In this commentary last week, we discussed some notions of how to maintain our mental health in turbulent times for America. Not that I’m a psychologist, mind you – I’m just a journalist, who has come across some research that I consider worth passing along.
This is worth our attention. Last year, 40 percent of Americans said they were more anxious than they were the year before – and fully one-fifth of adults were diagnosed with anxiety disorder. And that was before Donald Trump became president again, with an agenda that is unsettling to a lot of people.
No wonder. Think about what has happened in recent weeks.
Trump has shifted America from defending democracy in the biggest European war since World War II to siding with a dictatorial war criminal.
He has put in place tariffs that will surely inflate prices, while also demanding tax changes that will add trillions of dollars to the federal debt – thereby, of course, threatening recession.
He has gone after gay and transgender Americans… pushed a spending freeze that will literally lead to the death of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide; he has moved to disable our national health and disaster recovery agencies… threatened chaos in higher education… and put our nation’s premiere domestic security and intelligence agencies in the hands of inexperienced political hacks.
There’s more, but this list alone is making me anxious. And I’m eager to provide you a bit of relief here, actually.
One of our listeners last week said I was heading in the wrong direction – that the mental health I should be talking about wasn’t ours – that, in fact, I should be discussing the president’s. Countless experts have done that, of course: During his first term, 70,000 health professionals signed a petition declaring that Trump “manifests a serious mental illness,” in their words, and a book written by over two dozen mental health experts said much the same thing.
But there’s nothing we can do about that. Voters re-elected him anyway, so Trump is ours to contend with. And that’s where my reporting found some hope.
What a lot of us are experiencing is what psychologists call hyperstimulation anxiety, or just over-stimulation. That’s not the same as sensory overload, which is when there’s too much stimulation of one or more of our senses – sight, smell, sound, touch, taste. (You can get that when a taco platter comes with a mariachi band playing.) No, we can be over-stimulated to the point of anxiety from what we know about the state of current affairs in America. Beyond anxiety, it can cause irritability, restlessness, difficulty focusing, and even physical discomfort.
Does this sound like anybody you know?
You’ve heard the mental health professionals’ advice: set boundaries for what’s causing the anxiety by limiting your screen time, getting exercise, trying meditation. But there was also coping advice the other day from an unlikely source: a United States senator.
You might have gotten that prescription already if you were still paying attention after President Trump’s 99-minute speech to Congress. It was in the 10-minute Democratic response from a reasonable and calm person named Elissa Slotkin. She’s a former CIA officer who worked in national security under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and she is now a senator from Michigan. She’s fluent in Arabic and Swahili, by the way, but she was pretty good in English – as she noted that, in her words, “change doesn’t need to be chaotic or make us less safe.”
Slotkin had three suggestions for us, and I’d add just a bit of interpretation to it. Like this:
First, it’s easy to be exhausted if you’re paying attention to what’s going on, as public radio listeners tend to do. So take it easy, but don’t time out. We can’t resign ourselves to letting these dangerous things happen without our awareness.
Second, hold your elected officials accountable. This goes for every level of government. If they’re not listening to you, or not doing their jobs, let them know that you’re aware of it, and you won’t tolerate it. You’ll feel better if you speak up.
Third, and most crucially, engage – or, as Slotkin put it, organize. Pick just one issue that you’re passionate about, and get involved. (By the way, Slotkin said, “doomscrolling doesn’t count,” nor does just listening to people you agree with on the radio.) But here’s what would count: Join a group that cares about your issue, and act. Maybe you love the arts, or care about books, or want to help children facing disease abroad, or trans people facing discrimination, or you want to help fight climate change. Pick one. Do something to make a difference – it will make you feel immensely better about your place in the world.
That’s the prescription, and I think those three steps will help our own mental health. And our society, our beloved country, will be better. We need both more principled leaders and, importantly, more engaged citizens – and that latter can be us, for our own good.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.