GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — If you're anxious about the upcoming election, you are far from alone.
"I hear it from my patients all the time," Dr. Arash Javanbakht said. "Sometimes they get obsessed. They cannot leave it, but they still are hurting. They're like, 'I am frustrated. I'm feeling more anxious and feeling burned out.'"
Dr. Javanbakht works with this issue firsthand as the founding director of Wayne State University's Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic in Detroit.
So much so that he wrote a book on how to overcome it.
But he says this kind of anxiety has been getting more common.
"It has been increasing in terms of the focus of their attention on the politics," Javanbakht said. "Because, at some point, politics was part of your life."
"Now, this has become the major part that defines us as people and our differences between each other," he said.
With factors like social media, rhetoric, and punditry, Javanbakht believes the encouragement of tribal thinking is often to blame.
And letting one's anxiety build could cause even greater harm.
"What we eat definitely defines our physical health, right?" Javanbakht explained. "So, now, what I feed to my mind and brain defines my mental health. If all I'm getting is negativity, is fear, is danger, is threat perception, is exaggerated danger, then my attention only looks for all the negative and my thoughts become negative, and I start to feel the whole world is collapsing."
And if we allow that to develop, it could evolve into anger.
"Anger is always the other side of fear, and we see a lot of anger," Javanbakht said. "We see people are not tolerant of each other. We see people are starting to see so often, and too often, that different as bad, as evil."
So how can we overcome it?
"Emotions have energy, especially when it comes to such fundamental emotions like fear and anxiety," Javanbakht said. "The energy's immense."
Therefore, he said, an effective solution lies in harnessing that energy and putting it toward how you can make a positive impact.
"What are the good things I want to be passionate about and I want to advocate for, and how I can use this energy to, let's say, Go campaign, go vote, talk to people, discuss or even turn it to something for me to learn beyond what is being told to me that I should believe."
"I'm not asking people to be ignorant," Javanbakht clarified. "You want to know and you want to care about your country; that's normal. But then, there are ways that I can be caring about my future and my country, but not exhausted and frustrated and burned out."
Balancing the two, he indicated, can come through knowing your limits.
"One way is to limit the exposure," Javanbakht said. "Just know as much as you know people about the news, just know as much what's going on. Avoid excessive exposure."
In addition, Javanbakht pointed to the tried-and-true methods touted by many in the medical field for dealing with all kinds of stress and anxiety.
"There are so many different aspects to a human besides the politics," Javanbakht said. "And I cannot emphasize enough about the importance of exercise, especially cardiac exercise. It's an amazing way of helping regulating negative emotions."