Journaling Through Election Chaos: Why Writing Beats Arguing

A friend of mine journals her way through every election.

Not in a diary sense. She builds a scrapbook. News clippings, printed articles, handwritten notes about what she believes and why. She cuts out the pieces that matter to her, arranges them, annotates them. By the time the election is over, she has a physical record of what she thought and felt during a period when most people just felt overwhelmed.

It calms her down. It brings a little order to the chaos. And whether she realizes it or not, she’s doing something that most people never do during an election. She’s thinking instead of reacting.

I think she’s got the right idea, and I wish more people did.

Every election season I watch people turn into worse versions of themselves online, picking fights with cousins and old friends over posts they’ll have forgotten by spring. A notebook would save a lot of those relationships. Nobody sells you that option, because calm people don’t click on anything.

What does election season do to your thinking?

Election seasons deliver more than information. They deliver conflict, fear, urgency, and contradiction, all of it arriving at the same time from every direction. The news cycle runs around the clock. Social media turns every opinion into an argument. Friends and family members who agree on everything else suddenly can’t be in the same room. For more, see political books that build trust through specificity and What the 2024 Election Taught Us About Branding, Messaging, and the Power of Books.

The emotional toll is real. Sleepless nights, irritability, anxiety that sits in your chest and doesn’t leave. The feeling of being trapped between needing to stay informed and needing to step away before the noise destroys your ability to think clearly.

I don’t blame anybody for feeling that way. The coverage is built to keep you anxious, because anxious people keep watching and keep scrolling, and the networks and platforms make money from every sleepless night they help cause.

Most people deal with this by either consuming more news, which makes it worse, or disconnecting entirely. That leaves them feeling guilty and uninformed. There’s a third option.

Does Journaling Help With Election Stress?

Journaling during an election helps you process what politics is doing to you.

When you write down what you’re feeling, you externalize it. The anxiety that was circling inside your head is now on the page. It hasn’t disappeared, but it’s been moved from a place where it controls your thoughts to a place where you can look at it, examine it, and decide what to do with it.

You don’t need prompts or structure. Start with whatever is loudest in your head. The argument you had at dinner. The headline that made you furious. The policy you can’t stop thinking about. The fear you don’t want to say out loud. Put it on the page. No one is reading it. No one is grading it. The page absorbs what your relationships cannot.

This is especially useful when the urge to argue hits.

Political arguments with people you care about rarely change minds, but they reliably damage relationships. Writing down what you want to say, every heated word of it, lets you get it out of your system without the fallout. You can say everything on paper that you know better than to say at the table.

Losing a brother or an old friend over a candidate who’ll never know either of your names is a terrible trade, and people make it every election cycle. I’d much prefer those words go into a notebook where they can’t hurt anybody.

Clarity Comes from Slowing Down

The speed of election coverage makes it nearly impossible to figure out what you think. You’re told what to think before you have time to process what happened. Opinions arrive pre-formed. Outrage is manufactured on a schedule.

Writing slows that down. When you sit with a notebook and ask yourself what you care about, what policies fit your values, what kind of country you want to live in, the answers that come out belong to you, and no pundit or algorithm put them there.

My friend’s scrapbook works this way. By physically selecting which articles to keep and writing her own notes alongside them, she’s filtering the noise through her own judgment. She’s choosing, evaluating and deciding what matters, with scissors and a pen instead of a feed. That process itself is calming because it puts her back in control of her own thinking.

The Unexpected Value of Personal Records

Most people never consider that the writing you do during a chaotic period can become valuable source material later.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my ghostwriting work. Memoir clients regularly hand me personal writing from decades earlier, journals, notebooks, loose pages, sometimes boxes of them, and that raw material becomes the foundation of their book. Doris handed me over 2,000 pages of handwritten notes spanning her entire life, including dream journals she’d kept for years. That personal archive became Gators in the Soup.

Several other memoir clients have handed me journal pages, personal letters, and notes they wrote during periods of upheaval.

Those raw, unfiltered records are often more useful than anything they can recall from memory. The emotions are fresh on the page. The details are specific. The voice is honest in a way that polished recollection rarely matches.

Every journal entry is a real voice to work from, and every year with nothing on paper stays a blank the family can only guess at.

An election scrapbook, a political journal, a box of notes about what you believed and why, these are coping mechanisms, and they’re also primary sources. If you ever write a memoir, the chapter about what this period of your life felt like will be stronger because you wrote it down while it was happening.

Why journal instead of posting about politics?

Social media encourages people to perform their political opinions. Every post is a public statement. Every comment is an argument waiting to happen. The pressure to take a position, defend it, and win the exchange turns political engagement into a competitive sport with no winners.

A journal has no audience. There’s no algorithm deciding who sees your thoughts. No one is waiting to reply. You can contradict yourself. You can change your mind between paragraphs. You can be uncertain, confused, angry, hopeful, and exhausted all on the same page, because that’s what elections feel like for most people.

The honesty that a private journal allows is exactly what public platforms discourage. And that honesty is what produces clarity. You can’t figure out what you think while you’re performing for an audience, and every platform is designed to keep you performing. That design is vicious, because it turns decent people into combatants for the sake of engagement numbers. Put that energy into a page nobody else will ever see.

A Practice That Outlasts the Election

Elections end. The journaling habit doesn’t have to. The same practice that helps you process political chaos works for any period of uncertainty, career transitions, family upheaval, health crises, grief.

My friend has scrapbooks going back multiple election cycles. Each one is a snapshot of who she was during that period, what she cared about, what scared her, what she hoped for. Taken together, they’re a record of how her thinking evolved over time. That’s self-knowledge.

If you’ve been writing through this election, keep the pages, including the angry ones you’d be embarrassed to show anybody. Those are exactly the pages a memoir needs, and it would be a damn shame to throw them out because the election’s over and you’re sick of thinking about it. If you haven’t started, start tonight.

Schedule a free consultation if you’re ready to turn your personal writing into something larger.

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