It’s the day after Election Day, and people across the board are dealing with the results. Staying centered is both an imperative and a tall order, but experts are here to help, with some pro tips.
Regardless of whether one is celebrating or mourning in the wake of Tuesday’s election results, the biological effect on the body is the same, said Dr. Daniel Kirsch, president of The American Institute of Stress.
“Stress is our reaction to change,” he told the Daily News by phone. “We qualify this event as a stressful event. For everyone. Everyone.”
Both types of stress, good or bad, “can cause a heart attack,” he noted.
Here’s what you can do to take care of your stress levels:
Breathe
Mindfulness teachers and medical experts concur that simply stopping to catch one’s breath is a key starting point.
“Deep breathing is one of the best tools to fight stress. It’s free, and it’s always available,” Kirsch said.
Centering oneself around the breath is a way to combat the tendency to catastrophize, meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg told the Daily News.
“For people who are really, especially sharply distressed, we’re in fight or flight, we’re not breathing,” which makes it crucial to “just to be able to center for a moment,” she said. “Our thoughts cascade — this is going to happen, that is going to happen — and if we take a few breaths, we actually center again in this moment, we ground, and then we can deal with what is happening.”
Get physical
Physical activity is also very grounding, helping to use up the energy generated by stress, Kirsch noted. It sends your body the message that you’re not under physical threat. Exercising, dancing, singing, whatever it takes.
“Do something physical. Immediately,” he said. “This helps signal to your body that you are utilizing what it’s giving you. It’s giving you energy to move, it’s giving you clarity of thought.”
Stay with difficult emotions
“There are very powerful emotions arising for many people — sadness, fear, grieving, helplessness — and instead of reflexively pushing the feelings away or getting swamped by them, we try to recognize them,” Salzberg said. “Then instead of being carried away, we’re watching it with interest, and that brings insight or understanding.”
Don’t catastrophize
“The key part of mindfulness is noticing the difference between what’s happening and what we’re adding to what’s happening,” Salzberg said. “We’re having these really painful feelings and we need to deal with them, but we don’t need to make them worse.”
Take a break and stop doom-scrolling
Many have been obsessively following media in the months, weeks and days leading up to the election. Now is a good time to step back, the experts said.
“To charge your phone you have to plug it in,” Kirsch said. “To charge your brain you have to unplug.”
Do something you enjoy
Listen to music, appreciate some art, read a book, spend time outdoors — and don’t feel guilty doing something enjoyable, Salzberg said. “It’s not wrong, it’s not selfish, it’s a survival guide, really,” she said.
Connect with others
Likewise, connecting with others is helpful, “not to catastrophize together, but to have some way of not feeling so isolated,” Salzberg said.
That can include touching base with people you disagree with, psychologist Tania Israel told CNN.
Seek perspective
Essayist Rebecca Solnit had this advice for the day-to-day:
“You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward,” she wrote. “Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the 10 trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
