Finding Relief During the Presidential Election In Case You are Feeling Incredibly Anxious

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience. Sarah and her guest, Dr. Breese Annable, discuss the kinds of stress the US Presidential election is creating and whether this stress could be causing you chronic anxiety. Chronic anxiety can have an effect on your physical health and you deserve to feel better emotionally. There are ways to break the cycle of worry and emotional turmoil.  If you sometimes feel helpless, betrayed, afraid or even grief this year, this episode shares ways to move through these waves of discomfort with more ease and calmness. Creating community and taking media breaks are a few ways to do this.

Breese Annable’s Website 

This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

 We are talking about a very timely topic, which is Anxiety around this presidential election. My guest here tonight is Dr.

Brice Annable. She's been on the show before. She's awesome. I'm so glad she agreed to be on this particular episode with me. Dr. Brice Annable is a licensed psychologist and a coach and helps women pivot and change their careers. Welcome to the show, Dr. Brice. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

I went on ChatGPT, which I'm a new ChatGPT user, and I just absolutely love it. What I did is I went on there and I asked for the top reasons that Americans are stressed about this particular election. So these aren't my reasons, these are ChatGPT's, so I'll go through these. The first one is polarization, this tension between you and your friends and family who might be voting differently, in addition to just living in a country at this point that is so divided.

Another one, uncertain political climate. You've got two candidates who have.  It creates a sense of uncertainty. You really don't know how it's going to play out. It could be very different in each different scenario, but some of the specifics, immigration, the economy, foreign relations, just to name a few.

Another reason, election integrity concerns, uh, people concerned about whether the election results can be trusted. Another reason, handling future pandemics. This one I was actually surprised about. I haven't heard people talk about this that much recently. But anxiety over how each candidate will handle any future pandemics that should arise. 

Another reason for the anxiety, media coverage and misinformation, people becoming anxious because they're not sure what's the truth. The last reason on this particular list is the potential for civil unrest, potential protests, potential riots, you know, certain reactions. All these reasons contributing to people having anxiety about this election.

So one of the first questions we're going to tackle here is, is this election causing acute anxiety or is it causing chronic anxiety? Dr. Brice, I'd love to hear how we can differentiate these different types of anxiety. When we think about stress, I mean, stress is a normal human response. We have a stress response.

We need to have a stress response, and it's not inherently problematic. We start with a stressor. Something happens in our environment, typically we get a ping from the news or we have a conversation or all the different ways that we're just kind of flooded with information these days, right? So we have a stressor and then our body has a stress response.

The stressor resolves and our body normalizes.  That response is not problematic. It doesn't necessarily cause issues on a physical level or a mental or an emotional level.  Resolution, like that's the key. There's this resolution that ideally happens in an acute response. In the climate that we're in right now, I think very often we get hit with information that causes that stress response.

And we don't even get to come down from that and have that resolution before we're taking in other information. But it's just this repetition of these stressors happening in such a way that our bodies and our nervous systems, like our whole system is not getting a chance to resolve and move forward.

It's like if you were driving your car and the gas pedal got stuck down, you never get to turn off the ignition and let the engine rest. You know, our body doesn't get a chance to come down or resolve. Yeah. I like what you were saying about the resolution. That's something that we can evaluate, you know, is this stress that I'm having, is this anxiety that I'm having, is it coming to an ending point?

From what I understand acute stress is actually Healthy can, you know, keep us focused and motivated, but if we have this more chronic version of this anxiety, it can have some real negative impacts on our body, on our health, and I have some statistics here that I would love to share with you. Anxiety increases the risk of heart disease by 52%, and that's chronic anxiety.

Chronic anxiety increases the risk of heart disease by  52%, and this is because our blood pressure and our heart rate go up consistently, and it puts a strain on our cardiovascular system. And this is from a study titled, Anxiety and Risk of Incident Coronary Heart Disease. Another statistic,  35 percent of people with anxiety disorders report that they also have gastrointestinal problems like irritable bowel syndrome.

And the reason for that is, is the brain is connected to your gut. It's connected to your gut through your vagus nerve. It's connected to your gut through hormones. And so what happens is you're having this anxiety and your brain is sending messages to your digestive system to speed up your digestion or to slow down your digestion. 

Another reason for this is this chronic anxiety. Actually, it's shown in research is chronic anxiety actually thins the barrier in your intestine. So there's things that are getting into your bloodstream that normally shouldn't. And so that's going to cause some problems too. So there's really an important connection here between the mind and the body.

