Manage Election Night Stress and Anxiety by Making a Plan Now
We don’t know what exactly election night will bring, but gone are the days when we could get fairly accurate (if unofficial) results before midnight. And even if everything goes smoothly, election night and the days that follow will likely be contentious and tense for many of us. So let’s plan now.
Live the day first
Before we get to election night, we need to get through the day. Perhaps you will be at work, or taking time to vote, or volunteering to help vote. If so: let it distract you. Focus on the task that needs to be completed.
If you have a long, empty day ahead of you, make a plan now to give the time some structure. Exercise, meditation, volunteering, and productive activities like running errands or even crafts can help you burn off nervous energy while you wait.
And don’t forget to vote! Double check your registration status and your state’s laws now if you haven’t already. If possible, consider voting early. If you plan to go to the polls in person on Election Day, make a plan so you know when you’ll do it and how you’ll get to the polls. Prepare information on what to do if you are refused ; in many cases, you can fill out a provisional ballot.
Consciously consider your thinking
While you’re doing all this, you might be tempted to prepare for the worst. But experts say it may be useful to be cautiously optimistic. This way, you gain the psychological benefit of allowing yourself to hope for the best. Explain it to your pessimist this way: if the worst happens anyway, why not enjoy those positive emotions while you still can?
It also helps to think through possible scenarios. If Trump wins, what will you do? How can you mentally plan for this? How will you react if Harris wins? What if the election is too close to call, or legal disputes continue for weeks or months on end? How will you mentally survive this time? Thinking about the best and worst outcomes can help us feel resilient and prepared no matter what happens.
Understand the possibilities
Since voting by mail has become more popular than in pre-2020 elections, the process of counting results has become a little more complicated than before. Previously, absentee votes accounted for only a small percentage of the results, and by the end of election night it was clear who would win, regardless of the mail vote count. In 2020 it was not safe and we did not receive full unofficial results for four days .
Likewise, television networks and newspapers can usually get a decent amount of information from exit poll numbers, which are conducted by simply asking people leaving polling stations who they voted for. But if there is a political divide—for example, if Democrats are more likely to vote by mail—then these polls become less reliable.
Even knowing that old ways of reporting are less reliable than in the past, the media may try to present the situation in the opposite direction—for example, by trying to predict what will happen based on how many votes were cast early. . In truth, this election is different from previous ones in many ways, so no one knows how early predictions will relate to the final results. You can probably expect a process similar to what happened in 2020 – but 2020 was special in its own way, with all the pandemic chaos.
Keeping all of this in mind can help you understand the uncertainty you may feel as you watch the votes being counted or read about them as they come in. It’s also important to take a step back and remember that watching the results be counted on election night is a media event; it is not part of the democratic process. In most states, election results are not certified until several weeks later, usually in late November or early December.
The US Election Assistance Commission has a list of certification deadlines by state ; the last regular deadline is Dec. 12 in Oregon. Recalculation may postpone certification dates to an even later date. Meanwhile, both parties are preparing for legal battles, with Republicans already filing what news outlets continue to call a “flurry” of lawsuits designed to challenge election procedures in battleground states.
Reduce stress or at least try
If you’re worried about the election results, November 5th will not and cannot be a normal Tuesday evening. Plan how you will try to stay calm, but also set some boundaries in case your feelings get out of hand.
One of the things that can help the most is knowing who you can talk to. Who do you like to commiserate with or celebrate with, and are they the same people, or does it depend on how you’re feeling? If your spouse or roommates don’t feel the same way about the election as you do, you may want to plan to chat with someone else, either in person or virtually. If you find support on social media, consider messaging individual friends rather than spending your entire evening scrolling through the home page.
Establish self-care, whatever that means for you, but be careful: if you think the evening could go better with a few drinks, or if you’re coping with stress with weed, partake responsibly. If you don’t already have a class for potentially stressful nights, may I suggest getting ready and then taking a carefully optimized bath ?
Devote yourself to sleep
When you wake up on Wednesday morning, you will experience everything that Wednesday morning brings. Maybe someone will give a concession speech at night. Or perhaps millions of votes remain to be counted and an election cannot be called. It’s also possible: There is a presumptive winner, but candidates and states are already locked in epic legal battles over the legitimacy of some votes.
This situation, whatever it is, will be waiting for you in the morning, no matter how late you go to bed on Tuesday night. Decide for yourself how much crap you are willing to put up with and put a number on it.
Perhaps you want to experience the chaos of election night because you like drama and disaster and want to see how people react on social media. If you stay up until midnight, will that allow you to get enough sleep? If you stay up until 2am and the news is bad, will you feel like your time was well spent? Decide now that this is the last time you will allow yourself to stay awake. It’s important that you trust your brain, which doesn’t worry too much yet, to make this decision, because your brain, which is freaking out at 2 a.m., is not capable of knowing when to quit.
Or perhaps you love yourself and want to be as happy as possible under the circumstances. Lights out at 22:00. All the fresh horrors will still be waiting for you in the morning.
Go to bed correctly
At a minimum, you need to turn off notifications. If you ignore all my advice, the absolute minimum you need to do is make sure your phone is set to Do Not Disturb at whatever ungodly hour you finally get to.
But you have time to plan. If an app allows you to turn off notifications at certain times, such as Slack, make sure you set them accordingly. (If you use Slack for work, you should probably still mute notifications during non-work hours .) Similarly, you can set your phone to go to sleep every night, with your closest friends and family members listed in white emergency list. . Go back to your settings now.
In particular, think about what your phone will look like when you wake up. Do you want to see all nightly news alerts or would you rather turn them off? If you fear the worst, you can even prepare for a quiet morning routine, including breakfast, before picking up the phone and finding out. You can’t control what happens on election night, but you can decide how much of your time can be taken up.