We are living in stressful times. Disastrous weather conditions, regional conflicts, economic uncertainty, and, of course, the upcoming presidential election. Americans, in fact, may be more stressed out about the upcoming election than any other—if numerous surveys are to be believed. Ultimately, it is probably near impossible to avoid the stress. We’re hit with an endless and super-animated flow of news and information that prevents us from catching a break from the doom and gloom that confronts us. The bottom line: we’re hard-wired to listen to bad and disturbing news. We just can’t turn away. But against all this, there is hope for overcoming stress in a messy world, at least according to Dr. Mary McNaughton Cassill, an authority on stress management and also a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She spoke with WellWell recently on why our stress levels are increasing over politics and how we can remain engaged citizens without driving ourselves to the brink of a mental meltdown.
You’ve written a great deal about stress, its impact and its causes. Is it fair to say that Americans are suffering more 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. But a huge piece of it is that we have access to so much information today because of how the media and social media work. So, we are aware of a lot of things that probably in past elections weren’t public knowledge.
So, this is probably the highest stress level we’ve seen for an election?
Yes, but this is interesting. I saw a quote that said, 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. And also, before the era of TV and podcasts, 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-seven 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, 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 in it. So younger people today think it’s always been that way, but this constant flow of information 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. Today that is off the table.
The 24-hour news cycle is obviously a big impact, but there doesn’t seem to be enough news to fill the entire cycle. So, they are simply broadcasting the same topic over and over again. Do you agree?
I definitely do. And it’s a blurred 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 individuals’ opinions about things and they are biased. And the other problem is we can self-select the channels we want to watch that are saying what we already want to hear. And that’s part of the issue too.
Certainly, technology has expedited that information flow. What are the other factors that are contributing to 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. I 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. 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 are 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 II, they censored the letters that people sent back. So, people in the U.S. 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 trigger 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, 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 a place and time we go if it affects us. So, we watch that stuff and we remember the negative stuff better than the positives. And there’ve been all kinds of psych lab research to show that. For example, 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. You had to pay attention, the threats today are different because they’re not necessarily immediate. A lot of them are far away from us and there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. But that doesn’t keep us from incorporating it into this worldview 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.
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 viewed as a public service. But now your local news is competing with the national news, the reality shows, and all the streaming platforms. 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. 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, maybe you could write a letter to the editor, but now you can actually express yourself. The larger problem today is not how I get information, it’s how I judge the truth of this information. How do I know what’s real and what’s not?
Have politicians capitalized on this sort of fear in terms of the political environment, the culture, the milieu or has that just always been there?
I think the human tendency has always been there. There’s a book that’s really strange called The Hater’s Handbook. It was published in 1965 and the author collected negative comments made about politicians and celebrities going all the way back to the 1700s. When you read them, people were just as vicious. They said mean things in both directions, but they didn’t get replayed 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 you think about FDR, he used to go around the country on a train and give talks from the back car. So, people might hear him once if they ever heard him 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.
Is social media having such an impact that younger people are more affected by political stress?
I’m teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio, which is part of the UT system. We have 34,000 students here. I am seeing a lot of young people all the time. And we’re kind of a classic urban university. 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. The people who take my classes are interested, but I would 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. Everything from being depressed and anxious to being stressed is something they don’t have any stigma talking about 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. And when you look back, people idolized Kennedy, and FDR who 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 their backroom deals. So the kids today have a 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 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 and 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 60s. We look at everybody with this cynicism. There are rising rates of depression and anxiety among young people. And they’ve gone up tremendously. We often blame it on COVID-19, but it was happening well before COVID. And many people, especially older people I talked to, just want to frame it as 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 of generations of kids now who’ve only heard us complaining about it. So why are we surprised that they say, the future looks bad? My dad said it’s bad. My grandfather is 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 who volunteer for every activity we have going. And the Gen Z, the latest generation, these are kids who’ve really embraced activism and standing up for their beliefs. 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. 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.
Does the stress level manifest itself differently to different groups or is everybody equally stressed?
I 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 think about driving. Throughout human history, people could go as fast as they could walk, ride a horse, or go by the wind. Suddenly we’re driving 70 miles an hour talking on the phone and 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.
When I went to college, I did not study for the SAT. We just went and took it in the gym one day. Then I went to college and enrolled in person walking around, looking at the numbers on the boards. It 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 going. 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.
