The Right Way to Deal With Election Stress

We’re in the breathless final stretch of this election—when new poll analyses drop seemingly every five minutes, “closing arguments” that contain no new information receive detailed reviews, homepages transform into liveblogs, opinion pages swing wildly between imagining different scenarios, and almost none of it is useful because there simply isn’t much to do other than wait until Election Day. Or rather Election Week: Chances are that we won’t know for days, or even longer, whether the White House will return to a guy who tried to overturn the last presidential election.

In fact, at this stage of the election cycle, The New York Times’ dining section, with its recommendation of what cookies to bake while watching election night coverage, arguably contains more new and useful information than most politics sections: At least you get some tips about baking with brown butter.

But this year, many outlets have added a new genre of article to the mix: how to handle election stress. Experts interviewed by ABC News suggest that people sleep, limit news and social media consumption, and “focus on concrete tasks that they have control over, like helping get people registered to vote or participating in canvassing.” People interviewed by the ABC affiliate in West Palm Beach, Florida, likewise endorse action—and also prayer. Austin news station KXAN suggests people adopt a “day-by-day approach” and use “I” statements when “setting boundaries” with family and friends regarding political discussions. Psychologists in particular had a lot of advice: how to identify the root of your anxiety, “boost optimism up until the last minute,” relax via “deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, aerobic exercise, a warm bath, relaxing music, a walk in nature.” An article from the meditation app Headspace, unsurprisingly, suggested meditation. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus said that she knits, “compulsively.”

Your mileage with all these suggestions may vary. Personally, I found even collecting them to be overwhelming. (And that’s not ideal, given that my boss wrote Monday that we have a moral duty not to panic.)

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about a pair of essays Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote for TNR four years ago: the first about how mourning climate change prepared her to weather the Covid-19 pandemic, and the second about how being both a “climate person” and “a Black climate person” affected her perspective on the 2020 presidential election. Mary is emphatically not a “doomer”—i.e., someone who sees all the bad news and figures it’s time to give up. But in these essays, she emphasized the importance of fully acknowledging the weight of the moment, rather than trying to ignore it. “This is painful,” she wrote in March 2020 about Covid and the climate crisis. “It’s supposed to be. We are suffering through a collective trauma. We’re watching our world change, and it feels like it’s falling apart. That’s not supposed to feel OK: It’s not OK. As hard as it is, as painful as it is, we have to accept the reality of our crisis. Denial, often a critical step in the grieving process, is not an option.”

Her assessment of the 2020 election was similarly unflinching. Being a climate writer means understanding just how high the stakes are, and that there’s no such thing as putting the crisis on “pause” for four years. Instead, as writer and activist Bill McKibben has repeatedly observed, in his newsletter The Crucial Years, these next years are more vital than ever—and merely failing to act during this time will put us on a very dangerous path.

“This election,” as Mary put it, “is less about whether we should act on climate than how we should act on it. Should we act with compassion or with cruelty? Given that our national commitment to democracy has become debatable, this election is also about whether we even have the ability to act on climate in any meaningful way in the future.” Against all that, her message was simple: “This past weekend, on the first day of early voting in New York City, I stood in line for more than five hours to vote like my life depended on it. Because it does.”

That’s not a warm bath. On the other hand, it is an “I” statement, and I’d argue it does engage with the “root” of election anxiety. It’s also a kind of optimism. As Mary put it, “I’ll take a shot in hell over a shot to the head any day.”

It’s a line worth meditating on.

Good News/Bad News

Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached record levels last year, according to a new report from the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization.

Stat of the Week
$3 billion

That’s how much money the Biden administration is disbursing in Inflation Reduction Act–funded grants to green the country’s ports, following an announcement this week.

What I’m Reading

Authoritarianism is on the rise. Is climate change to blame?

“Researchers have long noticed that natural disasters like floods, droughts, and wildfires can help autocratic politicians consolidate power,” writes L.V. Anderson in an unnervingly timely article at Grist. But recent research has helped to narrow down what, exactly, is happening and how people disinclined to give up on democracy can push back:

Until fairly recently, researchers looking at the ties between climate disasters and authoritarianism only had case studies, like Duterte and Trujillo.… But in 2022, economists in the United Kingdom and Australia devised a clever study seeking to prove that storms like hurricanes actually cause a slide toward authoritarianism.… A causal relationship between climate change and authoritarian attitudes has also been demonstrated on a much smaller scale in psychology studies. In 2012, a team of psychologists divided cohorts of German and British university students into two groups and told them they were helping to develop a knowledge test. They informed half of the volunteers about some of the threats associated with climate change—findings about how hazardous heat, wildfires, and glacier loss are projected to worsen in the future. The other half learned “neutral facts” about their respective countries’ weather, forests, and economies, with no mention of climate change. The volunteers who had been told about the perils of climate change expressed more negative opinions of dangerous or marginalized groups—like terrorists, drug addicts, or attack-dog breeders—on a 10-point scale measuring their attitudes toward various demographics.

Read L.V. Anderson’s full report at Grist.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.