And the name of that study is anxiety and depression comorbidities  in irritable bowel syndrome. I had to look on the internet to make sure I could pronounce that right. Yes. You did it. Great job.  The, this next statistic that I want to share with you and the last one here is people with anxiety disorders have a 43 percent higher risk of developing autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. 

The reason for that is this chronic anxiety disrupts the immune function, increases inflammation. And so this is from the Journal of the American Medical Association. You might already have anxiety, I might be putting more on you, I'm sorry, but it's good to be aware of these, uh, statistics and this connection between what's going on in your, your mind and your anxiety and what's going on on a physical level.

I'll, I'll say hopefully in our conversation tonight, we will be offering some answers. Solutions.  So it's not just like, Oh my gosh, like terrible news. So we don't have to get into the weeds with this, but I think to also discern stress and anxiety, a lot of times those are used interchangeably. The vast majority of us are experiencing stress in this political environment that we are living in now that does not necessarily have to go into an anxiety disorder,  there are things that we can do.

I think for so many of us, these are unprecedented times. The things that we are needing to learn and to equip ourselves with, so many of us have not thought about these things or had to practice these things before, at least not in this context. Those are sobering statistics and there are things that we can do. 

I always say as human beings, we are wired to feel better. There are so many ways we can do that. And, and we all have our own individual tendencies and histories and things like that. I mean, my goodness in the, in the pandemic, eating disorder shot through the roof, substance use shot through the roof, all of these, these things shot through the roof.

And of course, we studied that and looked at that during the pandemic, but we've been living under incredible stress. for years prior to the pandemic. And it has shifted and changed and ebbed and flowed, but it has not let up. For some people, it has exacerbated the ways that they have coped with stress and difficult emotions.

For some people, it has brought up old behaviors that they had not engaged in for years and years. How do we exist in this stress? And again, we all have ways in the absence of other ways, our brain is wired to find them. There are so many, you know, vulnerabilities that you experience from a financial perspective, from a health perspective.

Sarah, when you were Talking at the beginning of our time and you were listening at listing out what chat GPT gave you, as far as, you know, here, the top, I think it was like the top concerns I was writing them down, but besides them, I was writing safety. Trust safety, like  emotional safety, physical safety.

When you were talking about the tension that we feel sometimes just even going out in the world, like there's a part of our brain that is. Activated and alert and you know, and so what we're talking about is these primal sources of safety, security, fundamental trust in just our well being in so many ways.

So yeah, so social security, Medicare, Medicaid, I'm at a different time in my life, but I have children in elementary school and the fear that as parents with young kids, so many of us. feel. I do a lot of community activism with gun violence prevention. And so there are these different, you know, depending on where we are in our lives and, you know, but again, certainly having those vulnerabilities where your security financially, physically, and all of these ways are vulnerable and are not secure.

It's like our brains cannot help. But know that, you know, and again, these very primal parts of our brains that are wired for safety, security, and wellbeing, it's just like, how can we not be activated and affected? Exactly. Yeah. So if we're trying to get a better idea of, you know, why is this so big? You know, why is this really difficult to process through?

It's one of the reasons is because it does, it hits those really primal core needs of, of safety and,  um, you know, trust, you know, how can we sort of. support ourselves to be more resilient so we can move through this next year. What can we do so we don't experience this anxiety in a long term? Cause we're seeing that this acute short term anxiety is okay,  actually can be beneficial in some circumstances.

But when it becomes more consistent and long term, that's when it is harder on our body. So how can we avoid that real long term anxiety? One of the first ones I want to bring up here is setting boundaries with media. And a lot of times when we talk about setting boundaries with apps and media, we're often talking about the dopamine hits and the, and the addictive qualities of the media.

Um, but. I think this conversation is a little bit different. It's more this, you know, concern, this worry, this fear that's coming up and driving us to continue to connect more with media. I mean, the news does such a good job of really hooking into our negativity bias, meaning that we actually react more strongly to negative news than positive news.

But as far as, you know, setting some boundaries with media, here's a couple ideas. Could you turn your phone off certain times of the day? Is that possible? Could you take an hour here, an hour there, and said, you know what, this is my phone break hour. I'm actually going to turn my phone off. So that's an idea.

