How to Reduce Anxiety While You Wait for the Results

Now that we’re in the thick of election season in the U.S., a lot of us are feeling increasingly anxious about our country’s future. For a few of us, this is manifesting as some extra energy that keeps us able to focus on the results. For others, however, this extra adrenaline is causing a whole host of uncomfortable symptoms like nausea, heart palpitations, and shortness of breath. 

This has led to a whole bunch of posts online telling us to breathe deeply or count things in our environment until the symptoms go away. But for most of us, especially now, these techniques are doing nothing. We’re spending hours breathing deeply and using these grounding techniques, but our heart rate is still high and our nausea is still present. So why is this?

The reason for this has to do with biology. Anxious symptoms are caused by adrenaline, a hormone that causes our heart, lungs, and muscles to go into overdrive. Unfortunately for us, there is only one way for adrenaline to get out of our body: get used by these organs, causing an increased heart rate and tight stomach muscles, even if we don’t want it to. We can breathe as deeply as we want, but no amount of deep breaths can make that adrenaline break down or prevent these symptoms.

Rather than asking how we can get rid of this adrenaline, the more important question to ask is why is our body creating all of this adrenaline in the first place?

I touched on a few examples in a previous post, but as a refresher: our body creates adrenaline when we spend time recalling uncomfortable memories, focus our attention on present discomfort, or think about issues we may encounter in the future. 

The reason why so many of us are experiencing anxious symptoms during the election is because we’re engaging in that kind of behavior - recalling all of the bad news we’ve heard recently, focusing our attention on catastrophic reports, or thinking about all the consequences of the election. If we want to stop experiencing symptoms, we need to cut off this behavior.

But why should we? If this election is important, shouldn’t we stay as up-to-date as possible on the information?

This question can be answered with another one: why do we need these moment-to-moment updates? The results of the election will be the same whether we check them once every ten minutes or once every day. All of this worrying about the election and hyper-focusing on the news affects neither our behaviors nor the outcome. But what it does do is increase the strength of the anxious symptoms we experience in these next couple weeks.

So, as strong as the urge may be to keep checking the news every few minutes or to keep catastrophizing with your friends and family, the only way you’ll properly be able to reduce your anxiety during this period is: don’t check the news more than twice a day, and focus your attention on activities unrelated to the election. It won’t be an easy decision to make consistently, but it will make the next few weeks go by much more painlessly.

If you’d like to read more about reducing anxious symptoms, keep an eye on my Facebook page or sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be releasing a video soon on the mechanism behind panic and how we can use it to stop panic attacks before they manifest.

For now, I wish you luck on your journey - especially during these times - and hope you have a speedy recovery.