How do we begin to deal with stress or recognize it? Is it different for someone my age to deal with stress than somebody just coming out of college?
Part of it is awareness, recognizing when you’re stressed. 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 feel sad. You know, they’re not connecting the pieces. That’s part of it. I think our expectations are different and I’ll bring it back to politics. 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. A comparison I’ll make, my dad is from Northern Maine. 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. 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 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 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: is this 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?
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 how we think of those people on the other side as 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 have been pandemics before. 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. And if you had asked me in March or April of 2020, are we going to close the whole country? That just seemed unfathomable to us. And by Christmas of that year, we were used to it. We had workarounds, we’d found where to stockpile our toilet paper and we were trying to have parties online. 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. I would say this happens a lot with science, nuclear weapons, and healthcare changes. We can keep people alive now. We can keep them alive well into their nineties, 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. There are a couple of things we have to do. One is to back up and get perspective. Another is that 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. I also think we have to put stops to it. One of the things 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 lives. We can make choices.
We’re never going to get an Eisenhower again, who was a grandfatherly figure people trusted. But do you see politicians understanding that this may not be effective?
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. And if you want to be cynical, I 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. I think they’ll adapt with us, but I’m biased. I believe more education, teaching kids to think about it more, going back to teaching more, not history, like memorizing 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. Today, the whole economic human rights thing is changing a lot. As humans, we don’t like change. It’s scary for a lot of people to see changes. Have you ever heard of terror management? It’s a psych theory. It came out of studying disasters and crises. And what Greenberg and the other people who put it together said, is 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. 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. 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 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.
To a certain extent, it’s this currency of fear that will motivate people. What have you seen to be the physical impact of this sort of stress?
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 and your blood pressure goes up. It makes you prepared to do a physical response, fight, flight, freeze, all of that. And these kinds 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. 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 going to 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. 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 50 years.
What are some of the basic things people can do? Not to be less concerned about elections, but to lessen their own stress?
The first piece 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 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 and go on with it. 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’m going to manage this, think there’s a middle ground. And I guess if there’s a thing I’d say is it’s, it’s not all or nothing. We have to figure out what amount works for you and what sources you like. It’s 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 view it like couples therapy. Couples come into me and they’re on the verge of divorce and they’re 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 going to get them back together, you have to lower the defensiveness and talk about why the other person feels the way they do.
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 a 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. 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 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 are 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?
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about stress, 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 and the way it surrounds us. When I look at this election, both sides think that if their side loses the world as we know it’s going to end. And I keep saying, I don’t think that’s true. We 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. 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. If someone had told you 10 years ago that we were going to shut down the whole country completely for a number of months, and put everything online, including school, would you have believed them? And we did it. And not only did we do it, but there were some good things. We’ve learned how to use Zoom.
I believe the same thing about politics. Do I get discouraged sometimes? Of course. What discourages me is 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. But I believe that 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 median like we say in psych. And there is a little formula I’ve adapted. The book I like is called Rapid Relief from Emotional Distress by Emory and 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’s volatile right now. And we have lots of media and we have lots of different positions. And I’m going to accept that. How am I going to deal with that? Part of that is how am I going to get involved. Part of it is how am I going to control 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. Then T, take action, is easy if you do A and C, but A and C are really 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, OK, 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. 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 same 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 so that we can make this system work? And that’s going to involve talking about it and looking for solutions.
Are you stressed over what’s happening in 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. But 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. What is it I’m so scared about in this situation and what can I do to mitigate that? Will it fix it? No. 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 and 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, my God, what if her house burns down? 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 in the immediate for me or people around me? I don’t want to come across as saying politics isn’t stressful. There are always things we don’t know. That’s the human condition. Robert Sapolsky’s book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers? is a 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 and teach people to think more critically about the media. I just think we need to change how we’re approaching it.
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, are the extremes that are getting in the sensational news that we see all the time because it’s on 24 hours.
About Mary McNaughton-Cassill, Ph.D.
Mary McNaughton-Cassill, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches abnormal psychology, theories of learning, psychology and health, physiological psychology and stress management. She has won numerous awards for her teaching and research and is also the author of two books: Mind The Gap: Coping With Stress in the Modern World and Give Way: Coping with Social Stress in the Connected World.
Her books can be found at Amazon at the following link: Mind The Gap: Coping With Stress in the Modern World and Give Way: Coping with Social Stress in the Connected World.
