In this episode of What the Health, John Salak welcomes Dr. Mary McNaughton-Cassill to explore the rising levels of political stress in the wake of the current U.S. election cycle. The discussion covers how 24-hour news cycles, social media and performance politics contribute to heightened anxiety and stress. Dr. McNaughton-Cassill provides historical context, noting how media evolution has intensified public stress, and explains psychological tendencies to focus on negative news. 

The episode delves into the media's influence on negativity and the loss of public trust, particularly among young people facing rapid technological and societal changes. Practical strategies for managing political stress are shared, such as moderating news intake, engaging with different perspectives and utilizing the ACT formula—Accept Reality, Create Vision and Take Action. The episode also promotes resilience and optimism, encouraging critical thinking and local activism.

00:00 Introduction: The Political Stress Epidemic

01:05 The Impact of Media on Political Stress

01:47 Expert Insights: Dr. Mary McNaughton-Cassill

03:08 Historical Context of Political Stress

04:36 The Role of 24-Hour News Cycles

08:53 Psychological Factors and Media Influence

14:16 Generational Differences in Political Stress

20:44 Coping with Modern Stressors

26:22 Adapting Political Strategies in a Polarized World

27:09 The Role of Education in Understanding Polarization

28:06 Terror Management Theory and Fear in Politics

29:42 The Physical Impact of Political Stress

32:10 Managing News Intake to Reduce Stress

33:54 Couples Therapy Approach to Political Discourse

38:33 The ACT Formula for Stress Management

40:24 Optimism and Resilience in Political Uncertainty

42:23 Concluding Thoughts on Political Stress

45:05 Final Remarks and Resources

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Give Way: Coping with Social Stress in the Connected World (Book): https://amzn.to/3BRb0vl

EP42 - Transcript

Let's face it, it's an understatement to say things are a little tense over politics in the U. S. It's been tense for a while, but with the presidential election at hand, tension, anxiety, rage, and a lot more are at a boiling point. This sort of tension isn't only a threat to our democracy, it's a threat to our personal health.

Heck, almost three quarters of Americans report they are stressed and anxious about the upcoming election. And stress is never a good thing from a personal health standpoint. Unfortunately, with today's 24 hour news cycles, the advent of ever present social media streams, and the rise in performance politics, it's pretty hard to escape the tribal trumbeats that exacerbate all this personal tension.

And I suspect this is especially true for younger people who probably find it hard to find heroes in today's exposed world. So, does this mean we're all doomed to excessive and unhealthy levels of political stress? Are our options limited to moving out of the country or going completely off the grid?

Perhaps not. There may be alternatives to these political stress baths. What the Health, thankfully, has lined up an authority on political stress to explain why it occurs and how we can all lessen our anxiety levels and still be good citizens.

So, welcome to what we always think is the best part of What the Health, when we get to speak with somebody at length who knows a heck of a lot more about the topics we're exploring. And today's topic is whether political stress is real and its impact. And we have the great pleasure of, having Dr. Mary McNaughton-Cassill of the University of Texas at San Antonio so Dr. McNaughton or Dr. M. C. as your students call you, welcome to our podcast.

Hello, good to be here.

Okay. I want to preface this by saying we're recording this on the morning of the first Harris Trump debate. Which obviously has gotten tremendous news coverage, as well it should, in a democracy or a republic.

And there's been a lot written about stress or at least the political turmoil that may be ravaging the country right now. But since this is your bailiwick, you've written a great deal about stress and its impact and, It's causes. So is it fair to say that Americans are suffering under political stress or suffering from stress from the elections and the political climate?

I believe so. Recent polls are suggesting as many as 72 percent of Americans report that they're feeling stressed or anxious about this election, and I think that there are a lot of reasons contributing to that, which we can talk about, but a huge piece of it is just that we know so much today because of the way the media and social media work, so we are aware of a lot of things that probably in past elections just weren't public knowledge.

Would you say? And given that sort of setup, I'm assuming you're saying that the stress levels are higher than usual or higher than they would have been in previous elections.

You know, that's interesting. And I saw a quote that said, well, this is the highest stress has been since the Vietnam era. But the truth is we didn't collect data. I would presume that the Civil War was far more stressful. They were actually fighting and families were split and shooting at each other.

