Speaking of Psychology: How to cope with political stress this election season, with Brett Q. Ford, PhD, and Kevin Smith, PhD

If the thought of the upcoming election sends your stress level through the roof, you’re not alone. Psychologist Brett Q. Ford, PhD, and political scientist Kevin Smith, PhD, talk about how political stress affects people’s well-being; what high levels of political stress mean for people’s lives, for the U.S., and for democracy; and how to stay politically engaged while still maintaining your mental health.

Brett Q. Ford, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the director of the Affective Science and Health Laboratory. She completed her doctoral training in social-personality from the University of California, Berkeley after receiving her BA in psychology and MA in social-personality psychology from Boston College. Her research examines what people believe about emotions and how people manage their emotions. Using multimethod and interdisciplinary approaches, her lab considers the benefits and the costs of striving to feel good.

Kevin Smith, PhD, is a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He studies the biology and psychology of individual-level differences in political attitudes and behavior. In other words, he is interested in why some people are passionate about politics while others couldn’t care less, where conservatives and liberals get their political beliefs from, why those beliefs are so resistant to change, and how those beliefs drive choices and actions.

Kim Mills: It’s May, and that means that Election Day is less than 6 months away. If just hearing that fact raises your blood pressure and sends your stress level through the roof, you are not alone. Back in 2022, APA’s Stress in America poll found that 57% of people surveyed said that the 2024 presidential election was already a significant source of stress for them.

The same survey found that 76% of Americans believed that the future of our nation is a significant source of stress, and 66% were stressed by the current political climate. In fact, some recent research has found that just thinking about politics makes people anxious, stressed, and unhappy.

So how does political stress affect people’s mental and physical well-being? Is it possible to stay politically engaged and follow the news while still maintaining your mental health? And if so, how? And what does this level of political stress mean for people’s lives and for our country and for democracy as an institution? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

We have two guests today. First is Dr. Brett Ford, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and director of the Affective Science and Health Laboratory. There, Dr. Ford studies what people believe about emotions and how they regulate and manage their emotions. Since the 2016 election, she’s been looking at how politics affect our emotions and how anxiety around politics drives people to engage or disengage with political action.

Our second guest is Dr. Kevin Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Dr. Smith studies the biology and psychology of individual differences in political attitudes and behavior, why some people are passionate about politics while others couldn’t care less, where conservatives and liberals get their political beliefs from and how those beliefs drive choices and actions. In recent years, he’s also been studying the effects of politics on people’s health and well-being.

Thank you both for joining me today.

Brett Q. Ford, PhD: Thanks for having us. I’m glad to be here.

Mills: Now, you both study politics and emotion, but you came to these topics from different fields and perspectives. So I’m going to ask you both to start by telling us a little bit about your background and why you got interested in politics. Dr. Ford, let’s start with you.

Ford: Well, I started as a stress researcher, so I came at this from the sideways. I study how people manage stress, how people cope with different types of stressors in their lives. And circa 2016, it seemed like politics certainly qualified as a stressor. As the months and years unfolded, it seemed like maybe politics qualified as a chronic stressor. And so when we took that lens to it, it seemed like studying emotion regulation in the context of politics was an important direction for the work to go.

Mills: And, Dr. Smith, your background is political science. So what led you to these psychological questions?

Kevin Smith, PhD: Well, I was involved in a lot of quantitative genetic studies where we did some of the first studies looking at the heritability of political beliefs and attitudes. And we by now have a kind of mountain of evidence that even though it’s a rather complex social phenotype, political attitudes and beliefs are fairly highly heritable. Which of course raises the question of how does that happen? How does genetics influence attitudes and behaviors?

And one of the ways in which we were trying to answer that question is looking at sort of like biological information processing systems. And one of those systems, to make a long story short, was part of the autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight system where we were looking at levels of cortisol, which is popularly known as the stress hormone. And we found that people’s cortisol levels are correlated to their political engagement. And that sort of got us to thinking, well, if engaging with politics is raising people’s cortisol levels and we can observe that, is politics having a broader effect on their psychological, even physical health and certainly their social health? So that was kind of my launching point into it.

Mills: One could argue that almost everything controversial in life has political elements. Is the stress or anxiety that we feel related to electoral politics different from the stress or anxiety that we might feel from say, office politics or family politics?

Smith: At least from my perspective, I think the short honest answer to that is we don’t know—the data that we have and we’ve looked at it is consistent with the argument that politics is a unique chronic stressor in the environment and that people who are not particularly stressed or anxious about other parts of the social environment still seem to get stressed and anxious about politics. I hesitate to crawl out on a limb and declare that definitively, simply because at least as far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been a ton of study on that particular question.

