It’s a stressful time to be a psychiatrist in America. Not a day seems to go by without a panicked patient or friend asking me how to stay grounded in the face of the political chaos that has suddenly taken hold of the nation. One patient, a 38-year-old scientist, worries that his research will soon be defunded, ending his career. A good friend, a professor in her 60s, fears that the United States is sliding into autocracy. How, they want to know, can they make themselves feel better?

They haven’t liked the answer I’ve had to give them. This is a hard thing for a psychiatrist to say, but if you’re alarmed by Donald Trump’s hoarding of executive power and efforts to dismantle the federal government, then maybe you should be.

Plenty of Americans may cheer the disruptive effects of Trump’s flood of executive orders. But being inundated with unpredictable change over such a short period of time undermines people’s sense of security and control. It’s bound to provoke intense anxiety. Even some of Trump’s supporters appear to be reeling from the chaos: Recent polling suggests that more Americans believe that Trump has exceeded his presidential powers than not. (My patients, who are predominantly based in New York City, lean Democratic, but even some of my Republican patients have told me they are having second thoughts.)

Humans have a powerful instinct to protect ourselves from psychic pain by denying or minimizing the potential seriousness of the threats we encounter. Studies have shown, for example, that the brain selectively attends to positive information, and that people tend to discount negative predictions in order to maintain an optimistic bias. The urge is unavoidable. Several weeks after Trump’s inauguration, a close friend told me she was still on “a break” from the news. She hadn’t yet heard about the president’s proposal to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” among other things.

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An information blackout might temporarily spare you such discomfort, but denial can be its own source of anxiety. A lack of knowledge about the environment around you increases uncertainty, which psychological studies have shown to be very stressful. For example, in one 2015 study, people who failed the California bar exam were more anxious the day before they received the news than afterward. (However, they felt more negative emotions immediately following the news.) Certainty, by contrast, allows us to activate coping strategies. That’s why we can adjust to good news or even bad news—both are clear and unambiguous—but we cannot reconcile with the unknown.

Many therapists are trained to identify the exaggerated emotional responses and distortions of reality that beset their patients, and to help them understand that things are not as bad as they imagine. But when the situation really is as dire as a patient believes, soothing reassurance that one’s distress is misplaced would be malpractice. No one can say exactly where Trump is taking the country, but those who worry about the breakdown of essential public services, the spilling of national-security secrets, and national paralysis in the face of natural disasters are empirically grounded in their concerns. Think of it this way: If your house is in danger of catching fire, the last thing you should do is disable the alarm.

Optimism relaxes us, robbing us of the drive to take action. But angst, like a smoke detector, is a powerful motivating force—one that can impel people to help bring about the very changes they need to feel better. Worrying about missing an important deadline at work might, for example, rouse you to work faster or cancel other plans that would delay your task. The solution to a constitutional crisis is less clearly defined—unless you’re a lawmaker or member of the executive branch, there’s little you personally can do to stop the erosion of democratic norms—but getting involved in local politics and community organizations can both help to shore up your corner of the world. Speaking up in defense of democratic values is also powerful, especially when many individuals are willing to do so at once.

[Read: ‘Constitutional crisis’ is an understatement]

Research suggests that you’re less likely to take such action if you insist on pretending that things will be fine. For example, in a pioneering study published in 2011, college students who were instructed to imagine that the following week would be terrific felt significantly less motivated and energetic—and were academically less productive—than their peers who were told to visualize all the problems that might take place during the coming week. In difficult times, inappropriate optimism can disarm and relax us—and substitute for actions that could actually bring about that sunny imagined future.

None of this is to suggest that abject despair is the appropriate response to the rise of authoritarianism in America. If you’re feeling anxious or hopeless, try to focus on the basics: Exercise, get enough sleep, eat a healthy diet, and talk about your distress with friends and loved ones. These tried-and-true strategies help us tolerate adversity.

Even better is a technique called mental contrasting, co-developed by the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, who led the study on college students. The idea is to visualize an attainable goal (such as getting involved in local politics or running a mile), then think about all the obstacles that might get in your way (such as failing to find people who share your political vision, or shin splints). Mental contrasting has been shown to help people improve their relationships and recover from chronic pain, possibly because it undercuts the complacency brought about by unrealistic optimism. Crucially, the technique works only for goals you have a chance of achieving; in other words, mental contrasting may not be what allows you, personally, to defeat the global creep of authoritarianism. But it’s more likely to help you, say, identify five ways you can meaningfully improve your local community, then execute on them, which is likely to make you feel at least a little better.

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During this challenging time, maintaining one’s peace of mind—or at least a reasonable sense of hope—is a commendable goal. But first, Americans have to see the world as it is, even if it’s upsetting to many.

The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by.

Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.

“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.

