The 2016 election has unleashed a wave of strong, difficult emotions, especially among those on the losing side.  Emily Dreyfuss of WIRED offers some suggestions on taking care of ourselves.

An excerpt: “Get Out of Your Head”

If you are experiencing despair, hopelessness, shock, or grief, they say, get out of your house. Go for a walk. Surround yourself with the people you love. Sleep, eat something healthy, drink water. Don’t read the news for a while if it’s upsetting you, unless it motivates you. Pause, if you can, to take stock of something good, something you are grateful for. Doing so will ground you outside the overwhelmingness of what you are feeling.

“Try to place today in the timeline of your life,” says Northeastern University psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of the forthcoming book How Emotions Are Made.“Normally humans have a really broad time horizon—you can remember the past, the future, you can do mental time travel—but in moments that are very strong, your time horizon shrinks to right now.”

Working toward what you see as positive social change can widen your perspective, but not everyone is able to take that step right away. People need one of two things when something devastating happens: either empathy or action, Barrett says. The key is to be patient with yourself and with the people around you.

Source: The Critical Role of Self-Care for Handling Post-Election Stress | WIRED