Navigating Anxiety and Nuance in an Election Season

It was quite a summer, right? Between the Olympics and the Presidential campaign shake-up, I cannot recall a more emotion-laden season like the one we just lived through. As I think back on my conversations from the last few months, I’ve witnessed (and experienced) extreme swings in attitudes and emotions.???

As we face the upcoming election in November and all the historic—and histrionic—sentiments it brings up in our on-and-off screen lives, I think now is a good time to reflect on the complex interplay between our brains, anxiety, and the way we process the world around us. In a time of heightened political tension and uncertainty, understanding these dynamics can be incredibly helpful in better managing our emotions, effectively communicating with others, and navigating this season with less distress.?

You see, as sophisticated as we may consider ourselves to be, all of our brains are capable of being governed by our primal, reptilian brain circuitry. Human beings are wired with an intricate and, at times, clumsy system that attempts to protect us and ensure our survival. The instinctual fear-center of our brains, the amygdala, is constantly scanning the environment for emotional and physical threats. And if detected it reacts, setting off the fight, flight or freeze response. This highly reactive system can ignite without us even realizing, until the physiological process is well under way. Some of us don’t even know it’s happening.?

When we scroll and see something that our amygdala registers as potentially harmful, emotionally or physically, it ignites a primal response-emitting stress hormones throughout our bodies. Of course, violent issues like school shootings and war trigger this. Our “emotional”? brain cannot discern between actual and potential threats. That’s why our fear response is set off from a slur, a stereotype, or an emotionally-laden story about our cultural, religious, or gender identity.??

The good news: we have a prefrontal cortex in our brain that has the ability to intercept and redirect our fear response and apply critical thinking. With self awareness and practice, we? train our mind to recognize our individual fear response, how we experience it in our body, our thoughts, and our subsequent actions. By doing so, we can facilitate the communication between our primitive, fear-centered and more evolved, logical, and strategic parts of our brains.?

Navigating anxiety and complexity in today’s world requires a balance of acknowledging our primal instincts while exercising the nuanced thinking of our prefrontal lobe. In order to do this, we have to tune into our bodies and our thoughts—including what we call “logical" or “rational” arguments—and catastrophic or black-and-white thinking. When we do this, we can manage our anxiety more proactively and engage more? accurately with ourselves and more effectively with others.?

Let’s dive into what this process looks like.?

Our physiological response to seeing an upsetting headline or photo could immediately set off our? physiology, like when we experience a racing heart, chest tightness, stomach pain, and? muscle tension and when these frequent symptoms accumulate, they may lead to more chronic inconveniences like can sleeplessness, stomach issues, or self-medication.?

?As fear response bathes the brain in stress hormones, the prefrontal cortex automatically goes into screensaver mode. All of our brain power is devoted to the actual or potential immediate crisis. Basically, the reptilian part of our brain is running the show-informing our thoughts and directing our actions. In its effort to protect us, it may be misguided, but the horse has already left the barn! . In order to access the more evolved part of the brain, we must first calm our body to mitigate the fight, flight, or freeze process. This enables our higher level, more sophisticated brain to participate again.?

Here’s a simple checklist that you can refer to help the two parts of our brain talk to one another more consistently. (If only our political system could operate this way.)?

• What is your body doing when you’re listening to voices, seeing an image, or scanning a headline? Is your neck tense? Are you picking your cuticles? Is your jaw tense? If so, pause.
• Calm your body. Breathe deeply, ground yourself and “get out of your head” momentarily.?
• What are you thinking? Are you engaging in anxious thought patterns like catastrophizing? or black-and-white thinking? Jot them down and consider if there’s room for nuance And if you’re feeling pressured to take action, can you pause before doing so.?
• Examine your thoughts and consider the sources: do you feel under threat? What is going on right now to make you feel this way? What is the outcome you fear and is it likely??
• Can you observe any anxiety thought patterns? If so, how can you recognize them in the future??

Political beliefs—and the arguments we make in its service—are rooted in emotion. The more threatening something is to our sense of self, the less curious we become about the origins of those beliefs. You can’t judge and be curious at the same time. When we deem a situation non-threatening, we’re more likely to consider another perspective and less likely to “other” the other side. And our two-party system, where there is supposed to be a clear winner and clear loser, often leads us to engage in binary thinking, where situations are seen as either all good or all bad, leaving little room for nuance. We feel compelled to choose between two extreme options, ignoring the middle ground, or focusing so closely on this one contest that we omit other issues of importance.?

Political media can create a sense of urgency that can limit our ability to engage in any conversation with nuance and empathy. If we can resist the urge to "other" those who differ from us by remembering that they have emotions driving their position, and that their “system” is simply trying to protect itself, we stand a better chance of fostering understanding and reducing collective anxiety in an already-fraught time.?

Demystifying Reads

My colleague Tovah Klein has written a phenomenal book, Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty . Based on her decades of extensive clinical experience and? research, she provides helpful mindset practical guidance to answer readers’ most fundamental parenting question: how to help kids thrive amid these stressful times.??

Take care,

Dana