How to Survive the 2020 Presidential Campaign Without Losing Your Mind

From the creators of Campaign Season 2016, get ready for a new and definitely not improved 2020 campaign season! This bad guy has everything you hated last season, with even more scientifically designed features to drive you crazy, from unfair arguments to anti-intellectualism. Plus, we have so many brand new features designed to boost your stress levels, including the need to pay attention to The View right now! Starbucks guy ! Tucker Carlson ‘s thoughts on beauty pageants! If you can’t wait, good news: the 2020 campaign is available now, sooner than ever, ready to take over your life and all your conversations over the next 19 months, whether you like it or not.

Okay, but really: The 2016 electoral cycle was so intense that it spawned a new psychological condition called headline stress disorder , led to a national study on the effects of electoral stress , and forever anchored the concept of “self-care” in our to the brain. … This American Psychological Association study found the first statistically significant surge in anxiety in 10 years thanks to the most recent election. The “season” of the campaign is so excruciatingly long – the same amount of time, according to the New York Times , could fit seven Canadian elections or 41 (!!) French elections. By comparison, based on the timing of their initial presidential campaigns in 2000 and 1992, respectively, George W. Bush will only announce this in June; and Gov. Bill Clinton won’t be on our radar until October.

The 2020 cycle is bound to be hell for your mental health, mostly because none of the 2016 problems have been resolved, some have gotten worse, and one side will certainly delve into their winning mentality at all costs. backed by a propaganda channel fueled by blatant prejudice. And despite all this, people are still likely to participate in polls relatively uninformed about what the candidates are in general for.

“He’s already falling off a cliff,” said Dr. Stephen Stosney, mental health consultant and author of Intensified Love, which coined the term “headline-related stress disorder.” “I think the 2020 presidential race will be the ugliest.”

You can’t control how the campaign season plays out or how long it lasts, but you can control how many of them you take and how it affects your mental health. Mental health professionals and campaign veterans say that just as if you didn’t get off the couch and try to run a marathon tomorrow, you need to start preparing now if you plan to get through this without dropping your phone and then yourself nearest toilet. Yes, professional runners (journalists, politicians, and other sadistic eccentrics) will always seem more prepared than you.

But as with most things these days, from eating to reducing waste, you just need to do less . Consume less news, use less social media, and, as awesome as it sounds in 2019, pay less attention to the campaign.

No, you don’t need to pay attention yet

I’m going to betray my life as a news junkie and my career in journalism, but I have to say, it’s okay not to read the news all the time. Yes, it sounds absurd, simply because there seems to be so much news happening all the time, and most of it is really bad, but you don’t have to keep headlines in the headlines all day every day to be an informed and active voter. Limiting the amount of news is key to stress management. Think about these shorter campaign cycles in other countries, and also think about how these countries have not recently elected a lazy slum master with an addiction to morning television for the presidency.

“It’s actually a long time before I think most people really start thinking about the candidates they want to support in the future,” said Dr. Weil Wright, a clinical psychologist and member of the APA stress team in America, which prepared this study. “For most people, while it’s probably good to have some idea of ​​what’s going on, there is no need to delve deeply into every little detail of the electoral cycle right now. It’s okay to just stay on the surface for a moment and not get caught in the whirlwind. “

Research over the years has shown that voters need only six weeks to make a decision; others say America should aim for a quick turn in British politics in a few weeks. However, you have no control over how long the campaign season lasts, so you must control how much attention you give it.

“For most people, from now until the moment we get closer, a lot will change,” Wright said, “that having to keep track of everything is likely to exacerbate this stress.”

Create a timetable and “men’s cave” for news

For a bizarre brief period in the 2000s, Americans were obsessed with building human caves, a place to watch sports, scratch, and otherwise have a safe space for the flexibility of this Y chromosome. While this trend seems to have disappeared , the idea can be applied to news perception. Create yourself a news cave, or at least set aside a place where you go to read the news every day.

Teresa Borchard , a mental health advocate and counselor, has a room in her home that she uses to watch the news, a sort of safe space therapy room where she can escape her children and the rest of her life and just fall into a trap. It doesn’t have to be physical space: Wright said you can schedule travel or lunchtime to watch the news. (Experts recommend making yourself a news schedule – say, an hour in the morning and an hour after work – to limit your news consumption to certain times and discourage you from checking the latest news every 30 minutes.)

