How to manage election anxiety

Election anxiety is rampant. In a recent survey by the American Psychological Association, 77% of adults reported the future of our nation as the top stressor in their lives. 

This stress may be magnified for you this week as we wait for the election results — or if the results are not what you were hoping for. 

We spoke to Dr. Laura Roberts, a local psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety and depression and an associate professor at Lehman College, to ask for advice on how to deal with election anxiety. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Epicenter NYC: What are some of the most common election-related concerns you’re hearing? 

Dr. Laura Roberts: The most common concern is fearing that the other side wins, and they’re bad, and they’re going to cause harm.

If I’m working with a person who’s married to someone who has different political views, that’s a big stressor right there — trying to maintain this common ground when there’s two fundamental differences. Especially because people feel so polarized right now in their thinking. 

And a lot of people feel silent because they’re not quite sure how the other person thinks. I’ll see that even with children, about the conflict [in the Middle East] right now. They might say, “Oh, I’m not sure how other people think. Do I have people that would support me? Do I have allies?”

It’s just all of these unknowns. So some people are suffering in silence. They’re afraid to voice their opinion out of anticipation of how they might be perceived or rejected.

Epicenter NYC: How can New Yorkers cope with anxiety about the election outcome?

Dr. Laura Roberts: When we feel uncomfortable with uncertainty, we tend to be more anxious. One thing I try to remind the clients that I work with is that everything is uncertain. And even if the outcome is what we would hope for, we don’t even know what that will necessarily bring. 

When there are [election-related] threats — those are real, and that’s frightening for people — I think one thing to keep in mind is that when we’re anxious, we tend to overestimate the threat. We also underestimate our ability to be resourceful and to deal with this threat. If this worst-case scenario were to happen — and there’s a lot of research that supports that even if we try to predict what would destroy us, it actually doesn’t. We are so much more resilient than we think we would be. 

Historically, when you’ve gone through other difficult times or traumas — times when you thought life was just over, you’ll never be the same — it probably was not true. You probably were able to recover from it.

Epicenter NYC: We’ve been hearing that this presidential election outcome might mean the biggest threat to democracy. But even if these threats are based on some indicators, you’re saying that the threat might loom larger in our imagination than it actually turns out to be?

Dr. Laura Roberts: We just don’t know. But people are anxious about it because they’re assuming the worst right now — and it could be. But if you think back to Covid, there was a time when people said, “We won’t ever hug again.” People thought that New York City was going to be a ghost town forever, and in a very short amount of time it actually bounced back. 

Preparing for the worst might not necessarily be helpful, or worrying about it. That’s something I do a lot with my clients: I often say, “what are all the benefits to worrying? Are there any?’ And people say, ‘well, I’m more prepared.” But are you really more prepared to handle something catastrophic if you were worrying about it? 

Probably it’s going to be catastrophic either way. It doesn’t mean to take everything so lightly. But if everything that we anticipate, the worry itself, is causing us a lot of stress — and there’s only so much that we can do. We can vote. We can take action. And there’s things you can do in your immediate surroundings, like find support.

But anticipating this loss of our democracy, it’s maybe too early to think that way. It might not necessarily be accurate, either. We just don’t know.

Epicenter NYC:  Post-election, what are best practices for having meaningful conversations with family and friends with different political views as ours?

Dr. Laura Roberts: Whenever you enter a conversation, if you go into it with an agenda, and starting with an attack, that’s where we go wrong. We often feel it’s important to be right, and we want to make sure our point is heard. 

Having some humility [is key]. But earlier philosophers like Socrates would say, a true philosopher is really willing to go into any conversation and have their mind changed and be open to that, but also admitting when they’re wrong.

If you think about it, even with some of these issues that are on the docket in this election — conservatives have one view about abortion and liberals have a different view — but in the end no one wants harm. But each side thinks the other wants harm. 

Imagine if you instead went into the conversation with, “let me find some common ground here.” Because chances are, as humans, we are more similar than we are different. It could be that the common ground is we all believe in certain moral beliefs. We believe that it’s important to be kind, or important that we all have rights.

If you go in with that approach, people will be more likely to hear what you have to say, too. They’ll have more respect for you, versus going in there with this really fixed view, and it’s hard to even engage in a conversation with a person who is fixed in their beliefs, and not willing to hear the other person.

Strategies to help manage anxiety during and after the election

This coverage was made possible by a grant through the URL Collective, a nonprofit supporting local, diverse media. Epicenter NYC and URL Collective have partnered to bring you election reporting from grassroots media. 

See more of our election coverage here.

You can reach Dr. Laura Roberts at laura.roberts@lehman.cuny.edu.