By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Last updated May 2026

COVID-19 A Care Package Of Comfort For Mental Health.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • March 15, 2020

SUMMARY

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Collective crisis. Whether a pandemic, a period of political upheaval, or any of the other large-scale stressors that have shaped recent years. Activates our nervous systems in particular ways. This post, originally written during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been expanded to address what we’ve all learned about navigating uncertainty: the clinical framework for understanding collective trauma, the particular ways it affects people with relational trauma backgrounds, and a care package of genuine support for trying times. Whenever you find yourself in them.

Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. When the World Becomes Uncertain
2. What Is Collective Trauma?
3. The Nervous System in Crisis: What’s Actually Happening
4. The Care Package
5. Free Guide
6. The Both/And of Trying Times
7. The Systemic Lens: Why Collective Crisis Hits Differently for Trauma Survivors
8. Building Resilience for the Long Arc
9. Frequently Asked Questions
10. References & Related Reading

“You may shoot me with your words, / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Maya Angelou, poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist

QUICK ANSWER · UPDATED JUNE 2026

Collective crisis, whether a pandemic or political upheaval, activates the nervous system’s threat-detection circuitry without a clear moment of resolution, creating chronic hyperarousal or numbing rather than clean recovery. Originally written during COVID-19 and expanded to address sustained collective uncertainty, this post covers the neurobiology of what’s happening and what actually helps the nervous system tolerate ongoing ambiguity. In my work with driven women during periods of collective stress, the most important skill isn’t staying calm but learning to metabolize fear without being overwhelmed by it.

In short: Collective crisis activates the nervous system’s threat-detection circuitry without providing a moment of resolution, producing chronic hyperarousal or shutdown that ordinary coping strategies weren’t designed to handle.

HOW I KNOW THIS

With more than 15,000 clinical hours spanning multiple periods of collective disruption, I’ve tracked how sustained ambient threat affects functioning differently than single-incident trauma. Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and originator of Polyvagal Theory, documented how chronic environmental threat dysregulates the autonomic nervous system’s capacity for social engagement and recovery (Porges 2011).

When the World Becomes Uncertain

There are periods in our collective life when the usual scaffolding of certainty. The sense that tomorrow will resemble today, that the systems we rely on will hold, that we can plan for a future we can roughly predict. Becomes unreliable. We’ve lived through several of these in recent years: a global pandemic, political upheaval, economic uncertainty, the ongoing crisis of climate change.

In those periods, I watch something particular happen in my practice. The clients who have relational trauma histories. Who grew up in environments of unpredictability, where safety was never guaranteed. Often have a more severe response to collective uncertainty than those who didn’t. The external crisis plugs directly into the existing neural pathways of early threat. Their nervous systems recognize the feeling. They’ve been here before, in miniature, in their own homes.

This is not weakness. It is, in a strange way, a kind of accuracy: they are the ones whose nervous systems were already calibrated for a world where things don’t go as expected. And that calibration has a cost.

This is a care package for those times. And for the residue of those times that can linger long after the acute crisis has passed.

DEFINITION

Collective Trauma

A traumatic event or period that affects a community, society, or group simultaneously. Disrupting shared assumptions about safety, predictability, and social functioning. Collective trauma is distinct from individual trauma in that the usual support systems (community, institutions, social connection) are often themselves destabilized by the same event, making it harder to access the relational co-regulation that typically supports recovery.

The Nervous System in Crisis: What’s Actually Happening

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University School of Medicine, has written extensively about how trauma. Including collective trauma. Is fundamentally a nervous system event. When we perceive threat, the sympathetic nervous system activates: cortisol and adrenaline flood the bloodstream, the heart rate rises, attention narrows to threat signals, and the capacity for careful reasoning and future planning is temporarily reduced. (PMID: 9384857)

DEFINITION COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

Collective trauma refers to psychological injury experienced simultaneously by a community or society as a result of shared traumatic events. Distinct from individual trauma in that it disrupts the shared sense of meaning, safety, and social cohesion that communities depend on, as described by Jeffrey Alexander, PhD, sociologist and professor at Yale University, in his work on cultural trauma theory.

In plain terms: When everyone around you is also struggling, the usual resources for coping. Community support, a sense of normal, predictable safety. Are also disrupted. Collective trauma is uniquely destabilizing because the very systems you’d turn to for help are themselves under strain. Recognizing it as collective, rather than personal, can be the beginning of releasing some of the shame.

