Even though the election is over, for many, the anxiety that the election sparked and sustained is not going anywhere. According to the American Psychological Association nearly 70% of Americans reported the presidential election of this year was a source of significant stress in their lives. We see it everywhere we look, still, it is hard to limit your content consumption or manage doom scrolling but that is a must.
Arielle Teets
Our lives are a conglomeration of nature and nurture. We learn from our environment, how we are raised, our life experiences, and we adjust. Seligman and Maier in 1967 did a study which identified learned helplessness as a phenomenon in dogs. (Sadly) Psychologists did experiments on dogs and found when they were exposed to repeated shocks that they could not control, the animals abstained from taking action when they could prevent the shocks. This coined the term and theory of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness has been associated with and used as an explanation for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. The main features of learned helplessness are lack of motivation, difficulty learning from success and perceived emotional numbness.
If this is your first election Congratulations on exercising your right to vote! If you are unable to vote, know you can make a difference in your community in other ways.
Election time can be scary. There is a lot of information and statistics thrown at us constantly, a lot of bickering and fact checking and re-fact checking and it can be exhausting to be a media consumer around these times. It can feel dehumanizing to watch the demographic or culture you belong to being critiqued and debated while the world watches. And yes, these people may control legislature, but us lay people create the culture and environment by how we speak, behave, and advocate in our day to day lives and for those around us. This advice from Madison Franz, a Florida Gulf Coast University Student in 2020, gave some great advice for affirmations during and post-election. They stay relevant today in 2024.
Many of us start the day with coffee and it is something that we often don’t think twice about. One cup of regular coffee is about 80 to 100mg of caffeine, depending on your beverage of choice. Espresso is about 75 to 150mg a shot. Cold Brew is around 200mg per 16oz serving. Medical guidelines recommend no more than 400mg of caffeine per day. Of course there are individual differences to this standard, but this recommendation comes with the understanding that anxiety, difficulty sleeping, headaches, migraines, and high blood pressure are all risks of over indulgence in caffeine. Simultaneously, moderate caffeine consumption has many potential positive health benefits such as improving brain function, boosting mood, increasing metabolism, lowering risk of stroke, heart disease, and liver damage, as well as boosting beneficial gut bacteria.
“I like to conceptualize triggers as landmines; we didn’t put them there and neither did the immediate circumstance that put you into this triggered state,” says Harlich. “When one gets stepped on, often nobody sees it coming, nor may anyone even know what landmine was stepped on.”
[Rachel Harlich is a psychotherapist specializing in LGBTQ issues.]
NAMI is the national alliance on mental illness. They are the nation’s largest grass roots mental health organization. Taylor Bennet from NAMI wrote an article about how to support and listen and potentially help a friend who expresses feelings of wanting to die. Suicide is heavy. It is not easy to think about and it is not easy to talk about, especially with those you care about. The most important thing to remember is to talk about it. Don’t avoid it, don’t graze over it, don’t try to talk about something else. Listen. Confronting those thoughts out loud with someone who cares for them impacts someone’s ability to get the help they need before reaching a crisis.
