Managing Post-Election Blues, with Dr. Arthur C. Brooks

(screen hissing) (mouse clicking) (bright music) Headspace Studios. (bright music) (gentle music) Hey, friends. Welcome to Radio Headspace and Wednesday morning. I'm your guest host for the week, Arthur C. Brooks. Well, this week, we've been talking about how to maintain happiness during an election cycle, and a crucial aspect of this is post-election blues. I think in the last few election cycles, we've all experienced some post-election results that were pretty surprising and not so happy, no matter where you sit on the partisan spectrum. It's normal to feel a sense of shock or sadness in the aftermath of an election that didn't go your way. Over the past 20 years, there's been a big increase in the intensity of how elections affect people psychologically, and there's a lot of reasons for that. We're not just delicate flowers. We're bombarded. There's all sorts of ways for media, traditional media, and social media, and politicians, and companies to inject messages into your consciousness. One of the things that we've started to identify in the mental health profession is something called post-election stress disorder. This is when there's a lot of attention to an election. It feels like the stakes are really high, and then it doesn't go your way. It's a new designation. Believe it or not, there are people who are specializing in treating post-election stress disorder with all sorts of traditional and non-traditional therapies. Now, if you don't believe that it's a real problem for your happiness, there's a pretty interesting study that went back to the 2012 presidential election between President Barack Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney. That might seem like a small election by today's standards, but it was a pretty big deal to a lot of people, and what they found is that people for whom the election went in the wrong way, 60% the day before the election said that they were happy. The day after, 30% said that they were happy. You might be thinking, "Okay, but the winners, they win a lot, "and so it kind of balances out at a societal level." Not so much. It turns out that the people who won, or the people whose side won in 2012, the Obama voters, they weren't happier after the election than they were the day before the election. So what we have is kind of a net loss with these elections, and we're likely to see the same kind of thing today. We need to take care of our happiness because a lot of people are going to be experiencing a lot of post-election blues. So how do you deal with that? I have five recommendations that are tested by science to make the day after an election that didn't go your way better. Number one, one of the things that human beings are uniquely capable of doing, it's an incredible cognitive feat, is counterfactual reasoning. It's a kind of rumination where we imagine the past being different, and thinking...