📿 Five Ways to Cope with Election Stress

This piece originally appeared on Lodro’s Substack: The Laundry

“Maybe,” I thought to myself the other day, “the best thing to do right now is Google election polling information.”

So I did. And I quickly noticed the waves of uncertainty arise in me. After the 2016 election cycle, I’ve lost some faith in pollsters, and yet I gravitate towards looking at the numbers each day. Why? There is an all too familiar desire to find something (anything) definitive to hang my proverbial hat on so that I might confirm that things will go one way or another next week.

We humans are pretty good at two of the following things:

• reveling in it when things are going well
• army-crawling through it when things are going poorly
• being okay in the midst of uncertainty

Have you figured out which one we’re not so good at?

I know a lot of people who throw their meditation practice out the window when things are going well. Who needs to manage their emotions when all the emotions are positive? Let them run rampant, right? Then, when their circumstances change, they find themselves glued to the cushion, feeling like they have lost the habit of meditating and trying to regain some form of equanimity in the midst of whatever…