How to Deal With Stress in a Politically Charged Climate
Sara Mathew, MSC Intern
Part 2: Planning Practically & Emotionally for Uncertain Times
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on navigating political stress while protecting your mental health.
In Part 1, we explored why political stress affects us so deeply and how to find balance between recognizing our concerns and not letting fear control our lives. We talked about the circles of control and distinguishing between catastrophizing and valid concerns. Now, we’re going to move into action. What can you actually do to prepare yourself for navigating life in these uncertain times?
One of the most effective ways to reduce anxiety is to take concrete action. When we feel helpless, doing something practical can help you feel more empowered. But practical steps are only part of your arsenal. Emotional resilience is the armor that protects you through difficult times.
Build Your Arsenal: Plan Practically
Get Your Documents in Order
Depending on your concerns, this might mean organizing important paperwork: immigration documents, birth certificates, medical records, financial information, legal documents. Make copies. Store them securely. Make sure trusted people know where they are.
This isn’t about feeding fear. It’s about being prepared, which can actually help you feel calmer. When you know you’ve done what you can do, you give your brain permission to relax a bit.
Know Your Rights
Educate yourself about your rights. This might mean understanding your workplace rights, your rights in interactions with authorities, your healthcare rights, or your voting rights. As the age-old adage goes, “Knowledge is power,” and understanding what protections you are afforded by the constitution and the laws of the land strengthens your armor.
Build Your Resource List
Identify organizations, hotlines, legal aid services, advocacy groups, or community resources that align with your concerns. You don’t need to memorize them all, but having a list already created for if and when you need support can be incredibly reassuring.
Strengthen Community Connections
One of the most protective factors against stress is community. Who are your people? Who would you call if you needed help? Who shares your values and concerns? Strengthen those connections now. Build your network. Your community is one of your most valuable resources, and you don’t have to face any of this alone.
Build Your Armor: Plan Emotionally
Your arsenal of practical tools is important, but so is your armor. Building emotional resilience isn’t about forcing positivity or pretending things aren’t hard. It’s about developing inner strength and protective resources to get through the difficult times.
Find Your Inner Strength
You are stronger than you think. You’ve survived hard things before. You’ve gotten through difficult days, weathered storms, and kept going even when it was hard. That strength is still in you, in fact it never leaves you.
Take some time to make a list of moments when you’ve been strong. When have you faced something difficult and come through it? When have you advocated for yourself or others? When have you shown courage, even if you were scared? If you’re struggling to identify these moments, ask friends or family members, sometimes others can see our strength more clearly than we can.
Keep this list somewhere you can return to it when you doubt yourself. The best place might be on your phone or a piece of paper in your wallet. You’ve done hard things before. You can do hard things again.
Know Your Grounding Techniques
When something stressful happens (a triggering news story, a difficult conversation, any kind of anxiety spike), you need tools to bring yourself back to the present moment. Have 3-5 grounding techniques ready to use.
Here are a few to consider:
Box Breathing: Breathe in for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts, breathe out for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts. Repeat several times. This signals to your body that it’s safe to relax.
Physical Grounding: Place your feet flat on the floor. Press them down and notice the sensation. Feel the chair or ground supporting you. Touch something with texture like a soft blanket, a rough rock, your pet’s fur.
Butterfly Hug: Cross your arms over your chest and alternate tapping your shoulders. This bilateral stimulation is calming and is often used in trauma therapy.
Icing/Cold Water: Hold an ice cube in your hand, splash cold water on your face, or take a cold shower. The temperature shock interrupts your nervous system and brings you into the present.
The key is to practice these when you’re not in crisis, so they’re available to you when you need them most.
Create a Hope Box
In difficult times, it’s easy to lose sight of goodness, beauty, and reasons for hope. Create a folder (physical or digital) where you collect things that remind you of what you’re fighting for and what makes life meaningful. Photos of loved ones, quotes that lift you up, moments of joy, acts of kindness you’ve witnessed. Come back to this when you need a reminder that there is still good in the world.
Engage Sustainably
You don’t have to be “on” all the time. You don’t have to talk about politics every day. You don’t have to attend every protest, sign every petition, or read every article. Sustainable engagement means finding the level and type of involvement that allows you to contribute to the causes you care about without burning out.
Different Types of Engagement
There are many ways to be involved:
- Voting and encouraging others to vote
- Volunteering for organizations or causes you care about
- Donating money to support important work
- Having conversations with people in your life
- Creating art, writing, or content that reflects your values
- Supporting businesses and organizations aligned with your beliefs
- Showing up with kindness in your daily life
None of these is better than the others and some days you might be motivated to do three and some days you can’t do any. Choose what feels right for where you are right now.
Permission to Have Boundaries
You are allowed to say, “I can’t talk about this right now.” You are allowed to skip the family argument. You are allowed to turn off the news. You are allowed to not engage with every social media debate. Setting boundaries around political discussions doesn’t make you a bad person or uninformed. Quite the opposite. It makes you someone who understands that you can’t pour from an empty cup.
Recognizing When Activism Harms Your Mental Health
Take notice of how different types of engagement affect you. Does attending events energize you or drain you? Does reading news make you feel informed or paralyzed? Does debating online give you a sense of purpose or leave you angry and depleted?
There’s no shame in stepping back from activities that harm your mental health, even if you feel like you “should” be doing them. You’re no good to any cause if you’re burned out, anxious, and unable to function. Whatever you choose to do, pace yourself for the long race rather than sprinting until you collapse.
What’s Next
By building both your arsenal of practical tools and your armor of emotional resilience, you’re creating a strong foundation to navigate the hard stuff. You’re acknowledging what you can control, strengthening your toolkit, and finding ways to stay engaged without sacrificing your wellbeing.
In Part 3 of this series, we’ll tackle one of the hardest parts of navigating political stress: relationships. How do you maintain connections across different viewpoints? Should you? When should you set boundaries? We’ll also explore how to protect your nervous system from overstimulation and build long-term resilience for the road ahead.
You’re doing important work by taking care of yourself. Keep going.
Mindful Springs Counseling is a nationwide mental health center specializing in non-traditional therapy services like Brainspotting and Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy and 100% independently owned by Aimee Solis, Founder and Executive Director. Mindful Springs has locations in Colorado, Washington and Illinois.