How do you cope with political stress (and get work done)?

Question

In many countries, it seems like we're living through a time of political turmoil. Here in the US, of course, there's the election and associated shenanigans. I'm personally not in a situation I can get more involved, given Covid, kids, and a parent with a terminal condition. Still I feel guilty I am not doing more.Do you have a way for tuning out / coping with the ongoing political turmoil to get work done?

ziddoap · Accepted Answer

A few things that I have found to help myself:
- I have stopped visiting r/all and r/popular on reddit, and instead I have curated a more niche collection of subreddits unrelated to news or politics.
- I set time limits for how much news/day and news/week I consume. These are hard limits. No "one more story", or the FOMO starts to creep in. I try to limit to no more than 3 days/week, no more than 1 hr/day.
- I have tried to curate my news sources using mediabiasfactcheck.com, choosing those with high factual reporting and low loaded-word usage.
- Friends and family have all agreed that we avoid political conversations as much as is reasonable.
- I long ago ditched /all/ social media (I guess if you consider HN, or my reddit account with 0 comments, a social media -- I have those still). But no FB, no LinkedIn, no Twitter. Those three in particular wreaked havoc on my psyche and I feel like I've truly improved my life by removing them.
Guilt is a hard emotion to deal with, and even harder to give advice about because of how differently it manifests in each person. I hope you find some things that help you cope.

pickle-wizard · Answer

I've been donating to political causes that I support.

wprapido · Answer

Not watching / reading news and not getting involved in political discussions online helped me a great deal!

austincheney · Answer

It&rsquo;s not a concern for me.