Mills: Does that ring true for you, Dr. Ford?

Ford: I think it’s useful to think about what politics shares with other forms of stress so we can triangulate our hypotheses and how we test our questions. It’s certainly a multifaceted stressor, and so it includes, and that might be what makes it unique in the sense that it includes both these identity-based and group-based forms of stress. When we interact with people we don’t like, that stresses us out. When we don’t share values with other people, that stresses us out.

Then there’s also this superordinate structural level of stress that can come from politics, right? When you’re facing systems that are much, much bigger than you and potentially feel like they are doing damage to you in some way or have the potential to, if the election doesn’t work out in the way that you want it to. It reminds me a little bit of stress that’s linked with being of lower socioeconomic status, right? These large intractable systems that seem to be working against you. So I think it’s useful to draw on our knowledge about other stressors, but that at the end of the day, politics may be unique in the sense that it’s this conglomeration of several really crucial forms of stress.

Smith: And if I could just follow up on that, I agree 100% with everything that Brett just said. One of the other sort of unique aspects about politics is it’s virtually impossible to avoid. Most of us have smartphones these days and it’s literally in our pockets. I mean, you really, really have to work hard to avoid politics these days.

Mills: Well, Dr. Ford, you published a study last year in which you asked people to track their daily news consumption and their emotions and well-being. How does political news consumption affect people’s stress levels, health and well-being?

Ford: We assume that people experience politics largely through their news consumption. We didn’t necessarily constrain the study to that though. It could have been conversations that they had with people that they know. It was mostly just how are you learning about politics today? But I certainly expect a lot of that to come through the news and social media.

And we found first of all that people—and we did not recruit particularly special participants—we found that participants were feeling stressed, feeling a variety of negative emotions about politics, at least 75%, 80% of the days that we asked them, and that they were feeling intense degrees of negative emotion on about half of the days that we assessed. Every other day, there’s an intense negative emotional experience going on for people from across the political spectrum.

Mills: And, Dr. Smith, you’ve done several national surveys on politics, stress, and health around the last two presidential elections. What did you find?

Smith: Well, we asked our respondents a number of questions about how politics is affecting them psychologically, emotionally, socially, even their physical health. And what we found is that kind of astonishingly large percentages of Americans identify politics as a source of not just stress, but it is interrupting their sleep patterns. They sort of associate politics with—I’ve said things on social media or to people that I end up later regretting. I kind of compulsively follow some sort of social media news, that sort of thing.

And two of our studies, we asked about suicidal ideation, and in both of those samples, 1 in 20 said that they’d had thoughts of suicide associated with politics, which just astonished me. And if the estimates from our national surveys are even within the ballpark, I mean I think the short description is that politics is not being very good for the mental health of Americans and maybe not even their physical health.

Mills: How does political stress compare with other stressors in people’s lives? I mean, that sounds pretty acute. Are politics as big a source of worry as money or health? I mean, we do surveys at the APA every year and we find money and health are way up there. Politics is on the list, but how do you find in your work where politics falls on the stress continuum?

Ford: I haven’t looked specifically at those types of comparisons. If I were to speculate, part of what makes politics stressful is potentially the implications, the downstream implications that it has for personal outcomes. What is so upsetting about having someone in power who you don’t agree with? It’s largely because you think they’re going to enact policies, laws, whatever that are going to impact you or the ones that you love. So perhaps in that sense it’s a bit more distal than some of these moment to moment, I can’t make ends meet today. But I do wonder if it is—I liked the word continuum or spectrum. I imagine that these things are kind of falling along a spectrum and there aren’t necessarily discrete categories, but that is speculation.

Smith: And we’ve come at it from a slightly different perspective in the sense that we have been looking at sort of diagnostic survey batteries for anxiety and stress that are general, and then we’ve been trying to see whether measures of political stress and anxiety, are they sort of highly correlated with these? Can political stress still be an independent predictor or is it an independent predictor of these kind of negative emotional and psychological effects when you control for generalized anxiety? And generally speaking, at least in the data that we have so far, and we haven’t done a ton on this, it seems to suggest that politics can be separable from more generalized measures of anxiety and stress. But we haven’t looked at all about specific stressors. Are you worried about money or that sort of thing.

Mills: When it comes to election stress levels, do you find that there are say, partisan differences or differences between the sexes or other demographic factors?

