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Key points
- Election stress can cause sleep loss, and sleep tends to get worse on election day.
- Engaging with same news stories and feeling national belonging can lead to a shared public mood.
- Mass printing technology increased people's sense of national identity, including people they'd never meet.
You turn off your devices. You go to bed at a regular time. You set a comfortable room temperature. You sleep in a safe environment. You're applying all the sleep hygiene techniques and yet sleep remains elusive. Frustration ensues.
If you find your sleep has gotten worse lately, it might not be a biological problem or the result of bad habits. It could very well be the looming US election. For better and for worse, belonging to a political community affects how we sleep.
Election Stress and the Public Mood
Election stress is real. A recent literature review in the Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Mental Health analyzed the relationship between elections and mental health around the world, with a focus on India. The authors concluded that the scholarly literature affirms how negative and stressful election processes can be, especially for vulnerable people and those who are suffering from poor mental health.
A paper by an international group of psychologists showed that the public mood dropped a lot around the 2020 US presidential election. How people feel isn't always a private or individual concern. The election cycle and the way people talk about it can affect the public mood. The authors of this paper, Cunningham and colleagues, define public mood as "the way in which the overall affective state of the general public is influenced in a positive or negative direction specifically because of their membership in a particular community."
Belonging to a society affects how we feel. Our emotions about an election don't just come from within. We have group feelings, although obviously, that doesn't mean we all think and feel exactly the same way at the same time. However, the group's overall mood dips and fluctuates along with other members of the community. At election time, the national political community comes into emotional focus, since so many people are talking about it.
Imagined Communities
In his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, anthropologist Benedict Anderson theorized that the rise of print capitalism created a sense of national belonging among people who would never actually meet. As mass printing technology spread through Europe, the owners of newspapers and other print media jumped at the opportunity. They started printing in the vernacular (instead of, say, Latin) so that more people could read it and would therefore shell out money for it. This change led to a standardization of language across distances. Before, dialects varied more significantly from one place to another.
It also led to people reading the same news stories, often about events happening far away from themselves both geographically and socially. They began to feel connected to other readers of these newspapers and to the people and events discussed within them. A sense of national belonging arose, based on shared language and experience.
Mood and Sleep Loss
What does this have to do with elections and sleep? When people engage with the same news stories and feel a sense of national belonging, even if fraught and fractious, they can also share a public mood. Evidence shows that elections can stress out voters both before and after election day. This stress increases when elections include the threat or reality of violence. Since mood can affect sleep, a negative shared mood might lead to communal struggles with sleep.
According to Cunningham and colleagues, mentioned above, elections affect mood, and therefore probably sleep, even among people who don't live in the country where the elections are happening. The effect for outsiders in this study was less pronounced than for people inside the community—in this case US citizens and residents—but it's still noticeable.
People have varying degrees of closeness to or distance from a community. There's no simple division between belonging and not belonging. Since the US looms large on the global cultural and political stage, people who don't live in the country and aren't participating in the election still care about the outcome. It will have an effect far beyond the nation's borders.
The Cost of Social Belonging
Unfortunately, for those losing sleep now, it's likely only going to get worse. Researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health in the Czech Republic looked at data from 15 million users of Sleep as Android, an app that monitors sleep cycles. In the lead-up to important votes, people in the UK and the US got the least sleep on polling day for Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, respectively.
The good news is that this electoral loss of sleep is a shared experience. And, as Benedict Anderson noted, shared experiences help people identify other members of their community. In any case, sometimes group belonging means we have to ride along with the public mood.
