Collective Stress: How Political Upheaval Impacts Your Nervous System (And What To Do About It)
When the world feels unstable, your nervous system feels it too.
What Is Collective Stress and Why Does It Exhaust Us?
Your heart may start to race, your stomach might clench, and your thoughts might begin to spin when you think about the polycrises of fascism, war, environmental collapse, and technologically-driven isolation. This is collective stress, and it happens to me too. On top of our everyday stressors like work, relationships, paying the bills, managing our mental and physical health, and balancing busy schedules, we are living inside overlapping global crises. And we are ALL walking around in a world that feels like it is crumbling. This collective stress shapes our individual experience.
Collective stress creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, the load of holding awareness of two seemingly conflicting realities. If your algorithms look anything like mine, a scroll through TikTok might look like this:
- An Iranian journalist naming fellow journalists killed during current protests
- A satire of Millennial mannerisms (I felt called out…)
- Minnesotan protesters singing Hey Jude to ICE officers
- Dog disobedience hacks (I don’t even have a dog…)
- A baby cuddling a dog
This constant deluge of tragedy, mixed with the whiplash of going from sadness, to numbness, to amusement, to curiosity, to shame, to guilt, back to amusement… it’s A LOT on our nervous system. There is no space for anything to settle. It is exhausting. And even if you aren’t on social media, you can feel it in the air around us, in conversations, at family dinner tables, in deciding which items to put back at the grocery store checkout, even in silence.
Why Pausing Matters for Nervous System Regulation
If you are reading this, I invite you to take a moment right now to pause and notice your body. Have you been holding your breath as you’ve been reading? Is your jaw clenched, are your shoulders tensed? If it feels okay to you, take a breath now with me and fill your lungs completely. Notice the room around you.
How was that? Can you feel your feet more sturdily on the ground? When we can build the muscle of PAUSING, we become more and more able to stay present, grounded, and available for both the everyday and collective stressors we face, even when things are chaotic, unstable, and scary. As Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist, famously wrote: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
That space is where nervous systems regulate. Pausing to feel our grief or anxiety helps us address it, and invites us to be more involved in both our own healing and collective healing, as opposed to responding with avoidance, collapse, or reactivity.
Personal Healing and Collective Care: Expanding What Healing Means
Whether you have been engaging in the work of self-healing but haven’t yet opened yourself up to the impact of the larger world on your experience, or you’ve been working to make change in the wider world but haven’t considered the role of your own healing in that, I invite you to expand your definition of healing to include both. Grace Lee Boggs, a social activist, teaches us: “In order to transform the world, we must transform ourselves.” In order to engage in collective care, we must be resourced enough to show up for the important work of relationship building and to tend to our individual needs without burning out.
As we see happening in Minneapolis, the unprecedented surge of ICE agents has been met by a united front of neighbors and community members coming together to protect each other. It is my understanding through professional and lived experience that our commitment and ability to care for ourselves, one another, and tend to the work of relationships is the most important work we can do.
Your Stress Response Is a Normal Reaction to a Scary, Overwhelming World
If you are crying after a political conversation, feeling tension when you hear the sound of the news, or feeling exhausted in a way that goes beyond your daily life responsibilities, there is nothing wrong with you.
You are not broken. You are having a normal response to prolonged, collective stress.
If you are thinking, “But my life is not as bad as what I see on the news,” remember that Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer once said: “No one is free until we are all free.” The suffering of others affects us. And our suffering ripples out too. Getting support is not a luxury. It is stabilizing and essential.
Systems of oppression want us to go on with “business as usual.” They want us to not pause with intention to address our stress and grief, and this perpetuates our stress and grief. When we commit to healing ourselves and each other, we are taking a step toward liberation and creating the world we want, together.
Looking for Therapy Support for Anxiety, Grief, or Political Stress?
Therapy can support you in addressing these challenges and honing your relationship skills, both with yourself and with the people in your life. If you are noticing that political upheaval is impacting your sense of safety or your mental health, therapy is a place to process that openly.
I became a therapist to support people in building emotional resilience and agency, to experience and tend to their feelings, so that we may all have the skills to show up for each other, ourselves, and the world.
Working with me, you can build and practice the skills of caring for yourself, others, and the world by exploring your own history, stressors, and trauma. I specialize in somatic therapy, IFS (Internal Family Systems), and trauma-informed care, and I bring in art, creative expression, and ritual to help you honor and move through personal and collective grief and anxiety. Together, we work to expand your capacity to feel the whole spectrum of emotions while remaining grounded, present, and strong.
I work with individuals navigating anxiety, political stress, trauma, and grief who are looking for a therapist who meets them with both clinical skill and genuine humanity. If that sounds like you, I’d love to connect.
In addition to therapy, getting involved in your local community is a proven and powerful way to support not only the world but your own nervous system. Next time you make too much food, find a local mutual aid organization or food pantry. Start small. Let the networks of care and support happening in Minneapolis encourage you to trust in the power of hyperlocal connection. Say hello to your next-door neighbor next time you take out the trash. Find the person on your block who has been there the longest and ask them to help organize a potluck. Go to a protest and give your neighbor a ride. Hop on a virtual Zoom for community member support. Do not underestimate the healing power of connection.
Collective stress is real. In this world where our systems make us feel powerless, I invite you to choose your own agency and connect to yourself, your healing, and your community. You don’t have to carry this all alone, reach out and schedule a session.