How do people respond–positively and negatively–to political stress?
There is no denying that tens of millions of people in the United States–and many millions worldwide–face turmoil, dread, anxiety and real physical and psychological symptoms from the political divisions created by some politicians, their backers, and corporations often motivated primarily by power, greed, and wealth through corrupt means. Instead of public service, these politicians and their syncophants (including those in the media and other institutions like the legal system) serve primarily themselves and/or operate out of fear of losing their positions and status.
While these actions are not new, technologies like social media and AI have helped to disrupt what had been fairly stable norms of acceptable civic behavior including the need for compromise, working for the common good, the maxim of “doing no harm,” and even basic common sense.
In the face of these frequent attacks, authoritarian actions, disputed elections, political retribution, and more, how do and how can people respond? And what are the consequences?
What does the research and commentary say?
*Abrams, Zara. (2024). The impact of election stress: Is political anxiety harming your health? Psychological science shows that politics can harm our physical and mental health, but the positive aspects of political engagement can lead to greater well-being. Monitor on Psychology, 55(7): 26. [Cited by]
“Political concerns, which affect both mental and physical health negatively across a broad swath of the population, topped the list of stressors on APA’s 2024 Stress in America survey.
Political anxiety is a source of chronic stress that differs from psychological conditions such as general anxiety, with its unique impact on emotional well-being and societal cohesion.
Effective coping strategies include regulating exposure to political information and fostering positive social connections to mitigate the adverse effects of political stress.“
*Ford, B. Q., Feinberg, M., Lassetter, B., Thai, S., & Gatchpazian, A. (2023). The political is personal: The costs of daily politics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, 125(1), 1-28. [PDF] [Cited by]
“Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across 2 weeks (Study 1: N = 198, observations = 2,167) and 3 weeks (Study 2: N = 811, observations = 12,790) to explore how these events permeated people’s lives and how people coped with that influence. In both diary studies, daily political events consistently not only evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also greater motivation to take political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political system that evoked these emotions in the first place. Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions, and regulating these emotions using effective cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action. Although people protected themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently used regulation strategies came with a trade-off between well-being and action. Second, we conducted experimental studies where we manipulated exposure to day-to-day politics (Study 3, N = 922), and the use of various emotion regulation strategies in response (Study 4, N = 1,277), and found causal support for the central findings of Studies 1–2. Overall, this research highlights how politics can be a chronic stressor in people’s daily lives, underscoring the far-reaching influence politicians have beyond the formal powers endowed unto them.”
*Smith, K. B. (2022). Politics is making us sick: The negative impact of political engagement on public health during the Trump administration. PLoS One, 17(1): e0262022. [PDF] [Cited by]
“Objectives: To quantify the effect of politics on the physical, psychological, and social health of American adults during the four-year span of the Trump administration.
Methods: A previously validated politics and health scale was used to compare health markers in nationally representative surveys administered to separate samples in March 2017 (N = 800) and October 2020 (N = 700). Participants in the 2020 survey were re-sampled approximately two weeks after the 2020 election and health markers were compared to their pre-election baselines.
Results: Large numbers of Americans reported politics takes a significant toll on a range of health markers—everything from stress, loss of sleep, or suicidal thoughts to an inability to stop thinking about politics and making intemperate social media posts. The proportion of Americans reporting these effects stayed stable or slightly increased between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2020 prior to the presidential election. Deterioration in measures of physical health became detectably worse in the wake of the 2020 election. Those who were young, politically interested, politically engaged, or on the political left were more likely to report negative effects.
Conclusions: Politics is a pervasive and largely unavoidable source of chronic stress that exacted significant health costs for large numbers of American adults between 2017 and 2020. The 2020 election did little to alleviate those effects and quite likely exacerbated them.”
And more on how to respond —
*Burkeman, Oliver. (2025). The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here.
“… But there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.
… I’ve been puzzling for a few years now over a shift I first noticed around 2016, when various acquaintances – and me too, in some ways – started doing what I called “living inside the news.” They seemed to view the world they accessed through news sites and social media as somehow more real than their immediate surroundings. The latter was a place they merely dropped into from time to time, before hurrying back to the main event.
… Keeping your centre of gravity immediate and local is the opposite of all that. It means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.
… One very good way to tell that your centre of gravity is out of whack is when it feels like you spend a lot of time inside the minds of far-off strangers.”
See also these books by Oliver Burkeman:
Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals
Questions? Please let me know (engelk@grinnell.edu).
