How to reduce digital stress during US elections (or any other major event)

oday is election day in the US, and chances are that even if you aren’t US-based, your attention is somehow affected by it, since this topic is widely present in the news, social media feeds, and conversations. Perhaps, you feel stressed, cannot fall asleep or cannot stop doomscrolling? May you have a FOMO?

As the pressure to know the results builds up in the coming days, how do you make sure this isn’t increasing your digital stress and affecting your mental health?

Here’s some research that explains what’s going on in your brain and simple rules to keep your digital wellbeing in any high-pressure social situation like war, pandemics, or elections, where you don’t have much control over what’s happening.

What's going on:

The human brain is wired to look for bad news—this is our survival mechanism (because it was your ancestors’ ability to pay attention to dangers that helped them survive). Social media algorithms tend to amplify our negative emotions, such as anxiety or anger. They don't pick up that much positive emotions.

Doomscrolling (the excessive focus on negative news on social media when you can’t stop looking for the latest bad news) affects your mental health. It increases arousal, anxiety, and depression and reduces psychological well-being and life satisfaction.

What to do:

1. Recognize that doomscrolling is just an ineffective coping mechanism where you are trying to meet a basic need—to feel safe and have some certainty over things. (Similarly, FOMO is an ineffective coping mechanism to feel a sense of belonging.)

2. Think of other ways to meet this basic need—the easiest is to start bringing order to your own physical environment (e.g., clean your table, do the dishes, etc.). Basically, any small thing over which you have control.

3. Remove your phone from the bedroom. People who use phones, and especially social media, in bedrooms have higher levels of anxiety and worse quality of sleep across all demographics.

4. Understand your feelings about what's happening. Are you worried or feeling helpless? Expressing your feelings to someone in real-time, rather than posting them or just continuing to read the news, will help relieve them. If you don’t have anyone to talk to, take 10 minutes today to write down everything that comes to mind on a piece of paper about the topic. Don’t re-read it—just throw it away.

5. Limit your social media usage these days to 30 minutes per day. This has been shown to reduce self-reported depression in a group of students.

Have a peaceful week!

P.S. If you are feeling stressed and/or busy with endless emails and Zoom/Teams calls and want to have more thinking space in your busy schedule towards the end of the year, to feel less stressed about all things on your agenda?- join our 5-Day Attention Detox challenge. It's a fun neuroscience-based short program to help you restore your focus in spite of digital distractions.