Ford: We rarely find partisan differences in day-to-day experiences of stress about politics. And that’s the study you referenced earlier where we kind of pinged people day after day, either two weeks or three weeks. And there aren’t in that context partisan differences. Now when we zoom out and look at macro level events, we have some forthcoming work looking at the impeachments of Donald Trump at different points in the time course before the impeachment, the acquittal, impeachment, acquittal, and so forth. There are huge, huge partisan effects that track exactly as you think they would based on who kind of won or lost in a given context. So it’s a really interesting pattern. It really depends on the context in which you’re measuring those emotions, those macro level events where there are clear wins and losses, you see partisan differences that are very consistent, very strong. When you’re asking people about day-to-day life, we’re all kind of on an emotional rollercoaster it seems.

Smith: In our research. I mean, we haven’t looked, I mean we’ve taken national samples and what we’ve found fairly consistently in terms of the demographic factors that predict higher levels of these negative effects of politics, age is a big one. Younger people tend to suffer from these effects more than older people. We have found ideology to be a fairly consistent predictor with liberals tending to report more of this than conservatives. Gender—I mean, we found some stuff, but it’s kind of mixed and I wouldn’t make anything definitive on that.

But two of the other things that we found consistent is that people who are interested in politics and paying attention to politics tend to suffer from this more or report more of this sort of stuff, which I guess isn’t too surprising. The other thing that is I found really interesting is that people who do not like their partisan opposites, if you’re a conservative who really doesn’t like liberals and think they’re lying and cheating, or if you’re vice versa, you tend to report more stress and anxiety from politics. And I think those are the big sort of demographic predictors of this sort of thing that we’ve found.

Mills: Now, United States citizens are certainly not alone in having a very fraught political atmosphere these days. What about people who live in countries where the head of state is absolute, in other words, a dictator, and people don’t really have a choice as to who their leader is. Does that have any impact on whether people feel more or less stressed? Do we even know?

Smith: As far as I know, maybe Brett knows something different, but I don’t think we know, do we? Brett?

Ford: There’s really interesting work being done in other cultures and other countries. There’s several wonderful researchers who focus on emotion, emotion regulation and stress and group-based conflict in Israel. And I think to some degree, some of the patterns that we’re talking about are kind of human patterns where something big and frightening happens, something threatening happens, it naturally evokes a response. But of course, people vary from each other, but on average there will be a response on average. People want to manage that stress. On average, humans are relatively resilient and we’re actually pretty good at coping with stress on average, and yet there might be really important downstream consequences of managing that stress.

This is a question that I get semiregularly when I talk about work on how when you’re really good at coping with the stress of politics, you’re actually less likely to be engaged because emotions drive engagement. And people will ask, well, what about in countries where your engagement doesn’t necessarily—might not have the impact that it can in other countries that are more democratically oriented or in countries or locations where your action could directly jeopardize your health and well-being? What happens in those countries? And I say that work is really important and needs to be done, and I don’t yet know of the work that has done it.

Mills: Have politics always provoked so much stress and anxiety in our culture, or is this new with the level of polarization we’re seeing today? Or do we not even have the historical research to know?

Smith: I don’t think, I mean certainly in the sense of the kind of stuff that Brett and I are doing. I mean, I don’t think we have research that goes back decades and decades to where we can sort of track it in a fine-grained way. But I mean, we’ve gotten pretty upset and stressful and anxious about politics in the past. I mean, at one point we had a civil war, and I would imagine that that was pretty stressful and anxious for an awful lot of people. Certainly if you went back to the 1950s and the 1960s with some of the things that was going on with the civil rights movement, I’m sure there was a lot of stress and anxiety around those sorts of things.

But are we in a new unique environment that is conducive to producing these sorts of emotional responses to politics? I mean, I think there’s a reasonable argument that there is. I mean, everybody is blaming social media for everything these days, but I mean, the fact is it’s a different information environment and a good deal of that information environment—there’s no gatekeeper, and it’s specifically designed to provoke emotional responses. So in that sense, I would say that we’re living in sort of a unique and different time, and that’s even without talking about all the attendant things that go with a rerun of the 2020 election, which in and of itself was not just stressful, but if you listen to some of our subjects, kind of a traumatic event, it was. Yeah.

Mills: Well, Dr. Ford, one of the findings of your research is that when people are feeling anxiety or stress because of politics, there’s strategies that can enable them to feel better. You just mentioned disengagement as one of them, but these strategies have trade-offs. Can you talk about that?

Ford: So given that our emotions help us do things, we have emotions for a reason. They help push us to take actions in the world. And our negative emotions also help us do things when we are angry, it helps us confront when we’re anxious, it helps us take care of threats. And when we focus on getting rid of those emotions, and there’s a variety of strategies that people use in their daily life to help manage these types of negative emotions that are really effective and useful and help promote mental health and even physical health, when we get rid of these emotions, sometimes we miss out on some of the benefits that those emotions provide us.