In acute, short-duration threats, this is adaptive. We mobilize, respond, and then. Ideally. The threat passes and the nervous system returns to baseline. But in prolonged, ambiguous threats. A pandemic that lasts years, an ongoing political crisis, chronic economic instability. The nervous system doesn’t get the all-clear signal. It stays activated. And chronic activation has real, measurable effects: disrupted sleep, irritability, difficulty concentrating, immune system suppression, and a flattening of what researchers call “affect tolerance”. The capacity to tolerate a full range of emotions without being overwhelmed.

Dr. Laurence Heller, PhD, psychologist and developer of Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM), adds that for people with early developmental trauma, collective crisis specifically activates what he calls “core states”. The deep, early-forming nervous system responses to threat that underlie many complex trauma symptoms. In a collective crisis, many people are experiencing what feels like a very old fear in a very new context.

“For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike.”. William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

The Care Package

This is what I want to offer you for trying times. Not a prescription, not a five-step plan, but a collection of genuine things that help:

DEFINITION WINDOW OF TOLERANCE

The window of tolerance is the zone of optimal arousal within which a person can process information and experience without being overwhelmed or shutting down, a concept developed by Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of The Developing Mind. Traumatic stress. Including chronic uncertainty. Narrows the window, making it harder to stay regulated, process information, or engage in connection.

In plain terms: When you’re in your window of tolerance, you can think clearly, feel your feelings without being flooded by them, and respond rather than react. Stress narrows that window. Chronic uncertainty narrows it further. The care practices in this post are, essentially, practices for widening the window. For expanding the zone within which you can function and feel.

Permission to not be okay. In times of collective crisis, there is often pressure. From social media, from our own internalized expectations. To be coping well, to be productive, to find silver linings, to emerge transformed. If you’re not okay, you are allowed to say so. Naming the difficulty is the first step toward processing it.

Normalizing your response. Whatever you’re feeling. Anxious, flat, irritable, grief-stricken, weirdly numb, alternatively panicked. Is a normal human response to abnormal circumstances. There is no correct way to feel during a crisis. Your nervous system is doing its best with information that would challenge anyone.

The basics, scaffolded. When the nervous system is activated, the basics become harder and more important simultaneously. Sleep, when possible. Movement of any kind. Even ten minutes of walking can shift the nervous system state. Food that is nourishing rather than just convenient. Water. These aren’t luxuries or self-care tropes. They are the literal substrate of your nervous system’s capacity to function.

Curated information intake. Collective crisis produces enormous volumes of information, much of it alarming, much of it contradictory, much of it designed (often unconsciously, sometimes deliberately) to activate rather than inform. Setting intentional limits on news and social media consumption is not avoidance. It is nervous system stewardship. You can stay informed without marinating in the anxiety of the scroll.

Connection with other humans. The nervous system regulates through connection. This is one of the most strong findings in trauma research. Text someone. Call someone. Sit near someone, even if you’re not talking. The co-regulation that happens through genuine human contact is irreplaceable, and it is particularly important when the nervous system is under sustained stress.

One small thing you can control. In times when large things feel out of control, one small domain of agency. A corner of your desk that is organized, a daily walk at the same time, a meal you cooked. Can provide a modest but real sense of ground. This is not about toxic positivity or pretending everything is fine. It’s about finding the small handholds that help the nervous system feel less at sea.

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Permission to grieve. Collective crises involve losses. Of safety, of normalcy, of specific people and things, of a future that looked different from what is now unfolding. Grief is not weakness. It’s the appropriate response to loss. Allowing yourself to grieve, rather than pushing through, is part of what allows the grief to move through rather than accumulate.

Compassion for your capacity ceiling. In times of sustained stress, your capacity is genuinely reduced. The things that felt manageable before may feel harder. The things you expect of yourself. Productivity, patience, emotional availability. May not be what you’re able to give. You haven’t become less capable. Your resources are being consumed differently. Adjusting expectations accordingly is wisdom, not failure.

The Both/And of Trying Times

Neha, a 40-year-old educator I worked with through the pandemic years and beyond, put something plainly that I’ve been thinking about ever since: “I feel both more broken and more real than I ever have,” she said. “Like the crisis stripped away a lot of the performance. I can’t maintain the facade of having it together. And weirdly, I’m starting to realize I didn’t want to anyway.”

