Collective Trauma: How Years of Crisis Have Left Us Anxious, Exhausted, and Overwhelmed

covid-19 global pandemic mental health Feb 06, 2025

Black and white watercolor-style image of stressed, worried-looking woman

Something is deeply wrong. We can all feel it—but most of us don’t have the words to describe it. If you’ve been feeling exhausted, anxious, or like your nervous system is permanently fried, it’s not just you—it’s all of us. What you’re experiencing isn’t just personal stress. It’s collective trauma.

Over the past eight years, we’ve been bombarded with crisis after crisis, to the point where many of us don’t know which way is up anymore. Time feels warped—each year feels like a lifetime and a blur all at once—as we’ve been forced to process an overwhelming amount of change, chaos, grief, and instability. When a global pandemic that killed or permanently disabled millions is just one of many traumatic events, you know we’ve been through some serious shit.

What many people don’t realize is that trauma isn’t just an individual experience. It’s a form of chronic stress that impacts entire societies—shaping mental health, emotional resilience, and even physical well-being. This type of trauma is called collective trauma, and today, we’re diving into what that means. There are other important pieces to this puzzle we need to also digest before we start talking about solutions, so over the next few weeks I’m going to introduce you to ambiguous trauma (the stress we can’t name) and collective grief (the mourning we don’t even realize we’re carrying) before closing this little series out with some tools, tricks, and resources we can use to integrate our experiences and begin to heal. My goal is to give you a container of sorts for all of this—so you can not only understand what’s happening but also have some idea about what to do about it.

What Is Collective Trauma? Definition and Key Signs

Let’s start with the basics: What is Collective Trauma? By definition, collective trauma is a shared psychological response to widespread distressing events, such as pandemics, wars, or social upheaval. Unlike personal trauma, collective trauma affects entire societies, altering cultural norms, emotional resilience, and even mental health across generations.

To break it down even further, here are the key components of collective trauma:

Shared experience – The trauma is one that affects entire groups, communities, or nations, either directly or indirectly.
Ongoing impact – Even after the event is over, its effects linger for years impacting multiple facets of daily life.
Intergenerational transmission – Trauma responses can be passed down through families and cultures through our literal DNA. (I’ll touch on generational trauma in the future, because wow, is that some fascinating stuff!)

What Causes Collective Trauma?

If asked to guess what causes collective trauma, you might list some of the more obvious culprits like wars, genocides, or the COVID-19 pandemic and its emotional/social ripple effects. And you would be correct! Beyond catastrophic events like wars and pandemics, many of us experience collective trauma through long-term, ongoing stressors like:

Climate change anxiety – The growing fear that our planet’s future is uncertain.
Systemic oppression & racial violence – The trauma of witnessing widespread injustice, even if it doesn’t directly affect us.
Gun violence – The uniquely American experience of living with regular school, workplace, and public shootings.
Political instability – The sense that our country is unraveling, leaving us helpless to stop it.

Personally, the first few months of 2025 have filled me with horror, dread, and helplessness as I witness the damage being done to huge swaths of humanity by the current presidential administration. This moment—this collective unraveling that I know many of you are also experiencing—is exactly why I’m writing this series. If things are only going to get harder- at least for a while- I want to give you some tools to help you cope.

Under Siege: How Collective Trauma Hijacks Your Nervous System

Let’s be real here: Our nervous systems weren’t built to handle prolonged exposure to crisis after crisis. Yet here we are. The effects of chronic stress, trauma, and emotional exhaustion are now showing up in our bodies and minds.

Collective trauma keeps our nervous systems stuck in overdrive, trapping us in a state of constant Autonomic Nervous System activation—or, as it’s more commonly known, the cycle of fight, flight, or freeze.

Constant Fight-Flight-Freeze Activation

You may have heard the concept of “Big T” trauma (things like assault or the loss of a loved one) and “Little t” trauma (going through a breakup or the loss of a job) but, in reality, your nervous system can’t tell the difference between the two. Repeated or long term exposure to “Little t” trauma can actually cause more trauma than a singular “Bit T” event. Likewise, your nervous system can’t tell the difference between a short-term crisis (like almost getting hit by a car) and an ongoing crisis (like living through global instability). So when threats feel constant, the stress response never fully turns off.

Signs of collective trauma can look different for everyone, but we tend to respond in one of three ways. Here are some common mental and physical symptoms of chronic stress and burnout:

Fight Mode: Chronic frustration, irritability, feeling on edge, the urge to “fix” everything.
Flight Mode: Overworking, “doom scrolling”, avoidance behaviors.
Freeze Mode: Numbness, dissociation, feeling stuck or unmotivated.

Chronic Stress & Burnout: How Collective Trauma Impacts Your Brain and Body

When the threat - real or perceived- never ends, your body stays stuck in survival mode, flooding your system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This eventually leads to the symptoms of burnout, brain fog, and disconnection, which can include:

Chronic exhaustion (even after a full night’s sleep): You’re mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. For me, this experience of chronic exhaustion also includes a constant low-grade feeling of dread about the future.
Brain fog & focus issues: Your brain prioritizes survival, not deep thinking, so you may experience trouble concentrating, forgetfulness, or decision fatigue. (Do you ever feel borderline traumatized by deciding what to make for dinner, particularly post-pandemic? That’s decision fatigue.)
Emotional reactivity: You may be more quick to anger than in the past or anxiety and difficulty regulating emotions.

I want to be really clear with you that this isn’t just personal stress (though obviously you may be experiencing that, too)—it’s a biological response to prolonged uncertainty and instability. We’re never going to be able to go back to the “Before Times”, but understanding that this is a nearly- universal experience is the first step to reclaiming your sense of self and learning how to regulate your nervous system again.

Healing from Collective Trauma: Where Do We Start?

I’d love to give you a neat, quick fix, but the reality is healing from collective trauma takes time and is no more simple than healing from singular personal traumas. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier in this post, I’m breaking this down over the next few weeks.

Next week, I’ll introduce ambiguous trauma—the stress we carry but struggle to name.
Then, we’ll explore collective grief—the mourning we don’t even realize we’re doing.
After that, I’ll dive into how we heal—both individually and as a community.

For now, I just want you to remember this:

🖤 You are not alone.
🖤 You are not broken.
🖤 You are not failing at life.

The exhaustion you (and I) feel is real—and it makes sense. Your body and mind are responding exactly as they should to prolonged trauma.

Love you, mean it-

Charis

P.S. - Drop a comment below and share your experience. Let’s talk about how this chronic stress is affecting us all—and how we can heal together.

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