Politics is costing Americans their sanity, friendships and sleep, study finds
Politics is literally making Americans sick — at least if their self-diagnoses are to be believed.
That’s what University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers discovered in a new study, which revealed that “a large number of Americans believe their physical health has been harmed by their exposure to politics and even more report that politics has resulted in emotional costs and lost friendships.”
The study was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. Researchers said it’s the first comprehensive look at the mental and physical toll of being politically plugged-in today.
Almost 40 percent of Americans surveyed reported that politics was stressing them out, while 20 percent said they were losing sleep — inundated by what researchers described as “never-ending campaigns, social media, (and) 24-hour news cycles.”
“Quite a few of the numbers jumped out at me,” political scientist Kevin Smith, the lead author, said in a statement. “Twenty percent have damaged friendships because of political disagreements ... And it’s a small (proportion), but 4 percent of the people in our sample said they’ve had suicidal thoughts because of politics. That translates into 10 million adults.”
Other findings were fascinating as well: More than 10 percent said politics has hurt their physical health and more than 31 percent “said exposure to media outlets promoting views contrary to personal beliefs had driven them crazy,” the researchers said.
“Politics is really negatively affecting a lot of people’s lives, or at least, they’re perceiving that politics is really negatively affecting their lives in deep and meaningful ways,” Smith said.
Unfortunately for politics-weary Americans, the findings come during a supercharged week in U.S. political news: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Tuesday, following a reported whistleblower complaint about the president pressuring Ukraine’s leader to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Smith published the study alongside co-authors John Hibbing, another University of Nebraska professor, and Matthew Hibbing of the University of California, Merced. A news release on their findings characterized the situation as “akin to a public health crisis.”
But the experts cautioned that it’s just one survey, so the findings “should be taken with a grain of salt,” NBC reports.
“Until we get more data, we won’t know whether this is really something [systemic],” or if sampling error or another problem impacted the numbers, Smith said, according to NBC.
The researchers said their findings are based on data collected in a YouGov survey of 800 people from March 15 to March 20, 2017.
“YouGov uses an online panel of approximately 1.8 million US respondents to create representative samples,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Our sample was specifically matched to a 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) sampling frame on gender, age, race, education, party identification and political interest.”
The researchers said their questionnaire “was developed by mirroring diagnostic instruments used by Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous.”
The entire project was a response to what they saw going on around them, Smith said.
“It became apparent, especially during the 2016 electoral season, that this was a polarized nation, and it was getting even more politically polarized,” Smith said. “The cost of that polarization to individuals had not fully been accounted for by social scientists or, indeed, health researchers.”
So who’s most negatively impacted in today’s political climate?
According to the researchers, results showed that “they are younger and unemployed; more disagreeable (more critical and quarrelsome), and less emotionally stable (more anxious and easily upset). They tend to be politically liberal, strongly disapprove of President Donald Trump, and have low opinions of their political opposites (they see them as uninformed, closed-minded, and untruthful). They also tend to discuss politics frequently and to be actively involved in a range of political activities.”
One limitation of the study is that it’s the first of its kind, meaning there aren’t earlier results to readily compare it to, researchers said.
But that also creates an opportunity: The study authors plan to share the data with other experts who can use it in their own research.
“One of the things that we’re really interested in is: What happens if a very left-leaning person is elected into the White House?” Smith said. “Do the symptoms stay the same but shift across the ideological spectrum?”
This story was originally published September 25, 2019 at 2:18 PM with the headline "Politics is costing Americans their sanity, friendships and sleep, study finds."
