Finding it hard to watch the news? You might be experiencing political anxiety

We don't talk enough about how mentally overwhelming the news cycle can be: for some people, it can be a whole type of anxiety on its own. Erin Paterson looks into ways of tackling a very modern mental health issue

Erin Paterson

In 2016 I suffered two social media emergencies in quick succession, both related to political events. One, on the night that Britain voted to leave the European Union, and another on the night of Donald Trump's election victory. The second one was so bad that I finally conceded to let my parents take me to a private psychiatrist for help. I had been so certain that in both cases neither event would turn out the way they did, that their coming to pass absolutely shook me. It's tempting to brand myself with liberal arrogance and being out of touch with the population; but it wasn't solely that I thought these things wouldn't happen, it was also that I believed these things couldn't happen. I was terrified that both these events would embolden racist ideologists and that we were seeing the beginning of a march towards fascism, both here and abroad. I was terrified, as many others were.

On both occasions, I woke in the middle of the night and checked news sites and my social media with trepidation but tacit confidence; on both occasions I was shocked into an acute anxiety attack, which saw me vomiting and returning to self-harm in a way I hadn't engaged in since my youth. The first thing I did was to shut down my social media accounts; I reasoned that not being able to see the news would calm me, but it didn't. On closing down my social media, and avoiding any mention of the results, I felt horrendously privileged and weighed down by an invisible force. It was unavoidable, and I needed to make my peace with it. This, though, was impossible. I couldn't reason my way out of worry about the rise in racism, what this would mean for marginalised people already suffering from demonisation in the media, and I couldn't pretend that it wasn't happening. I tried to restore my social media feed a few days later, and found the echo chamber of despair and dismay just too much to bear. People were hurting and scared, and it was infectious.

There are several terms for this now, with some having been given extra focus in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential Election; we have "Political Anxiety Disorder"and "Election Stress Disorder" among others. As is clear, this is something that a lot of people have encountered and my worry is that we haven't found a functional way to deal with it yet. With the onset of COVID-19 and lockdowns across the globe, I was particularly worried about the 2020 US election. Partly because I feared there would be another Trump term, but also my reliance on social media and the internet for company/information in lockdown has vastly increased. I had four years to prepare, but I still felt very underprepared. This is partly because we have become so used to political gaslighting in the years since 2016, that I wasn't sure I could trust anything. I still suffered the same anxiety in the lead-up to the night and had grown very distrustful of my own inner voice telling me that things would be ok.

How do we deal with this kind of uncertainty, the enormity of things that happen in the political sphere? Once we've signed petitions and marched, how do we deal with the very physical, very real effects of political anxiety?

"Change is a constant, we can't stop change happening, we can only do our best to control our reaction to the change," says Michael Stephens, the founder of WE CREATE SPACE, a not-for-profit organisation providing a free online well-being workshop within the queer (or LGBTQ+) community. "Those of us who are wanting to make a change can only do so if we are putting ourselves in the best position possible. So it shouldn't be seen as an act of dismissal or selfishness if we end up coming back stronger and more able to make an impact."

Stephens splits his approach into two steps: "caring" and "integrating". "By 'caring,' I mean asking yourself, 'How am I actually doing?' because we often tell ourselves stories." These stories, he says, might be us saying we're fine to get through a crisis, or flagellating ourselves by repeating how awful something is. "That story becomes our narrative, because we get so used to telling it. Sometimes we need to stop and question, 'Is that the truth?'" Stephens likens this audit of our emotions to growing up LGBTQ+. "I sometimes told myself stories to survive. But one thing I didn't do when I came out was stop and ask myself which of the stories I no longer needed, and what was the story I now wanted to tell? These behaviour and thought patterns become ingrained, and it can be difficult to recalibrate."

Then, "integrating". "'How can I learn from what has happened? What does this actually mean for me in my life?' Any kind of newness triggers the stress and conflict responses, so we feel anxious when we see change happening. In the longer term, what causes us anxiety is that our life path has changed; perhaps the idea of where we were going is no longer applicable. Perhaps it means that we're letting people down, not living up to people's expectations." Stephens suggests facing moments like these with a set of statements: "This is what's happened, this is what it means for me now, this is what I'm going to do with it." By taking this stance, becoming the active agent in your life makes uncertain events at least feel more manageable.

From what I experienced in 2016 through till now, I can attest to the cumulative effect of political anxiety. We witness so much political upheaval, especially between the Brexit negotiations, the US presidency and now the pandemic, that it becomes almost impossible to experience individual events with the appropriate response. To a certain extent, this makes sense: rogue world events rarely are rogue, and are usually the result of months or years of gradual decline or advance towards dangerous ideas. Anti-immigrant rhetoric and the stoking of racial tensions were the roadmap to the Trump presidency; anti-science/anti-intellectualism contributed to the reach of the pandemic. So in a sense, cumulative political anxiety is appropriate. When I broke down, I wasn't reacting to a single instance, I was reacting to the cumulative stress of knowing how we got here.

These events are a continuum, fascism ebbs and flows, but I've found Stephens' two-step process for dealing with political anxiety helpful. Firstly, we check in honestly with ourselves on how we are feeling, and ask the question, "Is what I'm feeling the truth?". Drop the stories that aren't true right now, right at the moment. Then once we've checked in with ourselves, we tell ourselves, "This is what I'm going to do about this."

It's important that we survive these times, and that we learn to deal with things like Political Anxiety – for ourselves, and also to protect tomorrow's activists and changemakers. As Michael Stephens said later in our call, "There are those of us who are privileged enough to switch off the news and not live it." It's for those who are living the news that we must be strong.

I came to the 2020 Presidential Election with a much better mindset. Perhaps I'd been jaded by four years of the world becoming entirely unpredictable, but on 3 November I made a plan. Being as I was unable to affect the outcome of the election, I knew that my only recourse was to watch, and I decided not to. I disabled my social media accounts, went to bed early and promised myself to think practically about the results from the first moment I became aware of them. I refused to let myself look to the future, to predict, to speculate; I knew that the only way I was going to get through the night with any semblance of health was to be clinically practical with the results. "How does this affect me right now?" helped stave off the physical effects of any possible anxiety attack. When negative thoughts and doom-mongering predictions came in, I simply asked,"Is that true?" and was unforgiving in ratifying my answer. If the answer lies in the future, then this problem is a future problem. There will undoubtedly be more chaotic events in our world, often predicated by the maelstrom we've already weathered. But for now, I can just focus on the moment. Otherwise, how can I be rested enough to fight for the next cause?