I want to name something that does not get said clearly enough in wellness spaces: for Black women, queer people, trans people, and immigrants, the current political climate is not background noise. It is a direct, ongoing threat to safety, rights, and dignity. The stress that produces is not anxiety in the clinical sense of a disorder. It is a rational response to real conditions.
Your nervous system knows the difference between a hypothetical threat and a targeted one. It responds accordingly.
What I want to offer in this post is not a set of coping tips that ask you to manage your way through something that is genuinely hard. What I want to offer is an honest account of what sustained political stress does to the body, why it lands differently in communities that are directly named in policy debates, and what it actually looks like to build physiological resilience in the middle of a moment like this one.
The Body Does Not Know It Is Reading the News
When your nervous system detects a threat, it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, releasing cortisol and adrenaline, preparing the body to fight or flee. This response is brilliant for immediate physical danger. It was not designed for the kind of threat that arrives as a news notification, a policy announcement, or a legislative session being broadcast on your phone while you try to eat lunch.
The problem with political stress, particularly for communities whose rights and safety are actively debated by people with power over them, is that the threat is real but diffuse. It does not have a single source, a clear endpoint, or a moment when it is resolved. The nervous system cannot discharge the activation because there is no single event to respond to. There is only the ongoing awareness that the world is deciding things about you.
Research has established that biologically, threats to the social self are among the most potent triggers of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Political campaigns targeting minority groups can significantly elevate biological stress responses, with lasting health impacts beyond the campaign period itself.
This is what I mean when I say political stress is a somatic experience. It does not stay in your thoughts. It moves into your muscles, your sleep, your digestion, your heart rate, your capacity to concentrate. It accumulates.
What This Means for Black Women Specifically
I want to be specific here because the research is specific.
Black women have the highest estimated allostatic load of any demographic group studied. Research on 208 Black women found that institutional racism contributes to physiologic stress regulation regardless of self-perceived health status, and that Black women face compounding racial and gender inequalities that make avoiding high-risk exposures exceedingly difficult over the life course regardless of socioeconomic position.
Allostatic load is the cumulative physiological cost of chronic stress. It is not a feeling. It is a measurable biological burden that accumulates over time through repeated exposure to stressors, including political and systemic ones, and that increases risk for cardiovascular disease, hypertension, autoimmune conditions, and early mortality.
What this means in practice is that a Black woman navigating the current political climate is not starting from a neutral baseline. She is carrying the physiological residue of every previous encounter with systems that did not account for her humanity. The current moment is not an isolated stressor. It is an addition to a load that was already significant.
This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to take the body seriously as a site of both harm and healing, and to stop treating political stress as something to push through or manage with productivity.
What This Means for LGBTQIA+ Communities
72% of LGBTQ voters report experiencing a negative mental and emotional impact due to current political discourse, according to a 2024 poll conducted by GLAAD. For trans and nonbinary people in particular, policies targeting their existence, their healthcare, their ability to be named in public records, and their presence in educational institutions are not abstract political debates. They are direct challenges to the conditions necessary for survival and dignity.
Research examining LGBTIQ+ individuals indicates that they show recalibrations in HPA-axis functioning likely linked to minority stress processes, and that these stressors heighten significantly during political campaigns targeting their community.
The minority stress model, developed by Ilan Meyer, describes how stigma, discrimination, and anticipated rejection create measurable mental health disparities for sexual and gender minorities. What is relevant here is the distinction between distal stressors, which are external, like policies and legislation, and proximal stressors, which are internalized, like hypervigilance, concealment, and the chronic monitoring of whether any given environment is safe. The current political climate is generating both simultaneously, and the body is holding all of it.
Why “Just Turn Off the News” Is Not a Clinical Answer
I hear this suggestion offered genuinely by well-meaning people, and I understand the instinct behind it. But for the communities I am describing, it misunderstands the nature of the stressor.
Turning off the news does not turn off the threat. It turns off your awareness of it. For people whose rights are actively being legislated, whose safety depends on knowing what is happening, and whose communities are organizing in real time to protect each other, disconnecting from information is not always possible or even wise.
What is possible is building internal capacity to process and metabolize what the nervous system is holding, without being consumed by it. That is a different project than avoidance, and it is the one I work on with clients.
What Movement Can Do in This Moment
I am not going to tell you that exercise will fix this. It won’t. No individual wellness practice resolves systemic harm.
What movement can do, when it is approached correctly, is support the body’s natural discharge mechanisms. When the stress response is activated but there is no physical outlet, the cortisol and adrenaline have nowhere to go. They stay in the system, contributing to the physiological accumulation we have been describing.
Bilateral, rhythmic movement specifically, walking, swimming, resistance band work, anything that alternates sides of the body and moves at a steady rhythm, activates the same neurological mechanisms used in EMDR therapy to process and integrate emotional experience. It does not resolve the external conditions. It gives the nervous system a way to move through what it is holding rather than continue accumulating it.