Or if you have enough self discipline to commit to only looking at your phone certain times a day. If you want to get out of the habit of having your phone right by your bed, you can go old school and buy a plug in alarm clock to wake you up in the morning and put your phone in a completely different part of the house. 

Uh, and this idea I love, it works so well with clients and myself, I've done this, is to remove certain Apps from your phone. So one of the reasons that we have such an addiction to our phone is because of how mobile it is, because we can literally take it anywhere. There's no place we can't take our phone.

We take it into the bathroom with us, right? How many of you like in the bathroom sitting on the toilet on your phone, right? Like it goes. everywhere. And this is one of the reasons that we are so addicted to it. So if you take some of your apps off of your phone and set it up where you look at Instagram or whatever it is only on your laptop, it's actually going to make a significant difference.

You're not going to carry your laptop into the bathroom, right? It makes a difference. One other thing I'll throw out here is to be mindful of what. Mental states or emotions are triggered when you are engaged in media, especially about the election, since that's what we're talking about tonight. What is going on?

Is my body getting really tense? Do I notice that I'm going into some anger? Is it bringing up some grief? That might lead you to naturally just want to maybe engage in media just a little bit less because you're realizing, you know, some of the negative experiences. One of the things that I really like about what you said is really putting systems and structure in place to create barriers.

The common denominator with all of those things, I think, is, from my perspective, is the starting point, and this is where I don't think it's a separate conversation from the addiction that we, you know, it's just, we, we, our society is now all on board with going, oh no, we're all addicted to these devices.

And then you pair that. With the thing that we're addicted to is now more and more giving us what can be actually traumatic information, distressing, disturbing, all the way to sometimes traumatic. Research has showed that when you just have your phone in your eyesight, your attention span goes down. We are more distractible.

Even just having my phone, you know, and I have my phone here and I have it turned down. But the fact that it's in my eyesight, my attention span goes down, my distractibility goes up. You pair that with the kind of information then that we are getting exposed to when we check our phones.  And yeah, we're not getting that dopamine hit.

We're getting that cortisol hit, right? That fear response where, when we're seeing this really upsetting news. When we are in that chronic stress response, the part of our brain where mindfulness lives, I like to say, is actually shut off. It's like it's offline, right? And so I think we have to appreciate that the fact that many of us are living in this chronic stress response, sometimes on top of it, an acute stress response, that part of the brain where mindfulness lives is impaired.

If not deactivated altogether. And so putting these systems and things in place, I think are really helpful and important because it's saying like, I can't solely rely on myself to be doing that. Well, I'll watch myself when there is. Some kind of really traumatic or upsetting news, and I will watch myself be in a cycle of checking.

Checking for updates, checking for new news, and I'm doing this checking behavior. Oh my god, do I have any more information? When our brain is in that state, we cannot access mindfulness as easily. We cannot access those tools, even those of us who are long time practitioners, because our brain's not, they're impaired.

Take the apps off your phone, put the phone in the other room to create separation and distance, I always say, between the urge and the action. Encourage people to lean onto some of those strategic things to create space between, you know, the urges that we have and then actually being able to act on them.

A couple of years ago, I did Episode about trauma and news. Does the news actually cause trauma? And I will tell you, there is a research out there that shows that you can get PTSD from bystander video. You can watch bystander video on the news and have enough trauma to be diagnosed with PTSD. So it's something to be careful of.

If you can take a few two minute  mindfulness breaks during the day, I assure you, it really will shift some things going on in your psyche and your body. Some ways that you could do that, you could find a video on YouTube of ocean waves.  And you can just say, this is my two minutes. You can set your phone timer for two minutes and listen to the ocean waves with your eyes closed.

And notice if you can tell if the waves are rolling out or are they rolling in? Can you follow that? Can you follow with your eyes closed and really tuned in to when the waves are rolling out and rolling in? That's just a really nice little. calming exercise that's only takes two minutes, but it's going to give you an hour or two of calmness.

Something else that you could do is just simply taking a couple minutes to tune into your body, right? We get so in our heads and wrapped up in all the things that we're doing. And if we can just. Take a moment to do a little bit of a body scan, you know, start paying attention to the top of your head.

What are you feeling there? Your scalp, your forehead, your eyes, your neck, your shoulders, just kind of moving down your arms. You know, do you notice a temperature? Do you notice tension? Do you notice texture of your clothing? Uh, and, and that really helps give a rest to that part of our brain that is kind of getting activated about all of these things because you're using a different part of your brain.

