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America is exhausted. Throw a pandemic at us, and we will learn how to order toilet paper online, teach our kids from home, and adjust to work completely on Zoom. Inflict yet more horrific racial violence and we will rise up to protest, demand justice, and form committees at the office to eliminate white supremacy. It has not been easy, and there is far, far more work to do, but so far, we have mostly remained resilient, adjusted to challenges, and worked hard to endure.
Until now. For many of us, these unprecedented stressors were bearable because we had an eye on early November as a time when we would finally find hope. We knew the pandemic would not end immediately, and we knew that we must continue to wrestle with uncomfortable truths regarding our complicity with systemic racism. But knowing that we may get political news signaling the potential for real change helped us remain strong and persist through these unimaginable stressors.
So we waited for November, and we invested in the political process like never before. We stood in lines for hours to vote, we encouraged others to do so, we donated money, we volunteered. And then we watched the results come in over the longest week we can recall, endlessly refreshing our browsers for the latest vote tallies, texting our friends for their take on the latest news, and visiting as many pundit websites and broadcasts as we could until finally—finally—a decisive victory had been projected.
For many, the end to our national suspense offered some relief and even cause for celebration. But here we are a few days later, and most of us still feel lousy. Is it anxiety? Are we still recovering from stress? Are we simply exhausted?
Below are three tips from clinical psychological science that may help explain why so many of us still feel weary, and why no one should expect to be productive for a while still.
1. We need new routines. For many people, the last four years have offered a routine that has become very familiar. Shortly after we wake, we check our devices for the news. More often than not, we are devastated by something that contradicts our most core values and beliefs. We read, we share our outrage with others, and then we go back to read more, perhaps switching to other websites to feel comforted by validating perspectives, or in an attempt to understand opposing viewpoints.
We proceed with our day, but almost every meeting or social interaction includes some reference to that day’s debacle and a discussion of our reactions anew. Maybe there’s been an update. Maybe a new tweet. Perhaps a decision that makes matters even worse.
The news is faster than ever, and in some way, the story remains in our consciousness all day, often leading to us processing that evening with our loved ones what we heard, what we think, and lamenting that change cannot come fast enough.
This has been our lives for years, and suddenly, it has (mostly) stopped. In the last few days, we now find ourselves at work looking aimlessly online for news stories out of habit, but there is little outrage to be found. What do we do now?
It will be important for us to make an effort to change our routine, find new interests to invest in, and change our habits so we can learn once again how to do things fulfilling each day, and break our “doomscrolling” patterns.
2. We need to rediscover our relationships. Our social relationships provide a crucial source of social support, fun, and respite. Our success in these relationships doesn’t only change our mood—social interactions also improve our productivity, success, and physical health too (see Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships, Penguin Books).
But our relationships have changed dramatically over the past few years, and especially in 2020. For many, our time with our friends has become dominated by discussions of the news, and more recently by COVID-19 or the election specifically. This has been more damaging than we realize.
Often, these conversations include discussions of what we have read, a feeling of emotional intimacy when we can finally express out loud all we have been feeling and exactly how angry we are. These conversations often are lengthy, with one tragic bit of news followed by someone else offering yet another awful insight or event that feels even more depressing. Indeed, many of us can recall hours and hours dedicated to this kind of discussion about politics, discussing COVID rates, or whether people engaged in appropriate COVID-related etiquette in public (“cov-etiquette?”) over the past several months, and it is no wonder that these interactions have often made us feel worse, not better.
Dr. Amanda Rose at the University of Missouri refers to this process as “co-rumination,” and her research reveals that while this process of ongoing commiseration does help us feel closer to our friends over time, it also is a strong predictor of depression.
In the coming weeks, we will need to recognize co-rumination when it happens and rediscover how we can introduce new topics again into our conversations with friends, and stop one another when we are letting bad news take over our relationships.
3. Our brains need time to recover. Some people get migraines when stressed. Others get back pain. Some have stomach upset, and others find themselves puttering around the house with nervous energy. We all know what stress looks like for us, and sometimes we can use these signs to tell us that something must be on our minds.
But of course, there are a variety of biological processes also occurring when we are stressed that do not have obvious signals we can notice. For instance, you may know that one particularly adaptive way that our brains respond to stress is to create more (or less) receptors for brain substances (i.e., neurotransmitters, like serotonin) that are influential in how we experience emotion.
The addition of these extra receptors is helpful—as they physically grow at the tips of neurons in our brain, we are able to cope with more and more emotion, kind of like a frog that does not notice the temperature of the water it inhabits is gradually increasing one degree at a time. Unfortunately, when stress drops suddenly, these extra receptors do not disappear right away. Rather, research suggests it takes a few weeks until they may downregulate to the level we experienced before stress.
If you are feeling only about 5% more relaxed and focused each day since the election, that may make perfect sense; even though our minds tell us there is less to feel acutely stressed, it will take a little while for our biological systems to catch up to how we think we should feel right now.
While we wait, it will be important for us to engage in practices like mindfulness meditation or progressive muscle relaxation to help speed these biological changes along.
We have faced enormous stress in 2020, and we are all aching for a return to normalcy. The perfect storm created by the combination of these stressors has left us craving normal routines, missing social interaction, feeling uncertain about our future, and yearning for signs of hope and change.
No one feels like their best self now, and no one is (or should be expected to be) productive, a terrific partner, or an excellent parent right now. As the year comes to a close, let’s be patient with each other, and with ourselves, knowing that it will take time for us to feel better, and using the concrete steps discussed in this post to help us feel better as we get closer to 2021.
© Mitch Prinstein, Ph.D.
