Election time!
Elections are such a pain!
I’ll admit it: I have a negative attitude about our U.S. elections. People are anxious, upset, demanding, and even mean. And I don’t like the choices we have at election time either. I’m pretty sure the reason we end up with the candidates we do is because the people who would make really good leaders aren’t suckers for the kind of punishment they’d have to endure if they joined the political race.
Elections should be a fabulous sign of freedom and the ability to choose.
But people don’t like losing.
And they don’t like feeling powerless.
I dread the post-Presidential-election days. Every four years, we go through this, and it seems to get more dramatic as the years go by. People start bullying each other on social media, blocking friends they’ve had for years, and generally throwing temper tantrums in whatever ways they can come up with.
Why do people get so angry when their candidate doesn’t win the election?
Anxiety.
Political anxiety on steroids.
This isn’t the same as fear. You’re afraid of things you know about, and that’s usually a good thing. Hopefully, we all have a healthy fear of jumping off a cliff because we know what will happen if we do. Gravity will pull us down, down, down, and then we’ll hit the bottom and most likely die upon impact (and if we don’t, we’ll probably wish we had). But this fear is good and healthy because it stops us from doing something stupid.
Anxiety is worse than fear. Anxiety is about not knowing. And when we don’t know what will happen, our minds begin inventing stories. What if this happens? What if that happens? What is the worst thing that could happen? Whatever it is, if it’s the worst thing that could happen, then it probably will happen!
When I was thinking about having children, I worried about everything. My worries conflicted with each other, so they couldn’t all happen, at least not at the same time. I couldn’t have a miscarriage and have triplets. I couldn’t be infertile and have a baby with severe birth defects. But since I didn’t know what would happen, and anything was possible, I covered all my bases and worried about everything. Just in case. I’d hate to have something happen and realize I had never properly worried about it!
That is the trouble with anxiety. You don’t know what will happen, or how it will happen, or whether anything will happen. It’s not the same as fearing something specific. If you fear something specific, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to take action to prevent the expected bad outcome. If you can’t prevent it, you can at least prepare yourself for it so you can deal with it in the best way possible. With anxiety, you just have no idea. Which means you often can’t prepare, can’t take any specific precautions, and can’t do anything constructive. All you can do is worry.
Sometimes, your anxiety is actually relieved when something happens. At least, now you know what that something is. And you can do something to respond to the something.
But with political anxiety, there isn’t just one person being anxious. There are millions of people being anxious. Anxiety spreads. People become irritable, tense, and grumpy, and they feed off of each other’s anxiety and spread it to the people around them.
Extremely anxious people begin thinking, “The situation is desperate!” followed by, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” This is when we start to see people who are normally kind and friendly doing things that don’t seem kind and friendly. They start making choices we don’t understand. We start wondering if they are stupid or evil or what. But they’re not! They’re anxious. Very, very anxious.
Calm Down
What can you do? Don’t feed it. You don’t have to join in. If you are with a politically anxious person, your response can either ramp up their anxiety or calm it down. It is always better to calm it down. If you feed it, don’t be surprised if the result is irrational and unreasonable behavior. Highly anxious people are in survival mode. Rarely are great decisions made when the brain is in survival mode.
To calm their anxiety and bring them back down to earth, take a deep breath and slow down. Show respect. Smile. Listen. Let the other person know you heard them. Let them know you care about their concerns. The result will be a calmer and more rational person… one who is much more willing to listen to you. They may not agree with you, but they won’t be your enemy. They’ll be more willing to find common ground and work with you.
The Power of Stories
Have you ever wondered why Jesus taught in parables? I’m sure parables were part of His culture and the teaching styles of His day. But they also make people think, work things out for themselves, and draw their own conclusions. It’s harder for people to argue with the conclusions they came up with on their own than the conclusions presented to them by somebody else.
So if you find someone questioning your positions, tell your stories. Leave the facts and figures at the door for now, although they certainly have their place. Never mind sharing your opinions and announcing your conclusions, either; that just invites arguments. Stories are gentle and invite thought. Appeal to people’s emotional side rather than their logical reasoning side (which often won’t sound very logical or reasoning if you start there!). You can eventually get to the logical reasoning side through stories.
And if they still don’t understand? That’s ok. Try Letting People Misunderstand.
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