Yes. You are not being dramatic, and you are not imagining it. Since around 2016, growing numbers of people have reported that the political climate affects their mental health. If the news leaves you tense, sleepless, irritable, or oddly flat, that is a response to something real in the world outside you, not a sign that something is wrong with you.
This article is about the effect, not the politics. It does not take a position on any issue, and it will not ask you to feel differently about things that genuinely worry you. It is about what happens to a person who stays in a state of alertness for months, and what can be done about it.
Why politics gets under the skin
Most anxiety has a target you can name and a boundary you can see, such as an exam, a deadline, or a difficult conversation. The political situation is different. It is ongoing, it changes daily, and you cannot finish it. One writer described it as the background becoming the foreground: things that normally sit at the edge of your attention move to the centre and stay there.
That constant low-level alertness is expensive. It uses the same system that keeps you safe in a genuine emergency, and that system was not built to run for months. Over time, some people become more reactive, more distrustful, or more inclined to expect the worst. Others go the other way and feel numb, switched off, unable to care.
There is a second reason it gets under the skin, and it is less obvious. A threat you can fight or flee is easier to bear than a threat you can only watch. With an exam, you can study. With a difficult conversation, you can prepare and have it. With a political situation, you may be able to vote or speak, and then you wait. Waiting without a finish line is one of the hardest things a nervous system can be asked to do.
This is why people who are not usually anxious find themselves checking the news before they are fully awake, or feeling a drop in the stomach when a headline comes through. It is why people who are usually patient snap at family members over the dinner table. The mechanism is ordinary. The duration is what makes it heavy.
Also read: Anxiety as an alarm system, not an enemy →
The two shapes it usually takes
- Tension: you check the news before you are fully awake, your shoulders are up, you argue with strangers online, and you cannot settle at night.
- Numbness: you stop opening the news, you feel flat, you do not want to talk about it, and you wonder why you cannot care about anything.
- Numbness is not indifference. It is often what is left after too much tension.
Most people move between the two rather than sitting in one. A week of intense checking is followed by a week of not wanting to look at anything. Neither state is a personality flaw, and neither is a permanent condition, but both are worth noticing, because they tell you which way the system is currently leaning.
A third pattern is easy to miss: the body speaks before the mind does. People describe a tight chest, a bad stomach, headaches, or a jaw that aches in the morning. In Nepal and across South Asia, distress often shows up physically first, and gets investigated as a physical problem before anyone considers what is being carried. If you have had tests that came back normal and you still feel unwell, that does not mean it is imaginary. It may mean the cause has not been asked about yet.
There is a reason the body gets there first. When you are braced, you are doing real muscular work: the shoulders lift, the jaw sets, the breath goes shallow and high into the chest. Hold that for an hour and it is tiring. Hold it, on and off, for four months and the body starts to complain in the places it has been working hardest. This is why the headache arrives before the person notices they have been grinding their teeth, and why the stomach gives out before anyone says the word stress.
It is worth knowing the direction of that arrow, because people often assume it runs the other way. They think: once I feel better, I will relax. In practice, relaxing the body a little is often what allows the mind to feel better, which is why breathing, moving, and sleeping are treated in this article as treatments rather than as nice-to-haves.
What a week of this actually looks like
It helps to see the pattern clearly, because it is easy to mistake it for a personal failure. A common shape looks like this.
- You wake and reach for the phone before you have decided to. Something has happened overnight and your body is already responding.
- At work you are present but not really there. Your attention keeps sliding back to what you read.
- By evening you are tired in a way that sleep does not seem to fix, because the tiredness is from alertness, not from effort.
- Late at night you scroll again, the most inflammatory thing your feed has, and then lie awake.
- The next morning you feel worse, and conclude something is wrong with you.
Each step is understandable, and together they form a loop. Nothing in that loop requires a diagnosis to explain, and nothing in it is permanent. It does, however, need interrupting somewhere, and the most interruptible point is usually the phone by the bed.
What you can control, and what you cannot
One of the most useful ideas for a situation you cannot fix is to sort what is yours from what is not. Your vote, a donation, a conversation you choose to have, and the limits you set on how much news you take in are yours. The outcome of an election, what a political leader decides, and what other people believe are not.
This is not about ignoring the situation or pretending to be calm. It is about putting your effort where it can actually change something, because effort spent on what you cannot change is how exhaustion turns into despair.
It is also not a test of how much you care. Some people carry guilt about limiting their news intake, as if less scrolling means less concern. Care is measured in what you do for the people and causes you value over years, not in how many hours of the day you spend feeling terrible about them. Being worn out does not help anyone.
- Keep a short list of things you can act on, and give them real time rather than worry time.
- Notice when you are re-reading the same updates and getting no new information, only more tension.
- Let some conversations be finished. Not every disagreement needs your participation to be resolved.
- Allow yourself to enjoy something. Enjoyment during a difficult period is not betrayal.
Practical things that help
- Set specific times to check the news, and keep them away from the first and last hour of the day.
- Keep the news out of the bedroom, and do not open it before sleep.
- Limit social media rather than only limiting news sites, since the arguments often happen there.
- Name the feeling out loud to one person who can hear it without arguing back.
- Move your body, get outside, and protect your sleep. These are boring and they work.
