We Really Are Losing Our Minds

In a sort of careless, haphazard sort of way, the words “This is driving me crazy” slip from our mouths. We don’t actually mean that we’re having some form of mental health crisis. We’re simply frustrated by the current situation, whether that be a difficult puzzle, directions for a new piece of furniture, or watching the nightly news. We let the words out, not realizing that the phrase may be more true than we intentioned.

The issue is that cases of dementia are increasing steadily, so fast that medical facilities are having trouble keeping up. One in six visits to the emergency department in 2022 that resulted in hospital admission had a wait of four or more hours, according to an Associated Press and Side Effects Public Media data analysis. Fifty percent of the patients who were boarded for any length of time were 65 and older, the analysis showed. Many needed long-term psychiatric care that isn’t available.

Sitting here in a comfortable chair, looking around the cat on the desk to try and read the statistics, it feels like more and more families are being touched by it. And while there are definitely many factors involved – like people living longer, genetics, lifestyle choices – it makes you wonder about the role of the constant pressure cooker environment many of us feel we’re living in these days. There’s a growing conversation and some real science to back it up, suggesting that chronic stress, including the kind we get from our tense political situations, could absolutely be playing a part in increasing the risk for dementia, maybe even causing it to show up sooner than we used to expect.

Think about how stress works in the body. That “fight or flight” response, with cortisol flooding your system, is great if you need to jump out of the way of a bus. But the problem is, in modern life, that stress response often gets triggered constantly by things like work pressure, financial worries, and yes, the non-stop, often upsetting political news cycle, social media arguments, and deep divisions we see. When your body is stuck in that high-alert state day after day, it causes real wear and tear. We know chronic stress contributes to high blood pressure, inflammation throughout the body, and messes with our sleep.  

Now, connect that to brain health. High blood pressure damages blood vessels, and your brain relies on a healthy blood supply. Chronic inflammation is increasingly being linked by researchers to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. And when you’re constantly stressed, your sleep suffers, which is crucial because that’s when the brain does a lot of its “housekeeping,” like clearing out harmful proteins that can build up. High cortisol levels themselves aren’t great for brain regions involved in memory either.  

So, if we accept that chronic stress is physically harmful to the systems that support our brain, then it seems entirely plausible that the kind of pervasive, often inescapable stress many people feel today – including stress from worrying about the country’s direction, political conflict, or feeling angry and helpless about it – could be contributing to cognitive decline. It might be speeding up the underlying damage, lowering our brain’s resilience, or pushing people who were already vulnerable over the edge into dementia earlier than might have happened in less stressful times.

It’s not saying politics directly causes dementia, of course – it’s far more complex than that. But the chronic stress generated by today’s intense social and political environment adds a significant burden to our physical and mental systems. It creates a biological pathway through which this constant pressure could very well be accelerating cognitive decline and contributing to the rising number of dementia diagnoses we’re seeing. It’s a compelling reason to think seriously about how our collective stress levels might be impacting our long-term brain health.

Maybe we should all take a break for the rest of the evening.