Anxiety and Politics

Anxiety and Politics

Today, I want to speak to you about anxiety and politics.  I want speak to the collective anxiety most of us have been feeling towards this year’s presidential election, the outcome, and how this year has felt different than any other year for most of us who can remember presidential elections over the decades. Yes, decades. I’ve been alive for four decades now, almost five, and I feel like this election year has been like no other.

Whether you follow politics closely, or whether you choose not to, and no matter which way you wanted this election to go, I’m going to address the anxiety that I’ve been helping many of my clients work through, especially the young adults I work with. I can see that our younger generations, our teens and young adults, are looking the older generation, for answers.  I want to give you some ideas of how to help your loved ones deal with anxiety and politics right now.

What do we do when the world isn’t behaving the way we want it to?

We want the world to behave so we can feel safe.  

We want to feel secure in the knowledge that the future will be more aligned with how we want it to go and aligned with our values.  

I love studying history.  If there’s anything I’ve learned from the story of politics and power, it’s that while the men in power are working through upheaval, there is chaos and an unpredictable future – and at the time of the upheaval, no one can predict how things will land.

This unpredictability can be such a difficult thing to grapple with when you’re trying to make plans for your future. Or when your young adults or your teens are trying to plan for their future. 

Politics feel like they are out of our control, and even though we get to vote, many of us research the issues, watch the debates, and even then, we feel like we don’t have that much power in the outcome.

There is where the anxiety comes in. But I want to speak to this anxiety in a different way than you’ve ever heard before.

Are you mis-assigning where the anxiety is coming from?

For instance, you think that the anxiety is coming from the candidate – from who will occupy the presidency in America.

But think of it this way: whoever occupies the presidency in America isn’t causing your anxiety. No. It’s not the candidate himself. Instead, it is the meaning you’ve attached to the candidate about what four years will look like going forward, and you are uncomfortable with how powerless you feel. The anxiety comes from giving your power away, your personal power of what you CAN control, versus what you WISH you could control.

We think the person who occupies the presidency in the Oval Office creates a predictable future where we feel safe and secure.

But this is not the case.

Safety and security come from our thinking. We create a narrative in our minds how the candidate aligns with that narrative or not.

You can control your thoughts and your narrative

What is it you can control? Your thoughts, your narrative, the story you tell yourself about the future you want to create. Most of us have a difficult time separating our Thoughts from the Facts and so we get it wrong in regards to creating the feelings of safety and security.

When we separate the facts from the thoughts that create a mental story in our minds, we start to see that we have a lot of projections about what the candidates will mean for our future. The stories, the projections, none of that is real – yet. It’s a mental construct. And when brains project difficult scenarios, difficult outcomes, brains generate the emotion of anxiety. This is what normally functioning brains do. Right?

The Truth

But the truth is, whoever occupies the presidency in America is a neutral circumstance.  Which is to say that two different human beings, two different brains will have two completely different stories and thoughts and meaning about the same fact of who is president.

Brains do this in every circumstance, all the time. We all have such different thoughts about candidates and the people who are running for office. No two people share the exact same thoughts about the same circumstances.

This explains why people get so passionate about politics. It makes sense. I understand why the anxiety is there and where the fear is coming from.

We have the power to Stop living in fear of the future

Number one is to stop living in fear of the future. This involves balancing realism with optimism, which can be akin to asking the brain to stop the anxiety thinking and drop and give you 100 jumping jacks when it is tempted to go down the anxiety rabbit hole.

Let me explain:

Here’s a true story I read about recently.  During the Vietnam war, a high-ranking naval officer and pilot was shot down over Vietnam and captured, where he spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war. His name is James Stockdale, and his story became famous in the book, Good to Great; written by Jim Collins.

Stockdale’s story is worthy of studying because he not only survived, but he possessed a kind of mental grit that carried him through a difficult circumstance. He was repeatedly tortured and he had no reason to believe he’d ever make it out alive.

He describes how he faced the situation, how he survived, while he saw many of his fellow American captors lose their will to survive and not make it.

