How to Deal With Stress in a Politically Charged Climate
Sara Mathew, MSC Intern
Part 3: Protecting Your Mental Health & Building Long-term Resilience
This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on navigating political stress while protecting your mental health.
In Parts 1 and 2, we explored understanding political stress, finding balance between acknowledgment and control, and preparing yourself both practically and emotionally for uncertain times. Now we’re going to address maybe the hardest parts: navigating tricky relationships across political divides, protecting yourself from constant overstimulation, and building resilience that lasts.
Navigate Relationships and Different Perspectives
One of the most painful parts of politically charged times is watching relationships become strained or broken over political differences. How do you navigate this while protecting your wellbeing?
Understanding Different Views
We all come from different backgrounds, ethnicities, experiences, family systems, and communities. These shape our worldviews, our values, and our politics. It’s natural, inevitable, even, that people will have different perspectives. Sometimes, hearing different perspectives can expand our understanding or challenge us to think differently. You don’t have to agree with someone to understand where they’re coming from.
When Differences Are Just Differences
Some political disagreements are genuinely about different opinions on complex issues. You might disagree about tax policy, infrastructure spending, foreign policy approaches, or the role of government. These are areas where reasonable people can disagree, and it’s possible to maintain respectful relationships across these divides.
If you can engage with these differences with curiosity rather than defensiveness, you might learn something. At minimum, you can practice coexisting with people who see the world differently than you.
When Differences Reflect Fundamental Values or Safety
But some political differences aren’t just differences of opinion. When someone’s political views threaten your safety, your identity, your fundamental rights, or your humanity, well that’s a whole different story. When political views reflect beliefs that dehumanize you or communities you care about, you are not obligated to maintain those relationships. Let me repeat. You are NOT obligated to engage.
What feels like “just politics” to one person might feel like “my right to exist” to another. Ultimately though, impact matters more than intent. Even if someone doesn’t mean harm, if their views cause harm to you or make you feel fundamentally unsafe, you setting boundaries is entirely valid.
You get to decide what feels safe for you. No one else can tell you where your boundaries should be. When someone’s political views support policies that could harm vulnerable populations, it’s reasonable to reassess that relationship. You can recognize both the good and bad in people while still choosing how (or if) you engage with them.
Respect vs. Agreement
You can disagree with someone respectfully. You can maintain civility even with people whose views you find troubling. But respect doesn’t mean you have to spend your time and energy with them. It doesn’t mean you have to explain yourself repeatedly or try to change their mind. Sometimes the most respectful thing you can do is put distance between you.
Violence, whether it be threats, aggression, or dehumanization, crosses a line. And you never have to tolerate that.
Protect Your Nervous System From Overstimulation
Our minds were not designed to process the sheer volume of information (and trauma) that we encounter on a daily basis. Every time you open social media, you might encounter stories of injustice, violence, suffering, and crisis from around the world. While staying informed is important, constant exposure to distressing information overwhelms your nervous system.
The Problem With Doomscrolling
There’s a difference between staying informed and doomscrolling. Staying informed means intentionally seeking out news from reliable sources at specific times. Doomscrolling means compulsively refreshing your feeds, reading every upsetting post, and letting the algorithm feed you an endless, highly curated, stream of outrage and fear.
Doomscrolling doesn’t make you more informed. It probably makes you more anxious. Often our bodies can’t tell the difference between reading about a crisis and experiencing it directly. Each distressing story activates your stress response, and over time, this chronic activation takes a serious toll.
Set Social Media Boundaries
Consider some strategies to reduce the secondary trauma:
- Use app timers to limit your daily usage
- Curate your own feed. Unfollow accounts that consistently upset you, even if you agree with them
- Take regular social media breaks (a day, a weekend, a week)
- Follow accounts that provide joy, beauty, or humor instead of the heavy content
Spend Time in Nature and Disconnect
Nature is one of the most powerful regulators of our nervous systems. Time outdoors, even just a walk around your neighborhood, can lower cortisol, reduce anxiety, and help you feel more grounded. If you can, spend time somewhere without your phone, where you can’t be reached, where you can just be.
Disconnecting isn’t escapism. It’s necessary. You can’t stay engaged with difficult realities without also giving yourself time to rest and restore.
Process What You See With a Therapist
When you’re constantly exposed to distressing information, you need somewhere to process it. Talking with a therapist isn’t simple venting but rather it’s helping your brain understand these experiences, make sense of your reactions, and develop healthy coping strategies.
A therapist can help you decipher between helpful concern and unhelpful rumination, process feelings of grief, anger, or helplessness, develop personalized coping strategies, work through relationship conflicts, and help you build resilience.
Build Long-Term Resilience
Political stress isn’t going away anytime soon. This means we need to think about sustainability. How do you maintain your mental health not just for the next week or month, but past that?
It’s Okay to Not Be Okay
Let’s be clear: resilience doesn’t mean forcing yourself to be happy every day. It doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine when it’s not. It doesn’t mean toxic positivity. You’re allowed to be not okay. You’re allowed to have hard days. You’re allowed to grieve, to be angry, to feel scared.
Resilience is about being able to feel those feelings without being destroyed by them. It’s about having the support, tools, and inner resources to keep going even when things are hard.
Give Yourself Permission for Joy
Even when things feel heavy, you’re allowed to experience joy. You’re allowed to laugh with friends, enjoy your favorite meal, watch a funny movie, play with your kids or pets. Experiencing moments of joy isn’t betraying anyone or ignoring serious issues. It’s refilling necessary fuel. You can’t sustain your engagement with difficult realities if you never let yourself feel good.
Build Rituals and Routines That Anchor You
In uncertain times, routines can be grounding. What helps you feel stable? Maybe it’s a morning walk, a weekly dinner with friends, a creative outlet, a meditation routine, or simply the ritual of a cup of coffee each morning. These small, consistent practices anchor you when everything around you feels chaotic.
You Don’t Have to Do This Alone
Navigating stress in a politically charged climate is genuinely difficult. It requires balancing awareness with self-protection, engagement with sustainability, and hope with realism. That’s a lot to manage on your own.
If you’re struggling, if the anxiety feels overwhelming, if you’re having trouble sleeping, if you’re withdrawing from things you used to enjoy, if you’re feeling hopeless, please consider reaching out to a therapist. Therapy isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s another tool for building strength. It’s a space where you can process your fears, learn about stressors and develop coping strategies.
Political stress is real. Your feelings are valid. And there are ways to navigate this that allow you to stay engaged without sacrificing your mental health. You deserve support. You deserve to take care of yourself. And you deserve to build a life that includes both awareness of hard realities and space for peace, joy, and hope.
Take it one day at a time. Be gentle with yourself. And remember: you’re stronger than you think.
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.