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COPING 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-13
Many people gave their all for the Harris campaign. When Election Day was over, we experienced a lot of different feelings - anger, sadness, panic, fear. We are also experiencing a “need to act” because the current administration is trying to destroy our democracy. It seems impossible to feel the way we feel and mobilize to resist at the same time. We are stressed.
There are two means of coping with stress: emotion-focused coping and problem-focused coping. Both are useful and effective in reducing stress, but the problem-focused approaches are ultimately the most effective since they address the source of stress. Yet, when emotions overwhelm us, it is hard to implement problem-focused coping.
Distraction and Avoidance. Are you doom scrolling on social media? Listening/watching news 24/7? This is certainly a source of your stress, so you need to avoid all the negative information. You can do this by limiting your exposure to it. Set an intention of spending a defined amount of time exposing yourself to the news. Set an alarm and engage with social media and/or the news for, say, 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes early evening (NOT right before bedtime and certainly not in bed). It helps to have a distracting behavior that prevents the behavior you are trying to diminish. Try reading fiction, listening to music, watching a funny movie or TV series for the time you’d usually be consuming news.
Pursue Pleasure. You know yourself enough to have a pretty good idea of what makes you feel better. By that I mean exercise, nutritious food, and adequate sleep. Does it have to be a complete overhaul of your current habits? No, because that is stressful! Take a walk or do a brief (10 minute) low impact yoga routine. Add a salad to your meals or substitute fruit for one snack. Turn all lights off and do not engage in daytime activities while in bed before sleep (video games, scrolling on the phone, etc.). If you can, discover the amount of sleep you really need by not setting an alarm on a weekday you do not have to get up. Do it again on a weekend day and see how many hours you sleep without an alarm. Try to accomplish this most nights by going to bed earlier or getting up a little later (or some of both). Pleasure is also gained by activities you enjoy. Did you stop doing them? Pick them back up again.
Problem-focused coping is directly addressing the source of your stress. You think you are attempting to do that with all the resistance activities you are getting involved in and it is overwhelming, so you are stressed. Instead of dividing your energy into a multitude of actions that stretch you so thin, you feel like you are going to collapse, conduct an audit. Identify what your talents, treasures and time allow. What talents do you have? What part of the resistance needs those skills the most? For example, are you a sales person? That translates very well into fund-raising skills that many local groups need. As for treasures - do you have any disposable income? You can set up a monthly donation to a group that reflects your values. Even five dollars a month matters. What amount of time (realistically) can you give to ONE effort that you identify as most important – DO that one thing, knowing that literally thousands of people are doing all the other things.
The most effective coping strategy in all situations is monitoring your self-talk. Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, identified four basic cognitive habits that lead to distress. He offers rational comebacks you can adopt to combat them.
MUSTurbation – rigid thinking that is either/or, black/white and demanding. This type of thinking leads to panic. You can recognize it when your thoughts contain words like ‘must,’ ‘should,’ ‘ought,’ ‘have/need to,’ ‘never,’ ‘always.’ Example, “I need to phone my congressman every day.” And “Trump should not have won the election!” How do you feel when you say things like that to yourself? Not good, right? It is more accurate to say “It would be helpful to set a plan to phone my congressman on a regular basis” and “Why shouldn’t he have won? Data show it was a free and fair election, so he won. No need to belabor that point, how does it help?”
AWFULizing (Catastrophizing) – is exaggerating the negativity of a situation. This type of thinking feeds anxiety. Words that signal you are doing it are ‘awful.’ ‘horrible,’ ‘disastrous,’ ‘catastrophic.’ Watch how you are describing current events to yourself (and others – stress is contagious!). You might argue that what is happening is all these things, but wait – things can always get worse and if you are using these descriptors now, how realistic are you being? And how are these words helping the situation? They are not. Ratchet back or avoid describing the “level of bad” entirely and reframe your thinking to “it could be better” which can bolster your confidence to act on the ONE effort you have targeted for your energy in your audit.
“I-Can’t-Stand-It-Itis” – is constantly underestimating your ability to cope. It is detected by thinking ‘I can’t stand it,’ ‘I can’t do this.’ ‘I just can’t.’ Well, of course you can, you are doing it right now! You have ample evidence of your ability to cope – you got through life this far and you have ‘stood it.’ I quote Stuart Smalley (Al Franken’s character from SNL) “I am good enough, I am smart enough and, darn it, people like me” – which also makes me smile (a pleasurable behavior that is available anywhere any time).
SHIThood – chronic negative self-evaluation. You believe that you are a bad person because you are not saving our democracy 24/7 and you are failing. This cognitive distortion is often based on the demandingness distortion. You are setting impossible demands - you are “shoulding” on yourself - and so, of course, you are failing. The Smalley quote comes in handy here too! AS does saying something like: “What I am doing is enough. Results take time, and the problems facing our country take more than one person to deal with them. It is not all on me.”
A lot of research shows that our emotions are caused by what we are thinking. Always turn to your thoughts when you are having a negative feeling and chances are they are of the variety I just described.
Resources:
This is a pdf of more types of distorted thinking that causes distress and the rational comebacks you can use to combat them:
https://counseling.humboldt.edu/sites/default/files/counseling/packet_for_dadt_cognitive_distortions.pdf
Ellis’ model of what causes distress and how to address it – a page to hang somewhere as a reminder of what is happening and how to respond:
https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheet/abc-model-for-rebt
Holiday is a licensed Counseling Psychologist who taught stress management skills to college students. She is a Team Lead for the Endorser Research Team for BlueVoterGuide.
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