The Both/And of trying times: they are genuinely terrible and they sometimes clarify what matters. They bring genuine suffering and genuine solidarity. They reveal real fragility and real resilience. They are not opportunities for growth in the toxic-positivity sense. You don’t have to be glad about them or find silver linings. But they do have a way of burning off a certain amount of pretense, and in that burning, some people find something more honest about themselves and their relationships.

This doesn’t redeem the suffering. But it is worth noticing.

The Systemic Lens: Why Collective Crisis Hits Differently for Trauma Survivors

Collective crises are not experienced equally. Research consistently shows that people with trauma histories, people from marginalized communities, and people with fewer socioeconomic resources experience collective crises with greater severity and with less access to the buffers that support recovery.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, research published in JAMA Psychiatry documented significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD in individuals with prior trauma histories compared to those without. The pandemic’s particular combination of isolation, threat of illness, and disruption of routine was, for many trauma survivors, a near-perfect activation of existing trauma patterns.

Dr. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, writes that recovery from trauma. Individual or collective. Requires three conditions: safety, mourning, and reconnection with ordinary life. Collective crises disrupt all three simultaneously. Understanding this isn’t defeatist. It’s accurate, and accuracy is the starting point for appropriate support. (PMID: 22729977)

In my work with clients during collective crises. Whether economic downturns, political upheaval, environmental disasters, or the particular weight of a world that seems to be producing new emergencies faster than we can metabolize the last ones. I return consistently to a distinction that I think matters enormously: the difference between helplessness and powerlessness. Helplessness is the subjective experience of having no agency whatsoever. Powerlessness is the objective reality that many forces are genuinely beyond our individual control. These are not the same. A woman can be powerless over the geopolitical forces shaping her world AND have genuine agency over how she responds to them, what she attends to, how she structures her relationships, and where she directs her energy. That distinction. Between what I cannot control and what I can, between the vast and the immediate. Is one of the most stabilizing frames I know in uncertain times.

The nervous system, in collective crisis, tends to loop. It fixates. Checking the news compulsively, seeking reassurance that is always inadequate, catastrophizing the next step before the current step has been processed. This is the hypervigilance of a threat-detection system in overdrive, scanning for danger with no clear object to scan. Gabor Maté, MD, physician and author of When the Body Says No, describes how chronic stress. The kind that comes from living in a sustained state of uncertainty without adequate support. Produces physiological changes that are genuinely harmful: suppressed immune function, disrupted sleep architecture, elevated cortisol that over time damages the very systems it was designed to protect. The solution is not to simply feel less anxious. That’s a demand that doesn’t work. The solution is to work with the anxiety rather than against it: to provide the nervous system with the specific kinds of input that down-regulate the threat response without requiring that the threat itself be eliminated.

Zoe is a thirty-six-year-old public defender who came to therapy during a particularly turbulent stretch of political news. She described her mornings as “already defeated before I’ve had coffee”. Waking with a kind of anticipatory dread that had nothing to do with her immediate circumstances and everything to do with what she might encounter when she opened her phone. In our work, we identified what I call her “news dose threshold”. The amount of information she could engage with before her nervous system shifted from informed to dysregulated. Below the threshold, she felt like a citizen who understood her world. Above it, she felt like a body absorbing threat without any way to discharge it. Finding that threshold and respecting it. Not as avoidance but as nervous system hygiene. Was one of the more concrete and immediately effective interventions in our work together. You don’t have to know everything. You have to know enough to act on what matters. Those are different quantities, and identifying the difference is genuinely protective.

Building Resilience for the Long Arc

The long arc of healing from collective crisis. Or from the individual trauma that collective crisis can activate. Is not a sprint. It’s a gradual process of nervous system repair, grief processing, and meaning-making that happens in relationship with other people and, often, with professional support.

A few things that support this long arc:

Ongoing, regulated connection. Not just the acute reaching-out of crisis, but sustained, predictable connection with people who know you. Therapy, long-term friendships, community. These are the relational infrastructure of resilience.

Somatic practice. The nervous system heals through the body as well as through the mind. Regular somatic practices. Yoga, breath work, dance, martial arts, anything that brings you into the body with a degree of intention. Build the physiological foundation for emotional regulation over time.

Narrative processing. At some point in the arc of recovery, there comes a time to put words to what happened. To tell the story, including the hardest parts, and have it witnessed. This can happen in therapy, in writing, or in careful conversation with trusted others. The act of narrating experience is part of how the brain integrates it.

