Activate your Election Day Self-Care Plan

8 ways to maintain your serenity no matter who wins

By now you’ve made your plan to vote or have already voted.

By this point, if you don’t know where you stand, you might do some speed reading or sit this election out.

You do you.

No matter how you lean politically, we can all lean in and give ourselves some good self-care to get through this election and to be our best selves, win or lose.

What is your self-care plan for Election Day?

How will you take care of yourself as the results roll in? Will you watch endless hours of TV? Will you stay up late as each state is announced? Will you bite your nails, yell at the dog or eat endless donuts?

Politics can take over your life and hijack your serenity. Every day my husband announces more doom and gloom as the election approaches. Every headline and sound bite make him feel as if the world will end on Election Day if the wrong candidates win.

I understand his fears, but I won’t give in to them. Every day I make a conscious decision not to awfulize what lies ahead if the people I vote for are not elected.

Let’s face it, half of the country is going to be disappointed on Election Day. We just don’t know which half and how that half will handle losing.

But right now we’re all united by anxiety and fear. If there’s anything more you can do to support your candidate, do it. I’ve already addressed hundreds of postcards, placed sticky notes in dozens of women’s restrooms and put a giant sign in our yard to remind people to VOTE EARLY.

Here’s what I’m including in my Election Day Self-care Plan:

Nature: Get outside for some Vitamin N. Nature doesn’t take sides. Those orange and yellow leaves falling like confetti are a reminder to let go. To let go and let God. To let go and let Love. To let go of what happens next and immerse myself fully in this present moment.

Read: I just bought a copy of Alexei Navalny’s memoir Patriot. I read the first five chapters in one night. Even after Vladimir Putin’s thugs poisoned the opposition leader in a failed attempt to kill him, Navalny returned to Russia. Why? Because it was home. It was HIS country, not just Putin’s.

This country is my home, and your home, no matter who is elected to lead it, no matter how messy they leave it in four years. It’s still our home.

Meditate: Create a space to pause. Viktor Frankl, who lost his family in the Holocaust, continues to inspire me. I bought his book Man’s Search for Meaning in the bookstore at Auschwitz-Birkenau. No matter what horrors the Nazi’s inflicted on him and his family, Frankl believed he had 100 percent power over his response to them.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space,” he wrote. “In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Meditation increases that space. Every morning I sit for 15 minutes in perfect silence. No music. No words. Just silence. I don’t get any visions or lightning bolts, but later, all through the day, I get gentle nudges that guide and direct my heart, my thinking, my words and my actions.

Move: Go for a run. Take a hike. Do some sit ups or push-ups. Lift some weights. Declutter a room. Show up for a yoga class. All that negative energy needs an exit ramp. Give it one.

Journal: Writing is my exit ramp and my dumpster. I scribble out all my fears to stop them from swirling around my head. Once I see them in black and white I surrender them all to a power greater than me.

Unplug: Turn off the TV. Stay away from Facebook and Twitter for a few hours, days or for the next four years.

Commit: Make a commitment to love this world regardless. To love life unconditionally. To love what is. To show greater love to those most affected by the election.

Pray: I constantly remind myself: God isn’t up for election. The same Higher Power (Love) will be running the world the day after we vote.

I also use the Serenity Prayer daily, which covers it all: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (the election results), courage to change the things I can (me, me and only me) and the wisdom to know the difference.

Where do you get that wisdom?

All of the above.