I would presume that other times have been fraught, but we didn't know what people thought. Before the era of TV podcasts. I mean, when you look back, people got their news through a newspaper. Sometimes it was slow. Sometimes it was late. A lot of people didn't read. If you look at the revolution, they even say that, quite a few Americans weren't really aware of much of what was going on because they lived in isolated places and weren't getting the feed that we get.

And what I talk to my students about, and this is interesting because you and I clearly remember a time before 24 7 news coverage. There was the nightly evening news and it was packaged and you watched it and then maybe you got the newspaper. And I remember when, Ted Turner said, Oh, I'm going to start a 24 hour news station and people thought it would be a huge failure.

They didn't think there was an interest. So younger people today think it's always been that way, but this constant flow of information really isn't the way humans throughout life have processed the world. Usually you knew what was happening around you and you weren't particularly engaged in stuff that was happening far away from you.

And today that is off the table. We see it all.

You know, what's, I find fascinating about the 24 hour news cycle as an old journalist is there doesn't seem to be enough news to fill a 24 hour news cycle. But what they've substituted in those news cycles really are talking heads who are just regenerating, the news cycle.

And I do watch a lot of this, whether it's, M-S-N-B-C or Fox or CNN. It's really one panel after another with a new host that's just going over the same topic over and over again, whether they try and balance that topic or not. I think that's one of the greater impacts of the 24 hour news cycle.

I don't know if you agree with that, but it's certainly a different type of news too.

I definitely do. And it's blurred the line between news and opinion because you're the journalist, but my take on it is sort of the acting thought for most journalists is you want to get to the truth and you want to present it in an unbiased way. But now a lot of what we watch is really individuals opinions about things and they are biased.

And the other problem is, We can self select. We can watch the channel that is saying what we already want to hear

hmm. Mm

that's part of the issue, too.

hmm. It's interesting. Just as an aside, we talk about news and the impact of what it's done for us or the information flow. And certainly technology has, expedited that information flow. When Kennedy was assassinated, I read that information got around the world within two hours because technology allowed it to. You can watch the news and nothing's really happening, but you're just staring at the TV hoping something, new is going to come on.

I remember that with the Kennedy assassination with, other assassinations, with other crisis points. But then you look at things like, and talk about impact of news. You look at things like the D-Day landings. People knew that was coming, and it was a great stress in America, and then they waited to see the ticker at Times Square roll at the landings that started, and then people, many rushed to churches to pray and whatnot, but as you said, it didn't have that impact, and you weren't getting as many opinions.

So we have that as a factor. That's, that's bashing us. What are the other factors that are sort of contributing to this? Or do you think that's just it? There's just more news. Is there a different political climate?

I think that is a huge piece and it's interesting to look at the impact of the news and stress across time. like I also go back to when President Kennedy got shot. That was important because we had television and people could see it. I don't know how long it took for the news of President Lincoln being assassinated, but it probably was days and weeks in some places, I mean, we have Evidence of battles that happened after wars ended because people hadn't heard it yet.

So, there's an immediacy and in the communications literature, there's some interesting studies that, like tracking World War II, we had the radio commentators on site. By Vietnam, we had TV. Now, everyone has a cell phone and that's increased the immediacy of it. And it also means that it's much harder to censor it.

In World War Two, they censored the letters that people sent back. So people in the US didn't necessarily know how horrible things were or what was going on, even if they were hearing from a family member who was there. So it was a different kind of controlled information. But here's where the psych part comes in.

We are wired to look for negative things. We need to watch for danger. We need to remember danger. If the green berries made us sick, we don't want to eat the green berries. If it smelled a certain way before the tiger came, we want to remember that. So we are still viewing news information as a way to protect ourselves and our world.

And the news media knows that, they don't say there was a robbery at an ATM and give the address and say it happened at night. They say, citizen robbed at the ATM, join us at 11 and then we all have to watch because we want to know if it was somewhere we go, a time we go, if it affects us.

So we watch that stuff and we remember the negative stuff better than the positives. And there have been all kinds of psych lab research to show that. There's studies, you give people 20 at the beginning of the study and you rig it. So some of them get to keep it and some of them lose it. And later you ask them what they remember and the people who lost the 20 that wasn't theirs in the first place remember it more than the people who got the 20 that wasn't theirs in the first place.