And to the extent that they can help push us to be engaged and to stay motivated to take action when we lose them, we lose some of that motivation. And so the same strategies that help us get through the day and manage family stressors and money stress and things like that in really important ways can also help us in the context of politics. But then we find that the people who are very successful at using these strategies, they have better well-being in daily life, but they’re the ones who are least likely to take action.

Smith: And that is something that, especially as a political scientist, I find not just concerning, not just sort of super interesting, but really concerning. I mean, the findings that we’ve come up with track exactly with what Brett is saying, is that negative emotion essentially motivates you to pay attention and get engaged civically. And if your way to deal with those negative emotions is to ignore the stuff that is producing those negative emotions, basically you civically disengage. And that’s not healthy for democracy. I mean, Brett and I were having a little bit of a conversation earlier this week. It is sort of like the $64,000 question in our research is how do you get people to civically engage while still mitigating these sorts of effects? And yeah, I would really like to know the answer to that question.

Mills: Well, are there positive effects from being absorbed by politics, for instance? I mean, I’ve been to a few national political conventions both as a reporter and later as an advocate, and I can tell you that the delegates and the other attendees seem really happy in this hyperpartisan milieu. Is that healthy?

Ford: Well, what is health? That’s for another podcast. Yeah, I think you’re exactly on the right track, and that’s where our research is going and where hints in some ongoing research is pointing us as well. So when we focus on the negative emotions and getting rid of them, that’s where we see these very consistent patterns of trade off. Because when we focus on the strategies that are really effective for getting rid of negative emotion, they often involve disengagement, tuning out, making things be less bad in our minds, which is super effective, right? Things not being such a big deal or it’ll blow over or whatever. Those are really important strategies that we apply to other stressors in our lives, and it makes sense that that’s part of our toolkit. But when we apply it to politics, that’s maybe where we get into trouble because we start disengaging and tuning out.

But to your point, Kim, there are positive emotions too. And I don’t talk about positive emotions to be a Pollyanna and say, let’s all just put on rose-colored glasses and hold hands, and I don’t know, sing Kumbaya, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s not meant to be a denial of what is very stressful. It’s actually the opposite. So we can let our negative emotions be, we don’t have to make the situation be less bad. We don’t have to make it be less severe, whatever. We can let that sit. We don’t have to engage in the cognitive strategies to distort the situation to be something that it’s not. We can let it be scary and frustrating and whatever, despairing, depending on who you are.

But it can also be an opportunity to connect with other people to have admiration or inspiration, to form these collective groups or have these collective experiences that can be uplifting and induce all sorts of other emotions. Compassion, pride, admiration, gratitude. Those emotions also drive political engagement. And so if we focus on cultivating those types of socially connected experiences, you get the benefit of feeling good, which in turn also helps keep you motivated. So that’s I think, a really promising direction.

Smith: And I think one of the things that a lot of people don’t quite realize is there’s a subsection of the population that really enjoys politics. I mean, they enjoy it as a contact sport. They like the conflict, they like to get involved. They like the self-satisfaction of being involved in a cause that they think is better than them and draw emotional sustenance from that. So yeah, I mean I think there are sort of positive emotions involved here, but there’s a lot of individual level differences. I mean, the notion of getting up in front of people and going after someone who disagrees with you, and having that give and take—to many people that would stress them out enormously. But for a lot of people involved in the political arena, it’s like, Hey, yeah, that sounds like fun. Bring it on. Let me have some more of that.

Mills: Now, there’ve been a lot of conversations so far this election year about how many voters are not happy with either of the presumptive major party presidential candidates. Is that an unusually stressful position to be in? Is it more or less stressful to feel like you have no good choice, at least at the top of the ticket?

Ford: It’s not great.

Mills: No.

Ford: It’s not a great situation. I mean, to the extent that it links up with other concepts that we know about learned helplessness, the idea that there’s nothing you can do to really change things, because if you’re perceiving either option as not so good, it sounds to me like a recipe for inaction and that’s not going to be good for the country most likely.

Smith: And even if it does prompt actions, probably a negative form of action. In other words, I’m going to the polls not to vote for someone, I’m going to the polls to vote against someone. There really isn’t a choice here that I’m going to feel good about. And I mean, I’m not sure what that does to people psychologically, but I kind of doubt it makes them feel good.

Mills: Is your sense that it’s more intense this year than in prior years? I mean, I know I always hear people saying I don’t like either candidate, but I’m going to vote or I’m not going to do anything.

