Stress levels, unlike the stubbornly static polling margins, are climbing to astronomical levels as we approach Election Day. I’m getting daily texts from far too many friends about the state of the ground game, biased polling practices, and opinions about why Harris must do this and not that, or that and not this.
This isn’t helping anyone.
In the many post-mortems that will begin the second after the election is called, it’s unlikely that we’re going to look back and say, “If only we had stressed more about polls every hour of every day in the last month.” The deciding factor is unlikely to be too little anxiety or a shortage of doomscrolling.
According to a May 2024 survey by the American Psychiatric Association, 43% of adults say they feel more anxious than they did last year. And73% are particularly anxious about the presidential election. While we don’t often agree on the polls, there is wide consensus that stress is not healthy. There is—as a certain presidential candidate might say—science the likes of which we’ve never seen before that shows that when we live in a perpetual state of stress, it takes an awful toll on us. And that can include news-induced stress. A 2022 study in the journal Health Communication found that being addicted to the news was linked to both poor mental and physical health. “Witnessing these events unfold in the news can bring about a constant state of high alert in some people,” said Bryan McLaughlin, astudy co-author and professor at Texas Tech University. “For these individuals, a vicious cycle can develop in which, rather than tuning out, they become drawn further in, obsessing over the news and checking for updates around the clock to alleviate their emotional distress. But it doesn’t help, and the more they check the news, the more it begins to interfere with other aspects of their lives.”
The news cycle is unrelenting. In an interview with Walter Isaacson, Yuval Harari said that the most abused word in the English language is “exciting.” We use it to say we’re happy—I’m so excited to see you! But unlike algorithms, which are on all the time, the human operating systemneeds downtime. “The news cycle is always on,” Harari said. “The political game is always on. And if you force an organic entity to be on all the time, to be always active, always excited, it eventually collapses and dies.”
You might think that the candidate you oppose is killing the country. But allowing yourself to be perpetually stressed by that candidate might be killing you. So don’t do the candidate you passionately oppose any favors by removing another voter from the rolls!
Then there’s the most frequent object of obsessive news stress: polls. They’re an invasive species that have taken over our political discourse. They serve as the boiler room for horse-race coverage that treats our elections as theater or reality television. Polls have come to define the contours of the race. And their outsize coverage crowds out discussion of issues that actually do have meaning. That’s why Ezra Klein recently gave this blunt advice in The New York Times: “just ignore the polls.” It’s also why, in 2008, at HuffPost, we introduced a series called Huffpollstrology, with the idea of placing polls in their proper context—more like astrology, which people can check every day with a properly sized grain of salt.
Read More: History Exposes the Perils of Relying on Polls
We also need to realize that much of the stress we’re feeling isn’t accidental. Algorithms now keep us in a perpetual storm of outrage. That’s not a byproduct. That is the product. It’s by design.
But while we might live in a world dominated by algorithms, we still have some agency. We don’t have to play the role we’ve been assigned by so much of the technology in our lives, especially social media. Because, to mix my metaphors, once you take the playing field in the game of outrage, you’ve already lost.
It’s ultimately about what kind of engagement we want. There are two types of engagement. One is caring about issues, educating yourself about them, and doing what you can to work toward the outcomes you believe are best for the country. That was the dominant meaning of the term before social media.
Then, there’s engagement the way it’s commonly used now: giving your attention to an app. If that engagement takes the form of outrage, all the better. Because expressions of outrage breed more expressions of outrage, aka “engagement.” The two forms of engagement often overlap and conflict, especially in an election. We need to take back the former definition and use that as our pathway of having an impact—however small in an election.
It’s not that alarm, distress, concern, and outrage are not warranted. The stakes are high. Our leaders’ day-to-day decisions, actions, and words have real consequences in real people’s lives.And there are lots of things, every day, that are truly alarming, distressing, concerning and outrageous. There have probably been half a dozen new outrages since you started reading this.
That’s precisely why it’s so important to take back control of where we put our attention, and how we react to the constant stream of outrage aimed directly at us. Because only then will we be able to mitigate the effects of those outrages on our lives—and especially on the lives of those most vulnerable among us.
Read More: We’re in Danger of Losing the Plot on Well-being
When we’re depleted and exhausted, we’re not as resourceful, creative, or effective. The goal should be to affect outcomes, not just to vent. And the way to best affect outcomes is to find the eye of the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength and wisdom. The Greeks called it“ataraxia,” the place of imperturbability within all of us. From that place, we can be at our most effective, and we can only get there by realizing we don’t need to match the frenetic pace of the moment.
This is what allows us to respond to the daily stresses of the news strategically, not impulsively. We can find lessons on how to do this by tapping into the wisdom of the past.
One example is from the very distant past: the Stoics. They teach us that while we can’t control what happens in the world, we can control how we react to it. But when we allow ourselves to be caught in a perpetual cycle of stress, we’ve ceded control of both our emotional reactions and our actions. And when we’re robbed of our inner freedom, we feel like victims.
Another politician who lived in turbulent times and exemplified Stoicism was Marcus Aurelius. He spent 19 years as the Emperor of Rome facing nearly constant war, a horrific plague, an attempt at the throne by one of his closest allies, and an incompetent and greedy (and perhaps even “very nasty”) step-brother as co-emperor. The lesson he took from this is one of my favorite guiding principles: “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
Another example, from the more recent past, can be found in the Civil Rights Movement. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. made his case to his fellow pastors for non-violent direct action by stressing how targeted and purposeful their movement had to be. As he put it, “I have not said to my people: ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.” That’s why the refrain of one of the most famous songs of the Civil Rights Movement was: “Keep your eyes on the prize.”
Yes, we should absolutely focus on doing everything we can—organizing, donating, writing postcards, canvassing, phone-banking—but stressing out about every poll that comes over the transom isn’t doing anyone any good.
Here are seven ways that can help you stop the cycle of stress and outrage, keep your eyes on the prize, and find your place to stand from which you can move the world, or at least your local precinct.
1. As they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself so you can take care of others.
2. Take action. Once you’ve taken care of step one, you’ll be ready to put your energy to work, which you can channel into real, meaningful engagement.
3. Remember that humor has always been a great way to find light in dark times. So seek out ways to laugh.
4. Find connection, both within ourselves and others. Community is essential to a thriving life — and a thriving republic. So reach out to people, seek out encouragement and inspiration from friends, and be there for those who need the same, including those who are most vulnerable to the breakdowns in our system.
5. Lean into the timeless. Timely can be necessary and useful, but the timeless—including the classics and ancient wisdom —is also necessary and useful. So don’t limit your reading to social media.
6. In fact, set a news and social media cut-off time. While being informed is obviously a good thing, choose a cut-off point when you stop reading the news at night. The news will wait—but your need for sleep won’t, and getting enough sleep will help you put stressful news into perspective.
7. Finally, pick a time at night when you turn off your devices—and gently escort them out of your bedroom. Our phones are repositories of everything we need to put away to allow us to sleep—our to-do lists, our inboxes, the demands of the world, and of course, endless polls. So charging our devices in another room allows us to wake up as recharged as our phones.