So I think that's part of just how we're wired because we evolved in a world with lots of immediate threats. Threats today are different because they're not necessarily immediate. A lot of them are far away from us where there's nothing we can do about it anyway. But that doesn't keep us from incorporating it into this world view. That things are terrible, getting worse, scarier. And that would be the next factor I'd say is if you ask people, say about crime, they're all going to tell you we've never had more crime.

If you look at the FBI stats, most cities are safer than they've ever been. You ask people about health and they'll tell you how horrible cancer is and COVID and the next virus and then you say but we're living longer than people have ever lived in the history of the world and that's not what we're registering.

We're registering the threats because that's what we're predisposed to pay attention to.

Do you think the news media, will report dangerous news than positive news first, on a scale, and we were taught that in journalism college as well. Do you think that's exacerbating the inherent, move that people have towards negative news, or it's just feeding it, or it doesn't really matter, or the news media is smart enough to know people are going to read negative news first. Is that reinforcing it, or is it just our nature, and we're just responding?

Kind of a vicious cycle. Again, I've at one point I was looking at how news media sources are funded and in the age of Walter Cronkite, they didn't really have to make a profit off the one hour nightly news. It was kind of viewed as a public service,

Mm

but now your local news is competing with the national news, the reality shows, all the other things.

And so they've had to up the ante on sensationalism because they want us to pay attention. So they'll get the ad revenue so they can. Stay alive, but it isn't even just the news. It's also social media, which I am overall a fan of social media and the internet, because it's given us all a voice. It used to be if you watched a news show, you could tell your family your opinions.

You, maybe you could write a letter to the editor, but now you can actually express yourself. But that has also amplified things the same way you said with the talking heads. Now everyone's got an opinion, and the larger problem today is not that. How do I get information? It's how do I judge the truth of this information?

How do I know what's real and what's not?

Do you think politicians have capitalizes this sort of fear in terms of the political environment, the culture, the milieu, or is that just always been there?

I think the human tendency has always been there. And you look back, there's a book that's really strange. If you can find it, it's called the hater's handbook. It was published in 1965, but what the author did is he collected negative comments made about politicians. And celebrities going all the way back to the 1700s.

And you read them and people were just as vicious. They said mean things in both directions. But they didn't get replayed at the top of the hour 24 hours a day. And, there is sort of a salience and a proximity. So today we hear it a lot more. It gets amplified. So if think about FDR.

He used to go around the country on a train, right? And give talks from the back car. So people might hear him once if they ever heard him in person or saw it in the news. But now today we are all seeing clips of everything they say everywhere. And I think politicians are using that to their advantage because it's a new game.

Right. It was almost described as performance politics. where someone wants to demonstrate. I don't want to say more than act, but I suspect that's often the case with a number of politicians, certainly not all of them. And we can think of a number who probably have done that on both sides of the political spectrum because the platforms are there to demonstrate their performances more readily, as you said, that in the past. Do you think, given that social media is having such an impact that younger people are more affected by political stress?

Well, I'm teaching at University of Texas at San Antonio, which is part of the UT system. We have 34, 000 students here. So I am seeing a lot of young people all the time and we're kind of a classic urban University, here in San Antonio, maybe 65 percent of our students are Hispanic. A lot of them are the first person in their family to go to school. And, I teach about stress, and I teach a lot, so the people who take my classes are interested, but I would definitely agree that young people are stressed.

Whether they are more stressed than we were, I'm not sure, because one of the differences is they just express it more, they talk about it. Everything from being depressed and anxious to being stressed is something they don't have any stigma about saying when, many generations before them didn't, but also they have no memory.

Of a world that wasn't filled with this negative news all the time.

Mm-Hmm.

And when you look back, people idolized Kennedy, FDR, people that really had dark sides we didn't see in the news. You could make them a hero because the news wasn't reporting about their affairs or the backroom deals they cut or any of those other things.

So the kids today have a really, really hard time finding a hero. Anyone that they can feel like they trust, who's honest. And I had a student who did a survey on that. When she asked them who they looked up to, public figures weren't heroes anymore. It was people they knew.

It was a coach. It was a teacher. It was a grandparent. Because those were people where they felt confident that this person is who they are. That they're not, faking it. So I think they have a crisis of confidence, but we all do. If you look at surveys, just how much do you trust politicians?

