step outside that.
• Connect with Your Body and Nature: connect with your body by stretching, exercise or walking and spend time in nature whenever possible. These are our body’s “reset” signals that support it returning to baseline and nurture resiliency.
• Make Contact: ensure you don’t end up in an echo chamber by regularly coming into contact with people who hold perspectives that differ from your own. When we have friends and loved ones on the “other side” it becomes harder to see everyone who is different from us as a potential threat.