What this looks like in practice varies significantly by person and by day. On a day when the news has activated you and you have energy to discharge, more vigorous movement can help. On a day when you are depleted and flatlined, what your nervous system needs is something gentle and grounding that does not ask for more output. Matching your movement to your actual state rather than a fixed program is the practice. That is trauma-informed training.
I also want to say clearly: rest is not weakness in this context. It is a political act. The insistence that Black women, queer people, and other targeted communities must continue to perform and produce at full capacity while their rights are being legislated against them is its own form of harm. Rest is part of how you protect a body that is being asked to carry too much.
What Therapy Can Do That Movement Cannot
The somatic load of political stress requires somatic intervention. But it also requires the relational and clinical work of making sense of what you are experiencing, naming it accurately, and building internal capacity that does not depend on external conditions improving.
Therapy in this context is not about reframing your feelings about the political climate. Your feelings are appropriate. What therapy offers is a space to process the accumulated weight without having to hold it alone, to distinguish between the things that are within your influence and the things that are not, and to build the kind of regulated nervous system state that allows you to stay present and functional even in conditions of ongoing threat.
Identity-affirming, liberation-based therapy understands that the political is personal. It does not ask you to separate your lived experience of systemic harm from your emotional and physical wellbeing, because they are not separate. They are the same thing.
I offer trauma-informed therapy virtually throughout Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia. If you are a Black woman, a queer person, a trans person, or someone navigating the weight of a political climate that is directly targeting your community, you do not have to carry this alone.
Frequently Asked Questions About Political Stress, the Body, and Mental Health
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Political stress, particularly for communities whose rights and safety are actively debated by those in power, activates the same stress response as any other threat. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis releases cortisol and adrenaline, heart rate increases, muscles tighten, and the body prepares to respond. When this activation is chronic and without clear resolution, the physiological cost accumulates. Research links sustained political and systemic stress to elevated allostatic load, which is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, immune dysregulation, sleep disruption, and chronic inflammation. Black women and LGBTQIA+ people carry a disproportionate share of this burden due to the compounding nature of racial, gender, and identity-based stressors.
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Because for many people it is different. Standard stress models assume a stressor that eventually resolves. Political stress targeting specific communities is ongoing, diffuse, and often tied to the fundamental conditions of safety and dignity. Your nervous system cannot close the loop because the threat has no single endpoint. This produces a particular quality of hypervigilance and exhaustion that is distinct from ordinary stress, and that does not respond well to coping strategies designed for time-limited stressors.
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Yes, and the research consistently supports this. Physical symptoms of political stress include muscle tension, headaches, digestive disruption, sleep disturbance, elevated heart rate, fatigue, and immune dysfunction. For Black women specifically, research shows that racial discrimination and political marginalization are associated with elevated allostatic load regardless of socioeconomic status. The body is not overreacting. It is responding accurately to ongoing threat.
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Yes, though the most effective therapy for this kind of stress is identity-affirming and liberation-based, meaning it understands systemic harm as real rather than asking you to reframe it. Trauma-informed therapy can help you process the accumulated weight of political stress somatically and relationally, build internal capacity and nervous system regulation that does not depend on external conditions improving, distinguish between what is within your influence and what is not, and stay connected to community and meaning even in conditions of ongoing threat. I offer this kind of care virtually throughout Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia.
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Bilateral, rhythmic movement tends to be most effective for processing the physiological residue of stress activation. This includes walking with arms swinging, swimming, resistance band circuits, and any movement that alternates sides of the body at a steady pace. The key is matching your movement to your actual nervous system state on a given day rather than applying a fixed program regardless of how depleted or activated you are. On high-activation days, more vigorous movement can help discharge cortisol. On depleted days, gentle grounding movement is what the nervous system can actually receive. Rest is also a legitimate practice, not a failure of discipline.
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The free consultation at this practice is a low-pressure conversation about what you are carrying and what kind of support makes sense for where you are. I am a Black woman and a licensed therapist who works specifically with BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ clients navigating the intersection of systemic stress, trauma, and embodied healing. Virtual therapy is available throughout Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia. Trauma-informed personal training is available virtually worldwide and in person in Gaithersburg, Maryland. You do not have to have it figured out before you reach out.
If this named something you have been carrying, the free consultation is a low-pressure conversation about what support could look like. No pitch, no pressure.
About Meagé:
Meagé Clements is a licensed clinical social worker and certified trauma-informed personal trainer based in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She offers identity-affirming, liberation-based therapy virtually throughout Maryland, DC, and Virginia, and trauma-informed personal training virtually worldwide and in person in the DMV. As featured in Oprah Daily.