How much do you trust companies? How much do you trust professors? It has gone downhill since the sixties. We look at everybody with this cynicism. And,, you didn't directly ask this, but I'll say it, there's a rising rates of depression and anxiety among young people, and they've gone up tremendously and we often blame it on COVID, but it was happening well before COVID and many people, especially older people.

I talked to just want to frame it as, well, these kids are weak. They're soft. They don't know how to cope. And I think that's a real disservice. I think we, as adults. grew up in a time where maybe your beliefs were more stable because you didn't have as much competing input for them. But we've gotten negative about the world and we have a couple generations of kids now who've only heard us complaining about it.

So why are we surprised that they say, well, the future looks bad. My dad said it's bad. My grandfather's not happy. We haven't modeled any kind of. optimism about the future. I think there are pockets of places, like when you look at millennials in the literature, they talk about them as the age group that volunteers the most.

These are kids that volunteer for every activity we have going.

Mm-Hmm.

And the Gen Z, the latest generation, these are kids who've really embraced activism and standing up for their Beliefs and, and I hope that's a trend towards them getting away from saying the media tells me it's all hopeless and there's nothing I can do, so I'm going to ignore it and saying, well, maybe I can do something in a small way.

Which is part of what I recommend for coping with stress, but the short answer to that question is, I do think young people are stressed, but I think it's a response to the environment we've put them in, as opposed to anything different about their abilities to cope.

Certainly, they're stressed. 31 year old daughter who's stressed and politically aware and whatnot. Are there other demographics you see that are particularly stressed, or are you saying the stress level may manifest itself differently to different groups, but everybody's equally stressed? Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Think we're all stressed, and I think that this is an experiment that's never been done before. Up until 100 years ago life hadn't changed that much. You walked, you worked, then we got electricity, radio, TV, the internet. It has changed so much faster than our brains can adapt. And the amazing thing is that we're coping at all.

I mean, think about driving. Throughout human history, people could go as fast as you could walk, ride a horse, or go by the wind. Suddenly, we're driving 70 miles an hour, talking on the phone, switching lanes. Our brain shouldn't be able to do that. It never evolved to do that. So it's made a tremendous, accommodation to this new task, but it takes energy.

And I think tracking this much information takes energy. Just the details, like, I laughed, my daughters, I have twins, they're 31. They're still young to us, right? But I can hear them to the 20 year olds I see, but When I went to college, I did not study for the. SAT, we just went and took it in the gym 1 day and then I went to college and you enrolled in person walking around.

Looking at the numbers on the boards. is so hard to be a college student today. You have to start studying for the SAT in ninth grade. By 10th grade, you're talking about where you're gonna go. Think about how frustrated you get trying to get through online to a company to change an order, and these kids are having to mess with that to file their financial stuff, to register every semester.

Like, just the sheer, number of demands and deadlines have gone up. And I remember I said this, my parents are both still alive. They're in their nineties. And during COVID, when you had to sign up for the vaccination online, they didn't know how to do that. So my sister did it for them and they kept saying, well, this is ridiculous.

Why do we have to do that? And I said, because young people in the world today have to do this every day for everything they want to do. And that's part of why they're so stressed.

So, how do we begin to deal with stress or recognize it? Is it different for someone my age to deal with stress than my daughter, than somebody just coming out of college?

Part of it is awareness, recognizing when you're stressed, and sometimes we don't. I have a small private practice, and people will come to me for therapy and tell me they're depressed, and when we get to talking, I say, well, of course you're stressed, and they're looking at me like, well, I'm not stressed, I just can't sleep at night, or I just feel sad. you know?

They're not connecting the pieces. That's part of it.

hmm. Yeah.

I think our expectations are different, and this I'll bring it back to politics, but when you think about the history of human life, people weren't primarily focused on happiness, they were focused on survival and getting by. We have the luxury in the Western world.

First world kind of problems to actually even think about whether we're happy whether we like our job you know a comparison I'll make my dad is from northern Maine even further up than you are and my grandmother worked as a maid and she cooked in hunting camps and she did hard work and she never complained But you know how she defined a good job.