I’m so fascinated with his story. But he says that he found a way to stay alive by embracing both the harshness of his situation with a balance of healthy optimism.

This is what we need to do when we are faced with difficult circumstances.

We need to embrace the harshness of our situation while at the same time, cultivate and keep alive a balance of healthy optimism.

He explained this idea by stating, “you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.”

Have faith in a better future

I am a survivor of difficult circumstances. And while I wasn’t tortured and held captive for seven years by enemies in a foreign land, I was taken advantage of as a child and I know the meaning of suffering. That’s all I’m going to say about that for now, but I am not a stranger to what Stockdale is talking about.

As a child, I had to learn how to have faith in a better future where I would someday be relieved of the difficult things, while also staying present in my reality and doing my best with it.

Always hope for the best, while also acknowledging and preparing for difficult things. When you are prepared, you have less to fear.

External circumstances do not cause our feelings

External circumstances do not cause our feelings.

This can be really difficult for most of us to understand at first.

It’s our thoughts about our circumstances that cause our feelings.

So, if you’re thinking the future will be terrible because of who is in the Oval Office, you’re going to feel terrible. It depends on what our brains are telling us.

We need to take a step back and stop living in a story driven future. This is what I mean by controlling what you can control. The brain on default will go down the fear and anxiety rabbit hole. It takes mental strength and discipline to say, “no brain – we’re not doing that right now. Instead, we’re going to focus on the here and now.”

We get to choose our attitudes and our thinking

When I was in college, I had heard a bunch of stories about a professor on campus that had a reputation for being the worst. A lot of my friends who had taken her class told me that I should avoid taking her class at all costs.

But as fate would have it, her class was the only class that fit into my schedule and I needed it as a prerequisite for another class. So, I took her class. And I was dreading it. In my mind it would mean three months of misery.

You may be able to guess where I’m going here – She turned out to be one of my favorite professors ever. Her class was hard.  Her class was jam packed with homework that was relevant to what we were learning, but she was thoughtful about all of it.  It was a lot of work, but I never felt like my time was being wasted. This was an upper division psychology class, and she took the time to really pick apart and speak to the good points of my papers I wrote in her class, as well as she always gave me meaningful feedback of where I could dig deeper and do better.

Many of my colleagues complained about her class. But I honestly loved it. This lady knew her stuff. She was demanding. She pushed us. She wasn’t exactly a warm, friendly person – maybe even a bit prickly. But even so, I saw past that and loved the content of how she lectured, how she expected a lot of us. And it was worth it. Not everyone felt that way. It’s fine.

My point is – we get to choose our attitudes, our thinking, our mental story in the face of any circumstance.

Are your thoughts shutting you down and causing you to feel powerless? Or are they helping you take action in the direction you have control over for yourself and your loved ones?

We create a better world when we think in terms of courage and then act, from that emotion. I’ve mentioned the Think/Feel Act Loop before in previous podcasts. But in this context, it shows up as thinking in terms of trusting yourself and your ability to be resilient, which will cause you to feel courageous, which will fuel actions that move you in a better direction for creating a better future for yourself.

If you want a refresher on this, listen to episodes three and four, I go into more detail on the think/feel/act loop in those episodes.

In short…

The American president does not create peace for you.

The senate and the politicians don’t create peace for you.

You create peace for you. This is what Stockdale was describing. 

Peace is based on how you are thinking.

What can you do for yourself?

Pay attention to what you CAN do for yourself. Do something that is productive for yourself and makes you feel proud. Incorporate some little pleasures into your day as well. I personally have to create a little more structure for myself when the fear and anxiety are high. I have to double down and create gentle routines that keep my mind focused on useful tasks.

When we change our internal worlds, when we do this thought work and we change our minds, we change the external world. We do. And that’s what I’m all about, making the world a better place, one human at a time. Starting with myself.

You are capable of so much. Do you know that? You are capable of more than you know. You have the power within you to create a beautiful future for yourself, regardless of what is going on in the outside world.

I hope you believe that. Don't forget, if you have haven't joined the newsletter, do it here, now! 

Take care my friends.

Until next time.