Politics and Your Mental Health: Finding Balance

Let’s talk about politics. Yes, you read that right. Political-related distress has come up in therapy quite a bit, so I thought I’d write about how to better cope with it.

It’s been said before about previous elections, but I think this one is one of the most important elections America has ever held. Politics, especially during the election cycle, generates a lot of worry and concern. The consequences are serious. It’s hard for even the most politically uninvolved to not pay attention this time of year.

There is nothing inherently unhealthy about mentally engaging with politically related thoughts just as there is nothing inherently unhealthy about engaging with negative thoughts in the mind. Unpleasant things happen, solvable problems need to be analyzed and resolved; therefore, it is sometimes necessary to intentionally think about fairly unpleasant things.

Issues arise when we can’t hold our thoughts lightly and we get swept away with them.

Do you…

• Have imaginary arguments with people in your mind about political issues?
• Have political arguments with real strangers or relatives that have led to isolation or broken relationships?
• Excessively consume political related content and then ruminate about how things should be, how we got here, and what the implications are?
• Find yourself pondering how you feel lonely and disconnected from your fellow human due to political issues?
• Get drawn into arguing with people about political issues on social media or spend too much time thinking about the witty thing you’d like to say to them?
• Spend excessive time imagining the terrible things to come if ______ (unwanted presidential candidate) wins.
• Spending too much time contemplating existential or depressing topics directly or tangentially brought about by political content.

Political issues (like many issues people worry about) are important and tie into values systems, worldviews, and identities (e.g., I am a person who believes X, I’m the kind of person who stands for X).

Given their importance, it is unlikely you’ll feel comfortable ignoring political issues, and yet it does no good to be consumed by them either. Like many of life’s virtues and vices, the key is to find balance.

I’ve divided this blog into two parts that deserve attention:

• Changing how we relate to political content
• Changing how we relate to one another

