Member-only story
Soothe Your Election Dread With This Simple Exercise
Turn your evolutionary stress response into action
To say 2020 has been a stressful year is almost insultingly obvious. As a therapist, I’ve watched my clients navigate job loss, social isolation, and concerns for the safety of their loved ones. With limited access to the places and activities we typically would turn to in order to cope, anxieties are running high and often have nowhere to go. And now, there’s the election.
One stress-management exercise I offer to my clients is to “zoom out” and then “zoom in” to gain a new perspective on stressors and chart a plan of action for getting unstuck. To understand how this process works, it helps to first understand how stress occurs in the body.
How stress works physiologically
Our bodies evolved to respond to stress as a contained event, with a beginning (you see a lion crouching in the grass about to pounce on you); middle (you either fight that lion, run like hell, or drop and play dead: fight, flight, or freeze); and end (you kill the lion, or run to the safety of your village to celebrate). The moment of danger passes, and the physiological process of the stress cycle is resolved.
Chronic stress — like living through a pandemic or, say, awaiting the results of an election that could unfold over several weeks and months — is what happens when our evolutionary survival reflex is triggered by a perceived threat that isn’t immediately resolved. It’s as if the lion showed up, ready to pounce, and then… nothing happened. For weeks. Months.
When we’re in the midst of an anxiety or stress spiral, we can feel so overwhelmed by an overarching sense of doom that we don’t know where to begin to address it. We get stuck in a freeze response, feeling numb or distracted. While this instinct is protective when we’re facing a lion we can’t fight or escape from, an uninterrupted freeze response in modern life can be maladaptive. Our actions need to adapt to…