You could do the same thing and listen to the sounds in your environment. I've had some really amazing mindfulness breaks just listening to my HVAC system. Like, it totally works. You don't have to be on the top of a mountain listening to the birds. Last one here. You can choose a color, take a two minute break to just look around and find, you know, five or six things that are that color.

It's just a redirection. It's just shifting your attention to something else that ends up feeling calming.  Want to add just to add what you're saying, you know, where our attention goes, our emotion goes. A lot of times if we're in that chronic stress response, it can be really helpful to have an external guide.

So for a body scan. When you're distressed, it's really hard to sustain your attention long enough to be able to do that. Now, if you're really familiar with those practices, your mind might be able to adjust there fairly quickly. If it's feasible, the more you can even just get out into nature. And nature could literally be walking into your front yard.

For me, I just walk into my deck, which has the trees. So it doesn't have to take a ton of time. Certainly if we've got more time, all the better. You know, we're, we're essentially talking about micro dosing mindfulness into our days. Yeah. I like what you said about where our attention goes, our emotions go.

And I want to address the emotional component here. So here's the thing. When something difficult happens in your life, it is actually this gold mine for mindfulness. It's this gold mine for emotional healing. It's not like when something awful happens to me, I get really excited. I'm like, yay, I get to do all this emotional processing. 

But I will tell you that when I reflect, 

I do feel some gratitude for having the opportunity to process through and heal some of these difficult emotions that are essentially stuck in your body. I mean, they really, they really are on that level. That's what I believe. So let's talk about that for a moment. Let's talk about these emotions. So some of the emotions that might be coming up for you, for any of us around this election are fear, maybe fear of our country moving into a direction that you're not comfortable with.

Grief, for example, losing relationships. It's due to political differences, losing your serenity, losing the state of, of calmness. That's a loss. That's something to, to grieve. Betrayal is another emotion that might be coming up for people and maybe feeling lied to. And hopelessness, helplessness, both of those are these emotions that are, you know, they're Coming up, you know, feeling like there's not a lot that I can do.

These emotions are real. They're important. They're valid, and they're an opportunity to do some emotional healing. So what that might look like, let's start with the helplessness. Validating the emotion is a great way to start. And the reason is, is because validation, a lot of people don't know this, but validation soothes your nervous system.

And you validate yourself when you're talking to a friend and they validate the way you're feeling, your nervous system soothes. So it's such a great place to start when you're having like this really intense emotional experience. What that might look like for helplessness is it's understandable that I feel helpless because there's a lot about this I can't control.

Maybe even talking more to yourself about how Helplessness is a natural human experience. We, we all feel that sometimes the reason is, is because as human beings, we can't control everything. There's a lot we can't control. And so just really coming to peace with that, that this is part of the emotional experience, it's uncomfortable, but, but it truly is.

And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with us. And then some compassion. I care about how I feel. I care that this is hard.  Betrayal, similar. You're validating yourself. It's understandable. I feel betrayed because, I mean, there's a load of things that we could finish that sentence stem with. You know, you pick that for yourself.

And that's what's so important about this is to just really dig into you and use your mindfulness to notice what is it for you? What is this bringing up? I love the even though affirmations, uh, even though I feel betrayed, I matter.  Even though I feel betrayed. I know my own truth. What is that even though affirmation for you, you know, taking a moment to, to really think about that and, and the self compassion part, you know, I know feeling betrayed is difficult and I can support myself through it.

You know, that self kindness, just taking a, a moment to say something kind to yourself. So many of us, if not all of us, have experienced those emotions. Grief is such a, an important emotion that I wanted to make sure to highlight. And just that whole process and experience of grief, because I think so often that doesn't go named and then it goes missed.

And again, we could talk so much about grief. What all the things that we have to grieve in this and that is irrelevant to who gets elected. We all know that it's not like somebody gets elected and these things are better. There are things that have happened on a societal level that are going to take a long, long time to heal.

But a couple of things I just wanted to add to what you said. When we're talking about mindfulness. And, you know, so many people in the chat were talking about these really wonderful self soothing strategies. And when I think about self soothing, I think on a sensory level, we're talking about oils that they smell, hot baths, you know, all of these things are acting on our sensory system to create more soothing.

We put that in the context then of our, this conversation around to the extent that we're able. At the time in the moment to experience these emotions that come up, the more we're not in a stress response, the more that we are feeling more regulated, more calm, more grounded. I think about it as like we're expanding our container to be able to feel.