Changing how we relate to political content

• Set boundaries with political news consumption. Limit your engagement with political news and entertainment. Instead of getting pulled away from your life every time you check the news on your phone, see if you can set aside time-limited, designated periods to consume this material. Set a timer, read the news, and when the timer goes off, do your best to move on with your day.Oftentimes the news cycle just repeats itself over and over again with a lot of words, images, interviews, and graphs but limited information. Most of us can (and historically used to) get by just fine without knowing what political news is happening the second it occurs. It will be there waiting for you at a time of your choosing instead of intruding on you.
• Reflect on the reward value (or lack thereof). Before you click on or share political related media ask yourself “Is this useful for me to consume? What am I really going to get out of this?” Conservative and liberal websites (and bots from countries trying to divide Americans) run stories that are rage clickbait. They usually feature someone or a group from “the other side” who is particularly extreme and an easy target to make fun of and show how ridiculous the other side is. Not only does this induce negative mood, it also gives us the inaccurate impression that our fellow humans on the other side of the political aisle are far more extreme than most really are.When current events are reported, it is useful to stay informed but there is a point of diminishing returns for any story. Do you really need to read yet another article about that tragedy that happened? Is yet another article about this or that debate analysis going to tell you something you didn’t already know? Maybe, maybe not.The important thing is to ask the question and then make your decisions with intention rather than habitually on autopilot.
• Set boundaries with social media. This is similar to the points above, but different in that many people don’t engage with social media with the direct intention of confronting political issues. If you’re finding yourself getting sucked into the void of doomscrolling, there is an app called ScreenZen that allows you to temporarily block websites and apps, limit your time on them, or delay opening them. If you open an app, you may get a prompt such as “Is this important?” which at least gives you a few seconds to reflect on your choices rather than scrolling on autopilot. ScreenZen is not the only app that does this of course.When it comes to changing behavior, don’t rely on willpower alone. Use apps, set alarms, unfollow people, or put the phone out of reach or in a drawer. Whenever possible, try to shape your circumstances so that the right choice is the easy choice. To borrow from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, to break a bad habit you want to remove (or lessen) the cues that prompt your bad habit, make it unattractive to do, difficult to do even if you wanted to, and unsatisfying to engage in.
• Practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is more than just a trendy buzzword. Taking just a few minutes out of your day to “be” rather than “do” can be more helpful than you might think. So often our mind is in analysis mode or in a state of wanting this and not wanting that. Mindfulness is a way of being that helps us wake up and stop getting in our own way. It’s too big of a topic to fully explain here, but there are many great apps (e.g., Waking Up, Calm, Insight Timer, Headspace, Happier) to dip your toes in and try out. The one I’ve used most and incorporate with patients in therapy is Happier (formerly Ten Percent Happier) due to its excellent but free introductory courses called “The Basics with Joseph Goldstein” and “Unlearn to Meditate.” I use the free version of the app as even its free version has a lot of useful content. The free course called “Ten Percent Nicer with Sharon Salzburg” is particularly relevant for finding balance in both caring about the world and what is going on while also being self-compassionate and not burning yourself out.
• Focus on doing things in your control consistent with your values. It’s easy to feel powerless about politics. When you ask yourself, “How can I change America for the better?” you are asking too big of a question that will likely only lead to abstract answers. Instead ask how you can change yourself, your friend group, your family, your neighborhood, and/or your community more specifically. Lasting change is often born from small changes done with consistency. Questions with smaller areas of focus will have more concrete, actionable solutions that will give you a better sense of control.
• Set aside a specific time to mentally address your political concerns. The way many people relate to American politics or other unpleasant world news closely matches the unhealthy way the mind sometimes relates to unpleasant doubts and worries as part of anxiety and mood disorders. That is, they excessively churn it over in their minds and have a hard time disengaging from it even when they want to.Just about any patient I treat knows that I strongly advocate for worry management time. In a nutshell, worry management is where you quickly jot down your concerns as they come up throughout the day and save them to be addressed during a specific 30-minute period instead of getting lost in the worries when they occur. During the designated worry management time, you don’t worry, rather you problem solve what can be problem solved and develop a rationale and plan for disengaging from useless thoughts or accepting what cannot be changed. Importantly, it’s not that you just willpower yourself to limit your time spent thinking about it. You curiously examine what function all that extra thinking is serving and change your reasoning process so that letting it go actually makes more sense than holding on to the thought. Oftentimes the intended outcome of worry (e.g., preparation, a feeling of “doing something about it”) is lightyears away from the actual outcome of worry (e.g., more stress and nothing to show for it).

Perhaps you’re reading these suggestions so far and thinking “Okay, I get it. I’ve heard this before. I need to set boundaries. I already knew that and tried. I know thinking about all this political stuff this much is toxic for me. Why can’t I stop?”

I’m glad you asked.

Rigid Rules and Misapplied Problem Solving

If you’ve tried to find balance, to limit your consumption of news, to not think about it all so much, what did you notice?

I bet it felt uncomfortable, maybe even unachievable.

Oftentimes when I first walk someone through the process of disengaging from their typical worry process, they’ll say something like “It feels wrong to not think about it.” They describe a temporary increased sense of vulnerability – as though the worrying and endlessly looping thoughts (while tortuous) were acting as somewhat of a security guard – a protection against something worse.

Does that feeling  sound familiar? Attempts to find balance in political consumption or worrying about politics might be met with an inner dictator voice in your mind that says things such as:

• This feels like giving up. If you’re not engaging with this you’re just putting your head in the sand.
• You need to fight back and prove that person wrong. Silence is complacency!
• If you really put your mind to this and think about it more you’ll figure it out. It’s the only way you’ll be able to put this to rest.
• If you were really a good (insert valued identity…parent, ally, citizen, person, etc) you would do more, engage more, think about this more. Letting this go right now shows you don’t care. Don’t you care? Are you going to leave your kids with this mess?
• Some version of: “It’s an act of privilege to not have to deal with this all the time. That’s a luxury many don’t have. Some people’s lives are on the line and they have no choice but to think about it all the time.”