They pay you regularly Today I'm talking to college kids who are telling me what their minimum salary has to be when they get out, and there has to be a path upward, and they need a pension, and they need stock options, our expectations for what is going to make us happy. Have been incredibly influenced by TV and the Internet and that ties us right back to the politics because , when you listen, and as you said, both sides are trying to get our attention in a landscape of tons of competing.

Things so they're trying to tie their things to us and so that they're not saying I'll change this economic policy They're saying I'll change this economic policy and here's how it will directly impact you which we then hear as This is going to make it easier or harder for me to buy a house Is this going to make it easier or harder for me to get a job?

So we have high expectations and then we're looking around at the political and economic sphere to see how they're going to threaten what we want, and that makes it hard.

Do you see this changing at all? What's going to happen in 10 years? Are people going to be sitting there babbling to themselves because they've fried out?

I don't

now.

Yeah, I don't think so. I am so much more optimistic than many of my peers, and maybe it's because I work around a lot of young people, but at the same time that they're struggling and stressed, they're also doing incredible things for themselves and their research for each other. I look around, and in Texas, I know people who are on the far right and on the far left, and they're all nice people.

They would all do something kind for you if your car broke down in front of them. I think we've exaggerated the polarization of we think of those people on the other side are horrible and that's making me crazy. But if you meet someone in person and interact with them, we're a lot more alike than we're not.

And I also think humans are very resilient. I mean, think about COVID. There've been pandemics before, but this one was unique. It was the entire world. And we knew about it because of the internet and we all got shut down, but we weren't shut down in our homes, not talking to anybody. We were all talking on social media.

You know what I mean?

Mm hmm.

We are a species that adapts really quickly. We just haven't had a lot of time to adapt to technology and the media. It's changed so fast. And also, it crept in on us. You know, I would say this happens a lot with science. You know, nuclear weapons, health care changes. We can keep people alive now.

We can keep them alive well into their 90s, but their quality of life isn't always good. Like, we have the technology, but we haven't figured it out. And that's how I think about the media and social media. I don't want it to go away.

We have to take responsibility for managing the impact of all of this news on us. And I, there are a couple of things we have to do. One is to back up and get perspective. Another, I'm really becoming an advocate for the whole media literacy movement, and you've probably read some of that.

The idea that even in schools, we should be teaching kids how to approach information and think about the source and the logic and who it's affecting, rather than just, Accepting what we hear. And I also think we have to put stops on it. One of the things that the Gen Z kids do is they call it a technology break.

They will turn off their phone for 24 hours or a weekend and just not do it. And that's hard once you're used to being connected all the time. But there is no reason we just have to keep adopting every technology and let it take over our life. We can make choices.

If it becomes less effective, do you think politicians will have adapt their approach to polarization, that sort of thing?

I mean, we're never going to get an Eisenhower again, who this sort of grandfatherly figure in the White House, who even if you didn't vote for him, you kind of trust him for any number of reasons. But do you see politicians changing or maybe it always will be effective?

Yeah, it's hard to look forward. I mean, I assume that successful politicians right now have a fleet of researchers and advisors behind them, looking at the trends and trying to make the margins work for themselves. If you want to be really cynical, you could say all they care about is winning.

I don't think that's true of all politicians, but it is the currency you have to do it to succeed. So I think they'll adapt with us, but what I, I'm biased. I've spent my whole career in education and that's another whole topic to think about higher ed, but I believe more education, teaching kids to think about it more going back to teaching more not history, like, memorize the wars, but.

Trends, factors, what's happened, what was going on psychologically. If you look at other times when we were polarized like this, like the Vietnam War, there were other similar things happening. The world was changing really fast. Then it was women's rights. It was the global connection. We could see things in other countries.

Today, , the whole. Economic human rights thing is changing a lot and humans. We don't like change. It's scary for a lot of people to see changes. And when we're scared, there's a theory. Have you ever heard of terror management?

No. Mm hmm.

it came out of studying disasters and crises.

And what they said is Greenberg and the other people who put it together said when we are existentially threatened, when we're really scared, our tendency is to look for people to ally with. We want them to think like we do, and the more scared we are, the more black and white we want it to be. They're right.

We know what's right. The other people are wrong, and we're going to double down on this. And to a degree, that's what's happening right now.

hmm.