There is also a way back into the present when you are caught in a spiral. The five senses are the fastest route, because the spiral lives in the future and the senses only exist now. This is the same technique used for panic and acute anxiety, for the same reason.
A news routine that actually holds
Most advice on this fails for the same reason most diets fail: it asks for a total ban, and a total ban is hard to keep on a bad day. What works better is a structure with two fixed points and a gap in between. The structure matters more than the number of minutes.
- Anchor one check to something you already do, such as after lunch or on the way home. A check tied to an existing routine survives a bad week; a check tied to a decision does not.
- Keep one check, not a scroll. Open the source, read what is there, close it. The endless feed is a different activity with a different effect.
- Make the gap deliberate. Between checks, you are not being kept informed by avoiding the news; you are simply being informed on a schedule.
- Put the phone out of reach at night, not just on silent, and charge it in another room if you can.
- Keep a single notepad for anything that feels urgent and unfinishable. Writing it down releases the sense that you must hold it in your head.
Expect the first two days to feel wrong. There is a real pull toward checking, and it will be strongest precisely when you have decided not to. That pull is not a sign that you need the news. It is a habit complaining about being interrupted, and like most habits it gets quieter after the first few days rather than louder.
If you are the person others rely on for updates, tell them what you have changed and why. “I am only checking twice a day now, so if something big happens, message me” is a sentence that stops you being the last to know without requiring you to watch all day.
The guilt about switching off
This deserves its own section, because it is the thing that most often undoes the work. People manage two days of a healthier routine and then feel ashamed of it. In a difficult period, paying attention starts to feel like a moral duty, and any relief starts to feel like complicity.
It is worth asking what that guilt is actually protecting. Very often it protects nothing, and costs a lot. You are not helping anyone by being exhausted. The people affected by the situation benefit from you being able to think clearly, work, and be present with your family, and none of that runs on four hours of broken sleep.
There is a distinction worth keeping: concern for a situation is not the same as constant exposure to news about it. The first is a value. The second is a behaviour, and behaviours can be chosen. You can care deeply about your country and still put your phone down at nine.
Protecting the people around you
Your state is contagious, in both directions. Children in a household are extremely good at reading tension without being told about it. They may not follow the news, but they notice the tight voice at dinner, the phone at the table, the adult who is present and absent at once.
- Answer what children ask, at the level they asked it, without adding the parts they did not ask for.
- Reassure with what is true about their own life, such as school, routine, and who will be there tonight, rather than with promises about the situation.
- Keep one part of the day free of the subject entirely. Dinner without the news is worth more than any explanation.
- Look after the person in the household who is carrying it silently. They are often the one nobody asks about.
In a joint family, there is often one person who is expected to keep the mood steady. If that is you, remember that the role is not free. Holding calm for everyone else uses the capacity you need for yourself, and it is allowed to be shared.
If you want something to hold on to beyond the moment, three small habits cover most of the ground: a fixed time to read the news instead of continuous checking, a daily period outdoors or moving, and one reliable person you can speak to honestly. None of these require you to be less concerned. They simply stop the concern from taking up every hour.
The part that is harder to say out loud
Many people carry the political situation silently. They do not want to seem dramatic, they do not want to argue, and they are not sure anyone would understand why it matters so much. That silence has a cost. One study found that almost half of therapy clients wished their therapist had made room to talk about politics. The wish to speak is common; the space to do it is what is missing.
If you are the person in your family or friend group who is expected to stay calm and keep the peace, the load is heavier than it looks. Holding steady for other people while holding your own reaction privately is real work, and it uses the same energy you need for everything else.
When it is more than the news
There is a difference between being deeply affected and being unwell, and it is worth knowing which one you are in. If the tension or flatness has lasted several weeks, if you are not sleeping or eating, if you have stopped seeing people, or if it is interfering with work and family life, that deserves more than a news limit and a breathing exercise.
It is also worth asking whether the political situation is the whole story. Political distress often lands on top of something older: a difficult family history, an anxiety that was already there, or a grief that has not been named. The news gives it a shape, but it is not always the cause. This matters because the treatment is different. If the underlying pattern is older, limiting the news will help at the edges and leave the centre untouched.
A useful way to think about it is that the situation is a magnifying glass. It does not create a worry so much as enlarge one that was already there. Someone with a history of being dismissed at home may find the political argument unbearable in a way that someone else with the same views does not. Someone who grew up with an unpredictable parent may find the daily uncertainty of the news far harder to tolerate. Neither is overreacting. The situation has simply found the weak point.
This is also why two people can read the same news and come away with very different levels of distress, and why comparing yourself to a calmer friend is not the useful test it looks like. They may have a different history, not a stronger character.
- If the distress lasts several weeks rather than days, it is worth speaking to someone.
- If sleep, appetite, or work are affected, that is a signal, not a character weakness.
- If you have stopped enjoying things you used to value, take that seriously.
- If the political situation has become the only thing you can think about, that narrowing is worth attention.
- If you have thoughts of harming yourself, that is not a political problem and needs immediate support, not an article.
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Next step
If the political situation has moved from something you watch to something that runs your days, that is worth talking through with someone. Sessions are available in Kathmandu and online, in English or Nepali. You do not need to have decided that anything is seriously wrong in order to have one conversation about it.