The idea is to create a place where you don’t get distracted by other things, and you can just burn through your daily diet of news and then back off. Print news, of course, will always be more informative, detailed, and less stressful than entertainment disguised as cable TV news or literally endless stream (for example, literally meant to get you to read, click links, and read more) on the Internet. … news or an explosion of outrage on social media.

Having a set schedule and space for fun activities will also help you avoid the stress of constant news alerts and amateur analysis of every person on Twitter. (More on this later.)

“Be proactive about [news consumption]; don’t just get sucked into it, ”said Kiran Dintijala, stress management consultant and author of Seven Keys to Survival Under the Trump Presidency .

It’s also okay to skip a story if you know it will cause stress too. “If I’m having a tough week, I just cut out all the news I want to read and put it aside until I’m ready to watch it,” Borchard said. ( A digital scrapbook app like Pocket works too.)

An APA study found that constant breaking news – from warnings to the latest geek tweets – turns news consumers into hyper-alert war dogs ready to attack. We are all looking for confirmation in the latest news that something, something is getting better, which means that we keep checking the feed. This is terrible for dealing with stress because it means you will never give up on your adrenaline rock.

“We want people to be informed, but you can pretty much get daily news in an hour, no matter what hour works for you during the day,” Wright said. “When people do it, and they don’t just see it all day, it’s a way to put some boundaries around it.”

One weird news alert trick

Yes, it looks like news comes out all the time, 24 hours a day, and new events seep through the timeline even in the wee hours of the night. Cable News especially loves to attach their BREAKING NEWS banner to any story to keep you on your toes (have you heard the BREAKING NEWS about the Titanic sinking a century ago ?). In fact, you don’t really learn much other than what you ingest during the news diet. Candidates need to go home and pet their dogs, and the president probably actually devotes more time to watching TV every day than you do.

Dintila offers a way to prove it to yourself: start keeping a diary of everything that you think happened on the news that day. After a while, you may notice that we are no closer to impeachment, the results of the Mueller investigation, or the election of the Democratic candidate than we were last week.

“If you do this within a month, you will realize that nothing really has changed,” he said. “I write the same thing every day.”

The goal is not to get sucked back into the maelstrom of your phone, which is what these alerts are specifically designed to do. You can stay up to date without succumbing to social media addiction (and yes, ironically, phone apps can also help you stay away from your phone).

Of course, disconnecting from the news and sinking facedown in a bubble bath for the next year and a half is not a luxury that many people can afford. The elections will again jeopardize the very physical safety of women, immigrants, minorities, transgender people and other groups.

“The people who say to stay out of the news come from a huge privileged place,” said Brandon West, president of the New Democratic Kings advocacy group in Brooklyn, who has been a high school political activist. “You cannot avoid politics, when the country, they see you, and they see the politics. As a person of color, I am a walking manifestation of blackness, and I cannot avoid it. “

Balance is key here. Shutting down completely means giving up your responsibility as a citizen, obsessively hitting the refresh button every 30 seconds means making yourself so exhausted and stressed that it becomes completely useless, let alone miserable.

Act like you’re not American

Part of how the West strikes this balance is thinking like a foreigner trying to understand American news. He avoids American cable news and continues to receive information from the BBC and Al Jazeera English. They act more like outside explanations of political sports than, say, the New York Post beating up writers to deep-rooted, disgruntled fans. Agencies such as The Guardian and the Financial Times are also highly regarded by many journalists.

“When you need to understand something, you need facts and a little analysis,” he said. “They go to basic questions because it comes from an external perspective, and then they give it to you.”

Write down your worries on paper

The problem with political anxiety is that it is endless. You can try to swim against anxiety by battling bots in the current, continually going back in time (2016 election). Or, you can deal with these worries simply by writing them down and giving them a name.