We're expanding our container to feel greater degrees of pain. We're expanding our ability to be present with that pain for longer. So these things go hand in hand. These soothing strategies are helpful in and of themselves. And then at the same time, they expand our container and our capacity for pain because this is not easy stuff.

This is hard practice. And so again, we have to be doing these things to expand our capacity and our ability to experience these really distressing, painful emotions. The other thing I just wanted to add about compassion, yes, I love that you were talking about validation and compassion, because as you said, Sarah, if you want to deflate somebody's anger and defensiveness, validation is your best superpower. 

But I wanted to touch on compassion because we were talking about it as far as self compassion. One of the strategies that I think is so effective with building resilience in these times is compassion with others. There's so many ways that we can do that, but one of the strategies that I really like is taking a long view of time.

I think very often about how, you know, we are in this particular period of time in the world and in our country. But if we take a bird's eye view, we can see a longer expanse of time. At other times, other points in history, there have been Other points of unrest, instability, even violence, but what that can do is just allow for a sense of compassion and connection to other beings and just how difficult it is to be a living being.

We are existing in a particularly turbulent time, but that longer expanse of time, I think, allows us to connect to all other humans who have existed or are also existing in unrest or unsettled times as well. And so that sense of compassion and connection to others is, I think, so fundamentally important to create resilience in this time.

Thank you, Dr. Brees, for bringing that up. That's what a mindfulness practice based in Buddhism is all about. May I have peace. May all beings have peace. You know, we really have that prayer and for everyone. So thank you so much for bringing that up. And I liked what you said about clarity. Creating this capacity for pain.

That's so important on a lot of levels. And one of them is, is because if we don't, then we hold it in our bodies. There's lots of books out there such as, you know, body keeps a score. She really outlined, you know, how that happens. Thank you for that. When we're talking about this idea of creating resilience, I think if we start from this acceptance of saying, we are just for the foreseeable future, right?

These are the times that we are living in. And so how can I accept that and then in turn weave in sources of resilience into my life? Empowering yourself for some of us to varying degrees, not everybody feels. Pulled to do this, but for so many of us taking action can be so important, especially with that helpless feeling right?

Because yeah, there is so much that it is so vast and it is beyond our control in so many ways. And yet there are things that we can do. This psychological experience of taking action, I think is one of the best and most important antidotes to helplessness. And then the thing that also can come along with that is connection to community.

So to take action in community is something that I think just creates such a resilience, right? Because we have this ebb and flow of events that are happening. And so When you're in one of the lulls in time where we feel like we have a breather, that community, those are resourcing us and those connections when things are happening that we've got those people.

I know I, you know, my community activism has really, I'm so grateful for it because that when things happen, those are the people that I'm reaching. I have a community of people that we are grieving together. We are connecting together. We are connecting. Getting active together. And again, not everybody is oriented towards activism per se, but thinking about whatever it is that feels true for you.

What are the ways that you might take action? What are the ways that you can build connection and community? Because we started our talk off talking about how this fear we're feeling is a primal fear. We are talking our safety, our security, our well being, physically, emotionally, financially, relationally, like, on every level of what makes us human beings. 

Connection is very often, like we talked about, validation can soothe those fears. Connection, a lot of times, can do the same. It, I think we can all relate to the idea that it feels different to go through pain connected than it does isolated. The community can be very supportive, especially if it's the right people.

Being around some like minded people. I just wanted to thank everybody for experiencing this with us. It could have been just Brice and I, which usually it is. This is the first time Brice and I have done a live recording. Brice, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit more about who you are, how people can get a hold of you, and then anything that you want to promote.

I work as a psychologist. I have a private practice. I do work as an eating disorder specialist. I also have a coaching practice. And in that coaching practice, I work with midlife women who have achieved a lot of success in their careers and yet have been very focused on pursuing external measures of success.

I believe so much that midlife is a time for evaluation of where we are in our lives, what matters to us. And so I love helping midlife women take that time for the personal reflection and then move forward with pivoting or changing their careers, but in a more authentic way. Thank you, Brice, for being on the show for this very important topic and sharing so much of your wisdom.

I really appreciate it.  Thank you so much for having me. This has been so wonderful. I'm so glad everybody was able to come and we could just create community for ourselves tonight, the Aware Mind Podcast is a TSD Mindfulness production. Please check out our show notes for upcoming events and links to additional resources.