A helpful conversation with a mental health professional in high-anxiety times.

Sara Rubin here, feeling on edge. There’s so much anticipation leading up to tomorrow’s election. But there’s no amount of reading about it, analyzing it or waking up in the middle of the night thinking about it that makes Nov. 5 or the following weeks any clearer. 

Wherever you fall on the spectrum of this nail-biter of a race, whether you’re keeping calm or not, there are useful strategies to employ if and when it feels like your brain is on fire. 

Election anxiety was part of an interview I had last week with Dr. Susan Swick, a psychiatrist and the executive director of Montage’s Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health. She and I sat down to prepare for an in-person conversation we’ll have this Thursday, Nov. 7 at 12:30pm, part of our Mic’d Up At The Press Club series, and we covered a lot of ground. There’s evolving scientific research, there’s insurance (negotiations are underway with Central California Alliance for Health for Ohana to accept Medi-Cal patients), there are new offerings (a prenatal parents’ group, really helping the institution serve ages 0-25, emphasis on the 0).

I captured a sliver of my conversation with Swick in a Q&A that will appear in the Weekly this Thursday, Nov. 7, and we will revisit some of these topics during Mic’d Up (consider this your formal invitation). But there’s more as far as strategy that is well worth sharing—not just with young people, but people of all ages. And not just for election season, but during any trying time. 

Swick shared with me the idea of building a personal playlist of strategies to deal with uncertainty. Maybe you go to the gym to sweat it out; maybe you meditate; maybe you call your brother to gab; maybe you go for a walk. “There can be a really long list of potential stress management techniques—you should always have your own playlist,” Swick says. “It’s OK to have some that are about numbing out a little—having a drink after work, or playing Spelling Bee on your phone. If all you have are numbing strategies, it’s not going to go very well.

“Your capacity to control the outcome is very limited. But it doesn’t mean you are powerless,” she adds.

The hard part, of course, is learning what’s on your playlist, and when to tune into what technique. I’d love to know what techniques you use to stay steady in unsteady times.