When the World Feels Like Too Much: Collective Trauma, the Nervous System, and Staying Human
Hey, so…we’re all seeing this, right?
If you’ve been asking yourself some version of this question lately, you are not alone. A lot of us are walking around right now with a low-grade sense of dread humming in the background, like a dark cloud looming over us.
Even if nothing catastrophic has happened in your own life this week, your body knows something is wrong. Violence, dehumanization, the misuse of power, the constant churn of breaking news…it all lands somewhere. The nervous system doesn’t need direct exposure to register threat. Proximity, even from afar, is enough. Witnessing is enough.
This is what collective trauma feels like.
It doesn’t always arrive as panic. Sometimes it shows up as exhaustion. As numbness. As irritability. As the sense that you can’t quite settle, even when you try.
This is a common response to sustained stress and uncertainty. Something we were never meant to know like this. (Literally. Your nervous system wasn’t designed for prolonged stress and constant activation.)
Living in a State of Ongoing Crisis
Many of us, especially millennials, have grown up inside overlapping emergencies. Economic instability. Political upheaval. Climate grief. Mass violence. A pandemic. The slow unraveling of institutions that were supposed to protect people.
There’s a particular kind of weariness that comes from realizing this isn’t a temporary moment. It’s a pattern.
The pattern:
Relentless crisis without relief
Constant threat without resolution
Information overload without accountability
Instability without repair
Demanding productivity while safety erodes
In other words, it looks like being flooded with too much input, too fast, too often. It looks like breaking news that never stops breaking, conflicting narratives, and a constant demand to pay attention. It looks like little responsibility for misinformation, harm caused by lies, and little, if any, meaningful correction, repair, or consequences for those in power. People are left to stay informed, sort truth from distortion, and emotionally process harm in real time, while the sources of that harm face little to no reckoning.
When systems fail again and again, when truth is distorted, dignity is denied, humanity is violated, and harm is minimized, ignored, and justified…it creates something deeper than stress. It creates moral injury. A rupture in our sense of safety and meaning. A grief that doesn’t resolve neatly.
The body holds this. Even when we keep going.
And If You’ve Lived Through Spiritual Abuse…
…this moment may feel especially charged.
For many people, especially those with histories of religious trauma or spiritual abuse, collective trauma and moral injury can reactivate familiar patterns rooted in high-control religious environments.
Watching authority go unchecked. Seeing power framed as righteousness. Hearing harm explained away as necessary or deserved. These dynamics are familiar to many people who grew up in high-control religious systems.
When old patterns resurface on a larger scale, the nervous system remembers. You may feel activated, angry, hopeless, or frozen, and not entirely sure why. Your body is responding to what it has learned about danger and betrayal. These responses reflect a nervous system responding to conditions that are not safe or humane. When there is danger and betrayal, the body reacts, not because this is normal, but because it isn’t.
Rest Is Not Quitting
There is a lot of pressure right now to stay constantly informed, constantly engaged, constantly outraged. As if looking away for a moment means you don’t care.
But there is a difference between disengaging from reality and setting boundaries around what your nervous system can metabolize.
You are allowed to stop scrolling.
You are allowed to take breaks from the news.
You are allowed to choose when and how you stay informed.
Rest is not avoidance. It is how we keep ourselves from burning out entirely. You cannot stay present to what’s happening if your body is in a constant state of threat. Rest is resistance.
Rest. Return. Repeat.
Joy Is Not Ignorance
It is also ok to have fun right now.
To laugh. To enjoy small pleasures. To feel moments of ease or connection or beauty. This does not mean you are minimizing suffering or betraying your values.
Joy is not a denial of humanity.
Joy is a remembrance of humanity.
Joy helps us re-gather what harm tries to fragment.
Joy seeks to reclaim what this broken system attempts to take away.
In systems that bank on our fear, exhaustion, and despair, joy becomes an act of resistance. It reminds us of what we are trying to protect. It keeps us tethered to our humanity.
You Don’t Have to Carry This Alone, or All at Once
You are not required to hold the weight of the world every waking moment. You do not need to stay activated to be ethical. You do not need to sacrifice your well-being to prove that you care.
Caring for yourself through rest, laughter, boundaries, and connection is not selfish. It is how you stay in this for the long haul.
Both things can be true at the same time: you can be aware of what’s happening, and you can choose to take care of yourself.
If you’re struggling right now, remember that you are responding to very real threatening conditions.
And if you’re finding moments of lightness alongside grief, that’s ok.
Both are human. Both belong.