Sept. 10, 2024 – Political anxiety has been with Michael Steiner for a while now.
The 33-year-old New Yorker started therapy just after the 2020 presidential election but didn’t think he could discuss with a psychologist the stress and anxiety politics brought him.
Leading up to that election, Steiner and his friends would spend hours online going back and forth about political issues. In the days when ballots were still being counted and recounted, Steiner and his roommates slept in the living room with the television on for 6 days straight.
After that cycle, Steiner realized he was potentially addicted to doomscrolling on X.com (then known as Twitter), was relying too heavily on his friends to field his anxieties, and found himself feeling immensely jealous of people who weren’t burdened by the same political stress. After bringing these concerns into therapy, he realized politics wasn’t an off-the-table subject during sessions; instead, he found a place where he could speak freely and clearly.
With the 2024 presidential election around the corner, more Americans than ever before are reporting feelings of anxiety around politics. But while it may feel like everything is out of your control, there are ways to cope and work through those feelings.
Your Feelings are Valid
“I had a very specific, Hollywood version of what therapy would be, and my experience talking about politics has been wildly different than I thought it would be,” said Steiner, who expected psychologists to be evasive and avoidant when it came to anything political. “But in this amazing world of modern therapy, there are people who can engage in real conversations.”
And for therapists, it’s important to validate their clients’ anxieties about what’s going on in the world. For many – if not most people – the stakes of the election are genuinely high, and their fears and stresses are warranted.
And for some people, the degree of this anxiety might be getting in the way of everyday functioning, and that’s when it’s time to work through it.
Lessen Your Media Consumption
It’s good to stay informed, but over-consuming news on social media is a pretty reliable way to keep yourself stressed out. Research has shown a strong link between social media use and increased anxiety, and mental health professionals are seeing this on the ground as well.
Jessie Borelli, PhD, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, has noticed that both her adolescent and adult clients struggle with media consumption, especially at night before they go to bed. Figuring out how to put realistic limits on your personal media consumption is a great place to start, whether that be putting your phone in another room after a certain hour of the day or actually deleting specific apps from your phone.
With teenagers, it can be helpful to bring a parent in to monitor their child’s use of social media, but it can also be helpful to try to let them do it on their own.
“If teenagers are able to follow their own guidelines themselves, that’s even better,” said Borelli. “That helps prepare them for adulthood when we have to monitor our own media usage.”
Keith Humphreys, PhD, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University, explained that this process is made even easier if you agree to do it with a group of people. If, like Steiner, you’re being inundated with group texts, it might be time to talk to each other about when you should take a break from link-sharing and political co-stressing.
This isn’t easy to do. It takes practice. Consuming political news on social media can be addicting.
“The political media industry has become a bit like the tobacco industry, in that the way that they make money is not good for human health,” said Humphreys. “I feel like those of us who care about improving mental health are kind of in a David versus Goliath situation.”
Take Conversations Offline
Reducing your media intake may also lead to fewer online arguments and more face-to-face communication.
“I think that electronically mediated interactions tend to be very emotionally charged,” Borelli said. “But often when you talk to the person in real life about some of these topics, it can take some of the volatility out of the situation.”
Humphreys said that he has set up these boundaries in his own life among colleagues. Instead of taking to X to have a public debate with another health care professional, he prefers to talk things through in person, like friends.
Accepting Reality and Taking Action
A large part of political anxiety is feeling like everything is out of your hands. A good way to deal with your own anxieties is to figure out what is simply beyond your control, and what productive actions you can take to get some of that power back.
Rather than stewing and obsessing over doomsday scenarios, identify the issues you care about and see if you can do something constructive, said Humphreys. Whether it’s registering people to vote, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or even prepping for potential climate disasters – action items like this can get you out of your head, at least for a little while.
On the flip side of that, accepting what you don’t have any control over can also be grounding. Zoe Nefouse, a marriage and family therapist associate in Los Angeles, said it’s normal to feel distressed in response to something distressing – she’s not there to say that’s abnormal. Still, there comes a point where you must come to terms with what you can’t do – and we can make meaning out of being alive, regardless.
“I’m not afraid to be like, ‘We can’t therapy our way out of this one,’” Nefouse said. “We’re all in this disgusting soup of existential terror, and we’re all just trying our best.”
