The Body Goes to the Polls: Civic Stress, Allostatic Load, and Ubuntu as Collective Courage

Ancestral Wisdom · Science Meets Spirit · Public Health

What the Body Does Before the Count

Election stress is not a metaphor. It is something researchers have measured, and the numbers describe a country holding its breath. In the American Psychological Association’s 2024 Stress in America survey, conducted online by the Harris Poll with 3,305 adults in August 2024, 69 percent said the presidential election was a significant source of stress. Seventy-seven percent said the same about the future of the nation, and 72 percent said they were worried that election results could lead to violence.

The survey also names who carried the weight most unevenly. Personal safety was a major stressor for 47 percent of Black adults and 47 percent of Latino adults. Yet the same survey found something that deserves equal attention: 73 percent of Black adults and 67 percent of Latino adults said their vote matters, and 64 percent of Black and Latino adults felt hopeful that the election could lead to a more inclusive future. Stress and hope were present in the same bodies at the same time. That is not a contradiction. That is what it feels like to care about a future that is not guaranteed.

One honest caution belongs here. That survey measured a presidential year, and November 3 is a midterm. We do not assume the same numbers carry over, and we will not invent a figure we do not have. The survey also measured reported stress, not heart rates or hormones. What we can say is that it describes a population reporting substantial election-related stress before any result exists, and that is worth taking seriously.

Allostatic Load: The Wear No Ballot Counts

The language for what happens next comes from stress physiology. In a landmark 1998 paper, Bruce McEwen described allostasis, the body’s way of achieving stability through change, and allostatic load, the wear and tear that accumulates when the systems doing that work are asked to run too hard or too long. A deadline raises your heart rate and then lets it fall. Allostatic load is what remains when the falling never fully comes. It is a useful framework for thinking about what sustained stress can do over time. The research cited here does not measure allostatic load around any election, so we offer it as a lens, not a finding.

This is where the ballot and the body meet, and where justice enters the science. A study led by Arline Geronimus and colleagues, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found higher allostatic load scores among Black than white Americans, with age patterns the authors tied to what they called weathering. Weathering is the idea that repeated exposure to social and economic adversity ages the body faster. An election season does not create that load from nothing. It lands on bodies that were already carrying it.

We have written about this physiology before, in What Chronic Stress Does to Black and Brown Bodies, and the central point holds here too. Racism, scarcity, and political threat are not feelings. They are exposures. A community that has been asked to absorb them for generations does not need to be told to relax. It needs the conditions that make relaxing possible.

When a Whole Population Holds Its Breath

If the idea that politics reaches the body sounds abstract, one study makes it concrete. In 2019, Alison Gemmill and colleagues reported in JAMA Network Open that, using national birth records, about 2,300 more preterm births than expected occurred among Latina women in the nine months after November 2016, a rise of roughly 3.2 to 3.6 percent. The authors describe a possible association. They could not say why it happened, and they could not separate native-born from non-native-born mothers. We hold the finding with that care.

We name it because the study found an association between the election period and increased preterm births among Latina women. It did not establish whether collective stress caused that increase. It does not tell us about sleep, blood pressure, or anyone’s inner life, and it does not describe every community. It is one piece of information, and information is where care begins.

Research on election stress is still young, but the message in it is old. Ubuntu Village does not offer this to frighten anyone. We offer it because naming a pattern is the first act of care. If your body has been loud this month, it is not weak. It is paying attention.

Kenya: Cohesion Built Before the Ballot

Kenya knows what an election can cost a community. A national survey conducted in 2011 and published in Conflict and Health by Kirsten Johnson and colleagues found that, in the years after the 2007–2008 election-related violence, more than 30 percent of respondents met symptom criteria for major depression and for posttraumatic stress disorder. We say this plainly and without spectacle. Trauma after electoral violence in Kenya and anticipatory stress before a U.S. election are different exposures, and we do not treat them as the same experience. The people of Kenya are not a statistic of harm. They are the ones who have spent the years since building what comes next.

Part of what they built has a name. According to the website of Kenya’s National Steering Committee on Peace Building and Conflict Management, the UWIANO Platform for Peace was established in May 2010 to coordinate efforts to reduce electoral violence ahead of that year’s constitutional referendum. It was founded by the National Steering Committee, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, PeaceNet, and the United Nations Development Programme, and it describes itself as a conflict-prevention strategy that includes a crowdsourced early-warning system. Uwiano is the Swahili word for cohesion.

The lesson for a body under strain is structural, not sentimental. Peace in Kenya is not treated as a mood that arrives on its own. It is treated as infrastructure, something people plan for before the vote and keep tending after it. We have followed that landscape closely in Kenya on the Road to 2027, and in our reflections on how votes across the continent get captured. The thread running through all of it is the same: people protect each other best when they have agreed, in advance, how they will.

Nigeria: A Peace Accord and Its Limits

Nigeria offers a different example: a national peace accord. In February 2023, days before the national polls, 18 presidential candidates signed a peace accord in Abuja, convened by the National Peace Committee and the Kukah Leadership Centre. They pledged to conduct free, fair, credible elections, to keep the environment peaceful before, during, and after the vote, and to use constitutional means if they disputed the outcome.

The coverage is candid about the limits. The committee’s chair said an earlier accord, signed in September 2022, had been violated numerous times, and the reporting describes no enforcement mechanism for the new one. An accord is a promise. A promise is only as strong as the people who keep it.

That is the part we want to hold up. Accords are signed at the top of a country, while daily life unfolds in compounds, markets, congregations, and group chats. The reporting we cite documents the accord, not what neighbors did around it, so what follows is our own reading: a person’s well-being during an election likely depends on both the pledges made by those with power and the ordinary commitments people make to one another. We explored what chronic stress writes into biology for Nigerian women in The Body Keeps the Weather, and the same logic applies. Safety is something communities make together, then ask their leaders to honor.

Ubuntu as Collective Courage: A Week of Practice

Ubuntu begins from a simple claim: I am because we are. Applied to an election week, it means the question is not only how you will care for yourself through the strain, but who you will do it with. What follows are Ubuntu-informed community-care practices, offered as shared wisdom and not as treatment. Take what serves you and leave the rest.

Before the vote. Decide with someone. If you are voting, go with a neighbor, a sibling, or a friend, and make it an outing rather than an errand. Name two people you will check in with this week, and ask them to name you. Eat at a table at least once, with other people if you can. Choose a window for the news and let it close. Then, a few times a day, breathe slowly, letting the exhale run longer than the inhale, and notice your jaw and shoulders.

On the night. Watch with someone you trust if that helps, even if the gathering is a phone call, or step away from coverage and check in later. Either is a form of care. Keep food and water nearby. If you do follow the count, let it be the loudest thing in the room for an hour rather than all night, and decide in advance when you will sleep.

After the result. Your body may respond in different ways, and none of them is wrong. Relief can feel like collapse. Grief can feel like anger. Joy can feel like fear that it will not last. Some people feel very little at all. Make room for whatever comes, and check first on the people in your circle who were most exposed. Then keep going, because civic life is not one Tuesday. It is a long practice of showing up for each other.

Kenya and Nigeria did not wait for perfect conditions. In Kenya, partners built a platform for cohesion before a vote. In Nigeria, candidates signed an accord, and the people who report on it were honest about its limits. That is the oldest answer to civic stress we know: not a calmer mind alone, but a larger “we.”

Editorial note: Ubuntu Village is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates or political parties. This piece is about bodies and communities, not ballots. The survey and birth-record findings above reflect specific years and populations, and associations in public health research are not proof of cause.

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