And, if you looked at the Cold War, we were really scared of war with Russia. And when you and I were growing up every evil person in a movie was a Russian spy, right?

That was how it was getting portrayed. But the truth is today, the changes are a little bit harder to grasp. You can't just blame the Russians. How do you blame the global supply chain and something that you can't get your new Toyota because a part made somewhere else isn't in the port in Long Beach, it's very hard.

To get a handle on it. And so I think that change coupled with the sort of constant flow of negative media makes people feel scared. And that's because of how we evolved in a world that didn't change that fast.

So it really it's a, it's a currency of fear to a certain extent that's, not new, but it's, this currency of fear that will motivate people. What have you seen to be the physical impacts of this sort of stress?

I mean, we've reported on What the Health and also, Well Well USA, stress is obviously a killer in a lot of ways. Do you see this sort of stress as having physical implications, health implications?

you've probably talked about this a lot, but your brain doesn't distinguish the stressor, the thing that's causing it, and the response. The response we have when we're stressed is a fight or flight response. So, you drop some adrenaline, your hypothalamus kicks in, your blood pressure goes up, everything makes you prepared to do a physical response, fight, flight, freeze, all of that.

And these kind of stressors, watching a politician you disagree with on TV. There's nothing you can physically do. You're just having this fight or flight reaction. Maybe you're yelling at the TV or banging your hand or something.

Or your friends are texting you.

Yes, but there isn't an effective response. You can't run away and hide up the tree.

And as we know, repeated stress like that is gonna play into whatever your Vulnerability is. If you already have heart disease, then fluctuations in blood pressure are going to push that. If you get migraines, if you have stomach aches, they're all going to get exacerbated. And then you got to layer it in, and this is the other change in modern life that I think feeds into stress. I always have the kids do this because we're sitting in a classroom with fluorescent lights and no windows. You know, what part of this environment that we're living in is normal for humans? We're not outside. We're not moving. We're eating processed food. We're not sleeping enough. We're not interacting with people in person.

All of that stuff has changed in, I don't know, 50 years.

And then you add to that even remote working now.

Absolutely.

Which I understand why people like it and we're remote here now but I, kind of miss working in an office and seeing people and, not communicating through text messages or emails exclusively. What are some of the basic things people can do not to be less concerned about elections because that's part of our role as citizens, or at least I believe it is. But what can they do to lessen their own stress? Is it just limit the news intake to try and judge where it's coming from? Is it getting out and talking to people? What would you recommend?

Yeah. The first piece, I think, is you do have to think consciously about your news intake. Not just how much, but what kind. I'm the kind of person who hates violent movies. I don't want to watch them. And I find the TV news violent and disturbing. So I don't watch the news. I either listen to it on the radio or I read it online.

And that allows me to sort of titrate what I take in and not get stuck with an image I didn't want to see that now I can't unsee. And some people are visual. They just want to see it, process it, go on with it. So there's that. Then you mentioned, the tendency to want to watch the news all the time when something bad happens.

And that's part of that information gathering. Well, I can only be prepared if I know everything about it. But there are people who do both sides of that. In my research, there are people who have the news on all the time so they don't miss something and people who don't watch the news at all and then they do miss things.

But I think they're both ways of coping with anxiety, trying to say, well, I, I'm going to manage this. I think there's a middle ground. And I guess if there's a thing I'd say is it's not all or nothing ? We have to figure out what amount works for you, what sources you like. It's really, really hard, but you have to make yourself look at sources that don't agree with you.

You have to see what's on the other side, but that's where I start looking at it like couples therapy or group therapy. You can't watch the other side and just sit there looking for the flaws and trying to prove that they're idiots or inhumane because you're not trying to understand their point of view.

I kind of view it like couples therapy. Couples come into me and they're on the verge of divorce and they're really Mad at each other, and they're just watching for things they can catch. See, you did it again. You disrespected me. See, last night you said you wouldn't do that, but you did.

And, if you're gonna get them back together, you have to lower the defensiveness and talk about why the other person feels the way they do. And, we have seen politicians really mess that up in both directions a lot because they are blaming the other person and saying, well, all the people who follow them are just stupid, or all the people who follow them are naive.