Smith: Yeah, I mean, for a variety of different reasons, we have two uniquely unpopular major party candidates in the United States, and that does not make for a happy, isn’t the future going to be great sort of mood amongst the electorate?

Mills: I want to go back, Dr. Smith, to something that you said right at the beginning about people’s political bent being hereditary, in essence. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how we know, I mean, it’s not so much that you would be necessarily a Republican or a Democrat, I mean, that parties are sort of made up constructs, but conservative and liberal, for example. Is that what we’re talking about?

Smith: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. And there’s been a number of studies done over the past 20 or so years. The first one was done back in 1986, but nobody really picked up on it. But certainly since the early 2000. And a lot of these studies are twin studies, so they take advantage of the fact that there’s—identical twins are literally genetically identical. And fraternal twins, dizygotic twins share only about 50% of their genes. So in very, very rough terms, if identical twins are more like each other politically than fraternal twins, that’s a prima fascia case.

I mean, there’s a lot of fancy statistics that can come into it, but that’s the basic idea that if identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins, it’s evidence that that trait is genetically influenced. But we also have adoption studies. People tend to be more politically like their biological parents than their adoptive parents. We have twins raised apart studies, and the twins tend to be more like each other. Now we have a genome-wide association scans that predict ideology. So there’s a number of different ways that it’s been triangulated. But the bottom line is ideology is not only heritable, it’s more heritable than a lot of other psychological traits. I mean, the estimates vary, but on the low end it’s 30% and on the high end it’s 60%.

Mills: Next time you get a 23andme test, you’ll find out whether you’re liberal or conservative. But let me ask, because we’re kind of getting into wrapping up here, whether you have advice that you want to leave our listeners with about how to manage their stress around the elections this summer and fall, because it’s only going to ramp up, I’m afraid.

Ford: My advice would be to not follow the common refrain of keep calm and carry on. I think that type of messaging reinforces the idea of if you’re feeling bad, get rid of those feelings. It’s okay for things to feel upsetting and just letting yourself sit with that and accept those feelings and accept the signals that they’re providing you about how you feel about how things are and connect with people that you care about. Connect with people who share your values, connect with people who don’t share your values. Provide yourself with opportunities to have moments of compassion and inspiration and pride and connection and love.

And these things are not mutually exclusive. You can let the world be kind of a scary place and it can also be a beautiful place where you can connect with people. And through that balance, I think we can maintain a connection to our values, and those values can help keep us engaged and motivated to do our civic duties. And then these opportunities to connect with people help us maintain our mental health and well-being. That’s what I’ll try to do. I don’t know, you can check back with me in a year.

Mills: All right.

Smith: I think my response will make every poli sci 101 teacher really, really happy. I think one of the things that people can do is become better informed about the democratic process and the institutions of our political system. One of the things that we find is that people who are truly politically knowledgeable about what a representative democracy is, how it functions and what our institutions do, they tend consistently to report less of these negative effects than those who are less informed. And we think that part of what’s going on there is if you understand the institutions and you understand how democracy works, democracy doesn’t get rid of conflict, it just manages it. That’s all it does. And the institutions in our system are set up to manage that conflict. And they’ve taken a pretty good kicking over the past 5 to 6 years and you know what—they’ve held, they have more or less done their job.

And I am pretty sure that the republic can survive the 2024 election regardless of what happens. And the reason why I can say something like that is because I not only understand the institutions, but have some faith in them and some faith in the process. And I think if people could, not in a Pollyanna-ish naive way, but in an informed way, gain some of that, I think that could take some of the edge off the anxiety and stress. What if I’m a conservative and Biden wins, or if I’m a liberal and Trump wins? You know what? Things will probably be okay. Not great, not great. I’m not really not trying to be Pollyanna here. But we’ll survive.

Mills: And this is really my last question. Are either of you or both of you doing any kind of research now related to the 2024 election specifically?

Ford: I am now! No, I mean, we need to understand what’s going on, so it’s certainly on our radar and we’ll be stay tuned.

Mills: Okay.

Smith: Yeah, and I’m a political scientist, so it won’t come as a shocker is—absolutely, we’re taking advantage of the 2024 election to redo some, to replicate some studies and also sort of investigate a few new avenues about how people are feeling about politics and dealing with it.

Mills: All right, well, we’ll have to talk again. I want to thank you both for joining me today. This has been really interesting. Thank you.

Smith: Thank you.

Ford: Thanks so much.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

For the American Psychological Association, thank you for listening, I’m Kim Mills.