Trump, another man said, was the only one inhabiting the political center these days. But some expressed concern about how much they were benefiting from the early days of Trump’s second administration, about the potential cost of new tariffs, and about the president’s embrace of “distracting” issues such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico and planning to redevelop Gaza.

“I feel like the administration is going for things that grab headlines, like trans rights, wars, things that people pay attention to, rather than actual inflation and pricing,” one of the men told the group. “So that is part of the negativity of politics that I don’t really enjoy.”

The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.

“We want to understand what are the very specific barriers for these working-class voters when it comes to supporting Democrats,” Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters on the project, told me. “I think we want to have a better answer on: Do we have a message problem? Do we have a messenger problem? Or do we have a reach problem?”

Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor and senior adviser to the Joe Biden White House, said the Democratic Party needs to think beyond the swing voters that were the subject of billions in spending last year and give attention to the people of all races and ethnicities who have firmly shifted away from Democrats to embrace the politics of Trump.

“The first thing you got to do is learn what you can learn, ask what you can ask, and know what you can know,” Landrieu told me last week, before the New Jersey focus group. “When you see it through a number of different lenses, it should help you figure out how you got it wrong.”

Since losing last fall, Democrats have railed against the price of eggs, denounced “President Elon Musk,” and promised to defend the “rule of law.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even led a chant of “We will win” outside the U.S. Treasury building. But there is still little Democratic agreement about the reasons for Trump’s victory or how Democrats can make their way back to power.

The Bridge plan is to launch a series of interviews with party leaders, tracking polls and meetings with voters around the country to try to figure out how best to fix the party after an election that saw Democrats lose the popular vote for the first time since 2004. Former Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Representative Colin Allred of Texas, who lost a bid for Senate last year, have signed up to work with Landrieu on the project.

Several other parts of the Democratic power structure are searching for answers as well. The new chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, has promised his own “postelection review” by the party. “Not an autopsy, because we’re not dead as a party,” he said late last year. The details have not yet been announced.

Third Way, a moderate Democratic group, ran a recent Democratic strategist retreat outside Washington to begin the conversation about how to create a new economic agenda and how to extricate the party from unpopular positions on issues such as transgender athletes and immigration enforcement. Future Forward, the largest Democratic independent spender in the 2024 campaign, has continued to circulate “Doppler memos” to Democratic decision makers, offering them real-time updates about how Americans are digesting Trump’s actions and the most promising avenues for pushing back.

The Bridge effort emerged from a four-day Palm Beach donor retreat this month, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. Top Democratic donors gathered for days of closed-door panels with titles such as “What Went Wrong?,” “What’s Going on With Men?,” “How to Stop Losing the Culture Wars,” and “Sending the Right Message: Reviving the Democratic Brand.” A Saturday-night panel at the conference with Landrieu, Allred, and others laid out how much was still unknown. The title: “It’s All About Listening: How Can We Reconnect With the Voters We Have Lost?”

“I just really believe you have to start from scratch. You have to throw out all of your assumptions,” Landrieu told me. “Whatever happened in the past is the past, and that is the last campaign. Joe Biden isn’t president anymore, and they don’t have Joe Biden as a foil.”

Even though the answers remain unclear, donors came away from the retreat saying they were eager to keep spending. Bridge has planned another donor conference in San Francisco for early next month. “At a time when some Democrats are in retreat, I saw a large group of donors at Democracy Matters in Palm Beach spoiling to re-engage in the fight,” John Driscoll, a health-care executive and an American Bridge donor, said in a statement.

The early after-action autopsy of Bridge’s own spending in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania last year echoed the early findings of other groups: Advertising for Kamala Harris and against Trump had a clear marginal impact where it was targeted, but it was unable to hold back the much greater Trump gains, including significant erosion among longtime Democratic voting blocs. A Bridge analysis conducted by the Democratic data firm BlueLabs of voters in the three states found that Democratic support overall dropped 3.9 percentage points in urban counties, 2.5 points in Hispanic-dominant counties, and 2.1 in Black-dominant counties. At the same time, counties where Trump received 60 percent or more of the vote saw their vote totals rise by about 5 percent.

Landrieu hopes to share early results before this year’s fall elections so that new tactics and messages get a test run before next year’s midterm elections.

After the focus group of white men, Bridge gathered a similar group of eight New Jersey Latino men—Trump-supporting members of the working class who had previously voted for Democrats. One voter said that the Democratic Party has walked away from representing the working class, given rising costs. Another expressed concern about the “woke” rules of Democratic governance. “People were getting hurt for any little comment, so you had to be politically correct for everything,” he said.

Democrats have spent years trying to convince nonwhite voters that Trump’s racial insensitivity should be a redline. These voters did not try to defend Trump’s racial views or argue that he is not racist. But even in that was a warning for the next iteration of the Democratic Party.

“Whether he is or not, I don’t care,” one voter said. “I vote with my pocket.”