And really, there are reasons people always make cost benefit analysis. If I am going with a conservative politician, the odds are that I'm worried about money and security. And I'm looking for someone who I think will protect those. And that might not be what I'm worried about, but it doesn't mean that your worries are stupid.

We have to understand each other's. And likewise, as a professor, I get people sometimes who say to me, well, you're probably just one of those liberal college people. And I say, , that's not fair either. Why do I think the way that I think? Why do you think the way you think and what's in common?

And that's how you do couples therapy. And it would sure be what we should be doing politically if we wanted to understand each other and get back to the humanity. And what happens in couples therapy when you get them to quit yelling at each other is they often end up crying. I thought you said that because you didn't love me anymore.

Well, I said it because I thought you were paying attention to someone at work. You know what I mean? There's these crossing misperceptions about why the person did it, and we're not talking about the humanity in the middle. What are the shared concerns, or how could we meet both of those concerns?

Mm hmm. What do you think of the biggest misconceptions about stress or and specifically political stress?

This is hard because ultimately how we respond to anything is under our control. And that's what we teach with cognitive behavioral therapy. The most common, technique used in therapy is it's not what happens to you. It's how you respond. So we don't have to be stressed about politics, but it's hard not to be because of the implications in the way it surrounds us.

When I look at this election, both sides think that if their side loses the world is we know it's going to end. And I keep saying, I don't think that's true.

Our democracy's gone for a lot of years. We've made it through a civil war. We've made it through other divisions. We will make it through this. We need to get involved in the causes we care about at a local level because that gives us a sense of control. And a sense of predictability, but we need to have some faith in the people around us and also in ourselves.

And I'll say optimism and people will jump on me and go, well, I'm not having rosy colored glasses. And I'm like, the optimism I'm talking about is not to say everything's going to be okay. It's going to say, I personally, or we as a society have the resources to make things better. We will work with what happens.

We will. Get through it. And we did it in COVID. I mean, honestly, if someone had told you 10 years ago, we were going to shut down the whole country completely for a number of months, put everything online, including school, would you have believed them? And we did it. And not onlydid we do it, but there were some good things, you know, we've learned how to use zoom.

Or would you believe that we could have created a vaccination, a vaccine in short order

Yeah,

this?

exactly. So, I believe the same thing about politics. Do I get discouraged sometimes? What discourages me is two sides. It's the people who just don't get educated and pay attention. And it's the people who only listen to one side and vilify the others. I think we need to get to the middle. Even the polls show that the majority of Americans aren't that far apart. The extremes are, but most of us are right there around the mean, like we say

in psych, you

Yeah.

There is a little formula I've adapted. The book I like is called Rapid Relief from Emotional Distress by Emory Campbell, and I've adapted this a little, but it's called the ACT formula, and it's supposed to be a way to get yourself to deal with stress. So A is accept reality, and that means you can't say if only.

If only my side wins, if only the politicians, if only the media, if only the economy, you have to say, the economy is volatile right now, and we have lots of media and we have lots of different positions, and I'm going to accept that so that I can get to see which is creative vision. How am I going to deal with that?

Part https: otter. ai My media intake. Part of it is how am I going to practice self care so I don't get run down and fried out and unglued. Part of it is looking at my assumptions about other people. And then T, take action, is easy if you do A and C, but A and C are really difficult. Hard. So let me just give you one example because I'm using the couples thing.

You got a couple that's barely talking to each other. They're talking about divorce. And I say, okay, let's accept reality. She's going to expect you to do more at home than you want to do. And he is not going to put these clothes in the hamper or whatever it is that we're accepting that. So what's the vision?

How are you going to get around it? I've had couples say, well, we're going to hire someone to clean house. Then we don't have to fight about it. And it's over. I think we need to look at politics that way, except that we have lots of different views in this country and they're different. Then how are we going to create a vision to make all of us feel safer or more belonging or that we can make this system work?

And that's going to involve talking about it And looking for solutions.

And you think people will be able to do that.

I do. I think there's a tendency to want the politicians to do it. And, they're playing off us. That's where the vicious circle comes in but one of the trends, anytime people get involved in a cause, they feel less stressed and that where we have to get. We have to take ownership of our reality, the world we live in, which is not the one we grew up in.

We have to not be nostalgic about the past because that is a path you can go down. That's not accurate either. And then we have to think about what we want.