Two factors are at play here:

1. Each of those bullet points reflects an underlying value that is meaningful to the person thinking it, BUT the mind has hijacked the value and created an excessively rigid rule about what it means to do “enough”. Given this rule, the notion of letting off the gas feels like compromising a value or giving up on something you hold dear, which doesn’t feel good.
2. The mind has been tricked into thinking that it is problem solving and doing something about it when in reality all that thinking and hand wringing puts you no closer to a solution than before. Furthermore, a lot of times the mind lurches into this attempted problem solving mode at times that are completely inappropriate (e.g., when you’re trying to sleep).

Thankfully you don’t actually need to compromise something you value or throw your hands in the air and give up in order to find a little mental peace. You can keep true to your values but decrease your mental misery by stepping back and reflecting on the rules keeping you stuck. When the mind berates you with the statements above, here are a few questions to consider:

• Does me not thinking about this right now really mean I don’t care, or are there other more productive ways I could show my support?
• Are these rules I’ve made and try to follow helping me live the life I want to live or are they holding me back?
• Will saying/writing/thinking this really help the situation? Is this really what it looks like to stand up for what I believe in?

I think if you honestly reflect on these questions, you find there is a big difference between “not caring about it” and “not dwelling on it.” I’m not suggesting that political apathy is the solution. Balance is key. We are talking about politics here, but the same could be said for most problems.

Changing how we relate to one another

The last topic I want to cover is how we can improve our relationships with those whom we disagree amidst this political climate.

In the wake of the pandemic and the events of 2020 and 2021, the thing that bothered me more than any particular political figure or political issue was the fact that I shared the world with people who viewed things so differently than I did. I of course expect there to be inevitable differences in society, but the chasm between viewpoints was just so dramatic.

• How do I work on a better America if I’m doing so with people who seem to desire a world that is fundamentally incompatible with mine?
• How do I relate to my fellow human when their choices don’t make sense to me?
• Most importantly, how do we resolve our differences and come to an understanding when it seems we are operating from different realities.

I hope you can relate to these questions to some extent. The questions are coming from a place of feeling disconnected from others. I think this is a place a lot of people find themselves in at one time or another. Below I’ve written about two areas that can help reconnect and provide hope for change amidst disagreement.

Step back from US vs THEM mentality by investigating other worldviews.

The vast majority of us don’t want to live in a country that is so divided and contentious. We have more in common than different, yet it is a human tendency to categorize, label, and divide up our world. We quickly form in-groups and out-groups. It is so easy to view the opposing political party as “the other.” The process of “othering” our fellow humans is an ill as old as human history. When we see someone as the other, it begins a path to being disgusted by them – to dehumanizing them. It can lead otherwise kind people to look at the suffering of the out-group without empathy. A lot of this is born out of not being able to understand or relate to the other person.

When people engage with or try to understand people with opposing political views, they often make the mistake of relying too much on the assumptions of their own worldview instead of trying to see things through the lens of the other’s perspective. This mistake can lead to ineffective communication, disconnection, and a sense that it is hopeless to ever understand each other.

I highly recommend reading the blog Understanding How Other People Think: A theory of Worldviews. In this blog, Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace use the analogy of worldviews being like our own personal snow globe through which we understand the world. A key insight to understanding and changing other people (or ourselves) is to first realize that we inhabit different worldviews. My motivations are different from your motivations. If you and I want to resolve our differences, we first need to understand the worldviews that you and I are coming from. This is particularly relevant when the other side’s stance on issues seem irrational, contradictory, or even immoral.

Spencer and Amber write, “All worldviews feel right from within their own snow globe. While some worldviews do lead people to do great harm, reality has few cartoon villains; worldviews make sense internally and are aimed at making things better, even if (from an outsider’s perspective) they can seem deeply misguided.” In their article they use real examples from the hot button issue of abortion to illustrate how arguments lose their teeth and don’t have the intended effect when they don’t speak to the opposing side’s worldview.

Taking an opportunity to curiously talk to one another and examine other worldviews can humanize them and help bridge gaps that make us feel separated from others. This video here has a few suggestions that I think are useful.

