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.

Not everything about getting older is bad. In fact, some things get better with age, especially if we work on them. I am going to be incredibly transparent and say that in the past I was not good at treating myself or self-care, as described in the first part of this blog.

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.

In Season 4, episode 4 of Parks and Recreation, Donna (Retta) and Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) created the tradition of “Treat Yo Self” day. In this episode, they can be seen buying themselves whatever they want for a day. After the airing of that episode in 2011 the phrase “treat yo self” gained popularity. In fact, some people (including the actors themselves per a Google search) grew tired of the phrase after some time.

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.

I would love to tell you that as a mental health therapist I have always practiced great self-care and never felt overly stressed or burned out. However, that is not the case. I have experienced seasons of stress and burnout and have had to walk through them and find support just like I am encouraging you to do in this month’s blog.