Welcome back, everyone, to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity

and the modern world of science and culture very seriously.

My name's Dan Koch.

I'm a licensed therapist and a post-evangelical liberal Protestant.

Now, this is part two of my Trump anxiety series. Part one, unfortunately for

YouTube viewers, is only available as an audio podcast. You can find that anywhere you listen to

podcasts under the You Have Permission feed. And if you're listening on a podcast app,

then you can go back, scroll back a couple months and find part one. I'm trying to pepper

these episodes in every couple of months, as so many of us are anxiously dreading the 2024

election between Trump and Biden. I know that I am. I think that there is some wisdom, however,

in some of the cognitive tools that I use with my therapy clients that can help us with this anticipatory anxiety, make sure to subscribe in the podcast app or YouTube if you want to make sure to catch the next one when it comes out.

Let me say right off the bat, my goal here is not to minimize our sense of the potential danger of a second Trump term.

I think it may well indeed be quite dangerous, nor do I want to equivocate between a Trump term and a Biden term or any other possible outcome.

As I mentioned last time, it's impossible to predict the future, but on my view,

another Trump term is significantly more likely to lead to disastrous results than a Biden term.

I will be voting for Biden. I will be donating to Biden's campaign via money and hopefully time.

Nonetheless, we each have a lot of life to live before November, and I know for my part,

I am in danger of much of that life being sucked into the black hole, of Trump-related

doom scrolling, of checking polls or betting markets, of binging politics, articles, and

podcasts in the hopes of alleviating my anxiety.

And things like that are largely a waste of my time, I believe.

They will increase my own anxiety without any discernible impact on the election itself.

...