Tips to Beat Election Anxiety, with Dr. Arthur C. Brooks

(air hissing) (button clicking) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music continues) (light music) Hey, friends, welcome to "Radio Headspace" and Tuesday morning. I'm your guest host for the week, Arthur C. Brooks. So as you know, it's election time, and you probably have a little bit of anxiety about that. I don't blame you. Between the news cycle, social media, preparing for your family dinners during the holidays, well, it can be tough. Today, I want to address these deep-seated feelings of anxiety that can emerge during election season. While we can't just get rid of all of our election anxiety, there are some things we can do to calm things down before and after we had to the ballot box. Let's talk about that. (light music continues) During ordinary times, during healthier times, perhaps, most people wouldn't be thinking that much about elections, but we live in a time where social media and ordinary media are surrounding us. And we're getting delivered to us, like, with a hypodermic needle, information and messages from politicians and people around politicians and activists and everybody else saying, "Look, this might be the last democratic election we ever have. This is the most important election of our time." We've heard it all. The truth of the matter is that we live in a hyper-partisan, polarized environment that's so filled with news and information that we can't escape the messages. And the result of that is, well, you're only human and you're gonna start to process that kind of alarm, that kind of panic that they're trying to elicit in you. They're successful is the bottom line, and the strategy we need to start to adopt is to fight back, to fight back against the panic that people want us to feel. Now, I'm not saying don't be concerned about politics. It's perfectly natural and it's a good thing to do. But we don't want it to wreck our lives, so we need to understand how to manage our happiness, even when other people, well, they'd just as soon we be unhappy, because that makes us better fodder for political battles. (light music continues) As a younger man, I have to say, I cared more about politics than I do now. I remember feeling really angry, and at one point, not being able to sleep. Now again, I'm a social scientist, so I was a younger scholar at that particular time. But I wasn't studying this. I wasn't looking as much at happiness as I currently do, and I certainly wasn't looking at happiness in the context of elections. Well, I remember one night, I had a pretty sleepless night about what was gonna happen in an election. About three o'clock in the morning I realized, I'm being manipulated. And that is the reason I turned to studying what I'm studying right here. I'm dedicating myself to trying to be a happier person through the election season, and I want you to be a happier...