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There’s a Name for That Feeling of ‘What Now?’
The Monday after the election, two days after the announcement of a winner ended an excruciating post-Election Day wait, my fellow Forge editors and I did a temperature check on the mood of the week. And in that moment, what we were feeling was… depleted. Freed from the nerve-wracking waiting game of an electoral unknown, we found ourselves battling an uneasy sense of “what now?”
As it turns out, there’s a name for this particular manifestation of extended stress: the “let-down effect.”
The term, which was popularized by the psychologist, author, and UCLA professor Marc Schoen, describes the come-down crash you feel after pushing through a period of acute stress, like the final grind to wrap a demanding work project or a sudden family crisis. You might also feel similarly after waiting to see if a despotic head of state will accept election defeat or, alternately, launch your nation into a sloppy coup d’etat. (Hypothetically.)
Your body reacts to these stress drills by pumping your body full of fight-or-flight hormones like cortisol and adrenaline — a response that humans evolved to escape life-threatening danger. For a moment, you become physiologically primed for survival. All the while, your immune system takes a hit, leaving you more susceptible to auto-inflammatory flare-ups, infections, and illness.