If you talk to someone you disagree with and hold the mindset of “I want to understand you” rather than “I need to change you” then you might be surprised to find you’re not quite as different than you originally assumed. This doesn’t mean you’ll be holding hands singing kumbaya by the end of the night, but it is a place to start.

If you liked Spencer’s blog that I linked above and the topic of understanding worldviews is of interest to you, I also recommend reading the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

Change how you think about how minds change

One of the most transformative books I’ve ever read is David McRaney’s 2022 book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. While its focus is much broader than politics, the explanations for how people make up their minds and change their minds helped me make sense of what was going on in America and restored some of my hope for positive change. I’ll share a few insights from the book here.

When you disagree with someone about something you really care about, the intuitive impulse is to go into debate mode and try to prove the “other side” wrong with reasons to change their mind. The rationale often goes, “I’ll throw all of these facts at this person and surely that will leave them no option but to change their mind.”

This facts-based approach can produce something called the backfire effect where a person actually commits to their original views deeper after being presented with counterevidence. Generally, if someone feels he is being shamed for holding his views or is being told what to think and his autonomy is threatened, you can expect the backfire effect. The next time you’re about to send or re-send a message on social media that shames or makes fun of someone in your outgroup who said something inaccurate or that you don’t like, consider the backfire effect.

Within an “us versus them” mindset, there is an implied sense of a zero sum game where there is a winner and a loser, and naturally, nobody wants to be the loser. Even if this is done in a civil way, it’s rarely successful if the goal is to actually change the other person’s mind or at least understand each other. Both sides lose because they will likely walk away discouraged that the other side is “unreachable”, and they will have learned nothing about what is truly driving the disagreement in the first place.

A better way is to not face off but rather stand shoulder to shoulder and try to mutually investigate “Why do you think we disagree on this?” (e.g., examine the differing worldviews).

We don’t change people’s minds by trying to change their minds. It’s less of a “I’m right and let me show you why” but rather a “let’s find the truth together” mindset. It must start with the relationship. One of the things David McRaney emphasizes is an attitude of collaboration, empathy, and curiosity. If a person you disagree with sees you as an adversary and can’t be vulnerable with you then why would they change their mind? If someone does indeed end up changing their mind, they won’t feel like they “lost” because they came to their conclusion on their own.

Changing one’s mind is not as simple as receiving new information. It is usually a gradual process of reflection where one feels safe to even consider the merits of their reasoning process and weigh the social implications of thinking differently. This is one of the many reasons why social media is typically not an appropriate venue to try to understand or change someone’s mind. Social media is generally not a safe place to be vulnerable.

A common theme throughout the book is howl group belonging and identity shape social and political world views. The social pressures to conform to whatever in-group tribe one finds themselves in are enormous, and it is appealing for a person to talk themselves out of any dissenting thoughts – even without knowing they are doing it.

We are social beings. To the mind, the potential for social death (being shunned or kicked out of your in-group) can feel like actual death. What if you endorsed a position that went against the ideals of your own family, culture, or close friend group? Even if it’s a topic you have strong convictions about, it’s a tough thing to do given the potential negative consequences. It’s common to choose group membership over truth if following what you think is true means being exiled and alone. Taking note of these important social and cultural contexts may help you extend empathy for those you disagree with.

Moving on

Election day will come and pass. Someone will be elected president, and even if it’s not who we want it to be, we have to find a way to move forward with each other. You’ll likely never be in a situation where you have to work side-by-side or share responsibilities with a prominent political figure, but you’ll certainly do so with those who don’t share your political views. Your mental health will benefit if you can focus on what unites you rather than what divides you.

Now perhaps you’ve read all of this and your takeaway is “None of that will help. It’s a hopeless mess. You’re just kidding yourself with false hope so you feel better. We’re all doomed.” And to that I say, sure, that is one way to think about it. I won’t argue with a belief. That is just one of many ways a mind could interpret the current state we find the world in.

At the end of the day, I think one of the best guiding questions for approaching all the mind’s commentary on American politics and the state of the world is “Is this useful?”. That’s a good start for moving on to something better.

This blog was originally posted on Anxiety Specialists of St. Louis.