SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) - The election has come and gone but for many, the stress from it is still with us.
Whether you're grappling with disappointment, anger or confusion, the stress can linger long after the ballots are counted. According to Dr. Elissa Epel, a psychiatry professor at UC San Francisco and author of "The Stress Prescription: 7 Days to More Joy and Ease," managing post-election stress is vital for maintaining emotional well-being and resilience.
If you feel like you're in a dark cloud, that the future is so bleak because it's four years of policies that you don't agree with that conflict with your moral values -- you aren't alone.
"What many people are going through is a grief response, feeling numb, feeling like all of a sudden they woke up to a completely different world and reality, that the world that they thought they understood is all of a sudden quite confusing and disillusioning," Dr. Epel told KCBS Radio's Patti Reising on this week's episode of "As Prescribed."
When grief is considered in the context of post-election stress, it's not just about losing a political race or mourning the loss of a candidate that you had so much hope in.
"There's also grief in realizing that you're in a sense in the minority, or that there's so much that you feel is unfair," said Dr. Epel. "So the loss of the world that you hoped for is a grieving. And we need to make space for that and acknowledge that. There's a lot of complex emotions that can arise in this post-election period that we're in."
Allowing yourself time to process these emotions is essential to moving through this difficult period, according to Dr. Epel. Self-care, doing things that make you happy, spending time with supportive friends, and finding beauty in everyday life can help restore some sense of stability during turbulent times.
It can also be helpful to "stretch" your understanding of other people's beliefs and views.
"Trying to understand people who voted differently than you is so healthy. It's so important," Dr. Epel explained. "While it's not easy to find common ground and common views with people who feel extremely different, there is so much overlap. There are so many values and views that people agree on. People want to feel safe, to feel loved, to see other people treated fairly."
"So trying to understand how people felt that they put forward a moral vote, a vote that was for the better of America and of their family, these are really important right now," she added. "This can take away and mitigate some of the anger and confusion and help us understand how to move forward."
While anger is a natural response to feelings of injustice or frustration, especially when the outcome of an election contradicts your values, it can also be an important catalyst for action.
"Anxiety and anger fuel action, and action is thought to be the sponge of anxiety," said Dr. Epel. "If we're uncertain about the future, and we have issues, especially local issues that we really care about, we can do something. And so communal action and finding out how other people, particularly policy or political leaders, are responding is really important right now."
While post-election stress is not a new phenomenon, political polarization has become more pronounced in recent years, leading to deeper divisions and stronger feelings of anger and anxiety. But Dr. Epel pointed out that these emotional reactions are not permanent.
"It's easy to catastrophize," she said. "We feel like we can't survive. We feel like we'll feel this heaviness every day, but that's just simply not true. We adapt. Emotions don't naturally last long if we can let them pass."
"Change is rocky and bumpy, and there's always this looking back and understanding that things always change, and looking forward, we will get through this," she added. "We're going to see more clearly. There'll be pathways for people of all different beliefs to be working for the social change that they care about."
Listen to this week's "As Prescribed" to learn more. You can also listen to last week's episode to hear about a new clinic at UCSF Health that is working to diagnose mystery neurological conditions, here.
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“As Prescribed” is sponsored by UCSF.