Let me ask you are you stressed over what's happening over the political environment? Do you get stressed by politics?

My sister would say that I study stress because I am a person who gets stressed. So yes, I do get stressed. I have spent, almost 40 years studying stress and what it does to you and your body. And I think that it's up to us to make choices. So when I start getting into that doom spiral of this situation isn't going my way and it's going to be bad, I actually approach it with a psych technique. I do. All right, what is it I'm so scared about in this situation and what can I do to mitigate that? Will it fix it? And let me give you another example. It's not politics, but it's related. I'm in Texas. I have a daughter in Boston, a daughter in California. We all could have a hurricane, a tornado, a fire.

I've done some disaster mental health work. I know how awful those events are. So when I look at the fires near my daughter's house, I don't think, Oh my God, what if her house burns down? I don't think that's I think I'm going to get her one of those boxes you can buy online where it has you organize all of your important papers so that if they do have to evacuate, they take the right stuff.

So, it's not saying there aren't bad things out there. It's saying, what can I do to make it a little bit better now in the immediate for me? or people around me?

I don't want to come across as saying politics isn't stressful. The world isn't uncertain. There's always things we don't know. I mean, that's the human condition, right?

Have you talked in your, any of your talks about Robert Sapolsky's book, Why Zebras Don't Get

No.

It's a great book .

He's a researcher out at Stanford .

Great book. And what he says is, Zebras don't get ulcers because they don't worry. They don't have the cognitive ability to worry about the future and the past. We do. That makes us unique. We have the language to talk about it. That's why we have been able to build on things and build our communities.

We're going to get stressed, but the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives, the talk can drive it. And that's where I think we need to educate people more on how to manage stress. Teach kids more about it. Teach people to think more critically about the media. I just think we need to change how we're approaching it.

Okay. And you're confident we can do it?

I am I Think again, not about the negative view of all the people in the world But the people you know around you how many of them are really

caring really resilient trying to make a difference That's most people the ones we're judging are the world is going to hell in a handbasket on You Are the extremes that are getting in the sensational news that we see all the time because it's on 24 hours.

All right. Dr. McNaughton Castle, thank you. This has been great. Hopefully people will take the conversation or your insights to heart and your advice and be a little less stressed out and a little more hopeful and recognizing that that doesn't mean everything works out exactly as you think, but even things that don't work out we can deal with. Is that a fair assessment?

That's very fair. And you know, again, I, I have a weird position because I do the research, but I also do therapy. I have sat with people who have a terminal diagnosis. They know they're going to die. We can't fix the future and that's bad. So then we get to see, create a vision. What are the most important things for you to resolve before that happens?

And that calms, even a person who knows they're dying and we're not necessarily dying. We're just looking at a political future. We might not like for four years.

Dr. McNaughton Castle, thank you very much for working with us today.

You're most welcome. I enjoyed it.

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Okay, interest in and stress over presidential elections are natural and unavoidable. In some ways, they are signs of an engaged electorate and a healthy democracy. Of course, when stress morphs into verbal or physical abuse, Or results in anxiety induced health issues. Well, that's different. None of these results are good for the country democracy, or dare I say, we, the people, what can be done on an individual level to offset the unhealthy impact of political anxiety.

Well, the first step is awareness, realizing that you're unnaturally stressed is a starting point for dealing effectively with it. Also, understand your information source. Is the information accurate, logical, or overhyped? Along with this, news channels and social media sources aren't going away, nor should they.

But that doesn't mean that people should expose themselves to a nonstop stream of information. Take regular technology breaks, ultimately figure out the amount of information flow that works for you. The level that keeps you informed, but not stressed out. Also. Try to listen to contrasting opinions and positions without demonizing the person holding them.

Finally, realize that no matter what happens, who is elected, the country will almost undoubtedly survive. America has faced enormous challenges in the past and come through a lot. And it is likely the country will come through again. Well, that's it for this episode of What the Health. We'd like to thank Dr. Mary McNaughton-Cassill of the University of Texas, San Antonio.

She provided some excellent insights and information that hopefully will help everyone cope with the political stress that surrounds us. Want more information? We'd recommend picking up her book. Give way, coping with social stress in the modern world.

So thanks again for listening to What the Health and we hope you'll join us again soon.