“The way anxiety works is if you don’t respond to an anxious thought, your brain continues to play it in a loop,” Stosny said. “Thoughts are running with anxiety very quickly. So writing them down, especially by hand, which is associated with motor skills, slows them down. “

He suggested that you list your concerns and specific concerns about the campaign season, and then assign a likelihood to each one. For example, Stosny said that if he is concerned that the post-election downturn may cost him his job, he will examine the vulnerability of his industry to the broader economy and the financial viability of the company he works for, and then assign a probability of 10. scale. If the number is high, he will write down what steps he can take to prepare if he loses his job.

“Worry is good because it forces you to plan ahead,” he said. “When you don’t plan, when you keep thinking about all the bad things that can happen, it becomes destructive.” Thinking, for example, that if someone wins, “the end of the world will come” is too abstract a thought and will only cause even more anxiety. The planet will most likely not explode completely, so what’s your particular concern? And what can you do to alleviate these concerns?

Find your problem and work with it

Channeling all your pent-up anxiety towards activism is good for your mental health and possibly the country as a whole. What’s wrong is thinking that you can beat a candidate on your own. As mentioned earlier, the series of questions at stake in this election makes it tempting to unfold a mile wide and an inch deep in everything. Instead, experts say it’s better to just pick a candidate or a problem or two and tackle them diligently, taking time each week or day to work on it. For example, promoting health care reform or environmental policy rather than a common effort to “beat this candidate.”

“It’s efficiency. Don’t try to read everything, don’t be an expert at everything, ”West said. “Pick a problem and what you can do for a couple of hours a day. Go canvas and call. Let this be your space. “

Stosna said lane selection and blocking are also key to not feeling powerless during the campaign.

“If you focus on what you can control and the importance you place on it, then you will feel empowered,” he said. “If you focus on the events themselves, then you will feel powerless.”

It’s easy and even seductive to let off steam by shouting at protesters or oncoming protesters, bullying someone on Twitter, or knocking a MAGA hat off someone’s head, West said. But such things only serve to boost your adrenaline levels, fuel an addiction that gives you energy in the moment, but leads to a depressing breakdown later. “People on the web or on the street are just avatars of what you’re really mad about,” he said.

“The problem is not that they exist,” he said. “The problem is the lobbyists who agree with them.”

Trade adrenaline for endorphins

Twitter outrage and cable TV news festivals are popular because they are a cheap rush of adrenaline. You can open the timeline and experience a sweet fit of outrage that will thrill you at any hour of the night, as if, say, you always had a giant Costco-sized pile of cocaine in your closet. But instead of opening the tempting cocaine closet, open the drawer and get out your running shorts.

“It’s like any other amphetamine: you get a burst of energy and then you collapse,” Stosny said. “The only way to avoid depression is to be angry all the time. So you get angry because you focus on what you are powerless over. Anger makes you feel stronger. “

Instead, you can feed the beast with any endorphin-producing exercise. According to him, this can be done even in 30 minutes of walking.

“Your brain is hungry for one of them,” he said. “If you want to give up adrenaline, you need more endorphins.”

Get ready for the real real world

This run or walk is a good time to remind yourself that Twitter and your other channels are not the real world: they are flat, self-made landscapes that have little to do with how most people think.

When it comes to personal political discussions, especially with family or friends, Borchard finds it helpful to write down your arguments ahead of time to prepare. If it gets too hot, she has an escape plan, such as getting up to wash the dishes at dinner.

You must also agree that you will almost certainly be driven insane by people who refuse to accept facts and science as an argument, since this is apparently what we are doing in America right now. Experts believe that it is simply impossible to refute their beliefs with real facts. “Instead, move on to storytelling or storytelling,” Wright said.

“Taking a personal approach to these issues we’re talking about can sometimes help people see things differently,” Wright said. Avoid being defensive by adding new information to the conversation instead of arguing for lack of facts, Stosna said.

“If you try to tell someone they’re wrong, you’ll automatically get a defensive reaction,” he said. “Just add more information, don’t subtract from what they say.”

You can survive this season if you do less: be active for the goals you believe in, but know that flushing your brain with every nasty bite of campaign secretions will only stress you out. And also keep in mind that every politician will inevitably end up disappointing in some way.

“In the end, remember: no president can make you completely happy,” Dintila said. “Your happiness depends on your actions in life.”