Professional support when needed. For many people, the post-crisis period. When the acute crisis has passed but its effects remain. Is actually when the most therapeutic work becomes possible. If you find yourself still activated, still grieving, still carrying the weight of recent years, this is a reasonable time to seek targeted support.

I also want to name something that driven women in particular need to hear during collective crises: your hypercompetence is both an asset and a vulnerability. The same qualities that make you effective in emergencies. Rapid assessment, decisive action, high tolerance for ambiguity. Can also make it harder to receive support, to acknowledge your own overwhelm, or to allow yourself to not have a plan. In my practice, the women who struggle most in uncertain times are not the ones who lack resources. They are the ones who believe their resources should be inexhaustible. Who treat their own depletion as a failure of will rather than a predictable consequence of caring too much about too many things without adequate replenishment. Collective crisis is a particularly cruel context for this belief because the demands are genuinely extraordinary and the permission to be affected by them is often felt as a luxury. It isn’t. It’s a requirement for sustaining anything resembling a functional life over time.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

What I see consistently in my work with driven women is that the body holds the truth long before the mind catches up. By the time a client lands in my office describing what isn’t working, her nervous system has been signaling for months. Sometimes years. The tightness in her jaw at 3 a.m., the way her shoulders climb toward her ears during certain conversations, the unexplained fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to touch. These aren’t separate problems. They’re a single integrated story the body is telling about an emotional terrain the conscious mind hasn’t been able to face yet.

How to Care for Your Mental Health Right Now: Practical Steps for Uncertain Times

In my work with clients through periods of collective crisis and disruption, what I’ve learned is that most people don’t need more information about why they’re struggling. They can feel it. What they need is something concrete and doable. Not a list of aspirational practices, but real, accessible steps that can be taken today, with the time and energy they actually have. If you’re reading this during a period when the world feels unstable and your internal resources feel thin, I want to offer exactly that: honest, practical guidance that meets you where you are.

The most important thing I can say at the outset is this: what you’re feeling right now is a normal response to an abnormal situation. Anxiety, grief, irritability, difficulty concentrating, a strange flatness. These aren’t signs of fragility. They’re signs that your nervous system is responding appropriately to real disruption. You don’t need to fix these responses. You need to support the system that’s generating them, so it can do its job without overwhelming you.

Regulating your nervous system starts with the body, and the most accessible somatic tools are also the simplest. Bilateral stimulation. Even something as low-tech as tapping alternately on your knees while you breathe. Activates the same basic mechanism used in EMDR and can help reduce the intensity of anxious activation in real time. Slow, extended exhalation activates the parasympathetic nervous system and reduces the physical sensation of anxiety within a few minutes. These aren’t cure-alls, but they’re genuinely effective for in-the-moment support, and they’re available to anyone right now.

Staying connected to your body throughout the day also matters more than it might seem. During periods of collective stress, dissociation is common. A kind of checked-out quality where you’re moving through your day without really inhabiting it. Simple practices that bring you back into physical sensation. Feeling the ground under your feet, noticing three sounds in your environment, holding something cold or warm in your hands. Interrupt the dissociative drift and help your nervous system re-anchor. These practices draw on Sensorimotor Psychotherapy principles and can be woven into a busy day without requiring dedicated time.

Relationships are the most powerful mental health resource most people have, and they’re often the first thing that suffers during collective stress. Make intentional contact with at least one person who matters to you today. Not to problem-solve or process the news, but just to be in connection. A brief conversation where you genuinely check in on each other can regulate the nervous system in ways that nothing else replicates. Humans are built to co-regulate, and isolation. Even voluntary, well-intentioned isolation. Has a measurable cost.

Be very deliberate about your media consumption. This isn’t about avoiding reality. It’s about recognizing that your nervous system can’t distinguish between a threat that’s happening to you directly and a threat you’re reading about on a screen. Every alarming headline your system processes generates a real stress response. Designate specific, limited times to check news, and be willing to close the browser when that time is up. Your nervous system will thank you.

You don’t have to navigate uncertain times alone, and you don’t have to wait until things are calmer to reach out for support. Sometimes the best time to begin therapy is precisely when things are hard. Not when you’ve got it more together. You can learn more about therapy with Annie, or if you’re not sure what kind of support fits your situation, take a few minutes with the free quiz. Whatever’s happening in the world around you, you deserve care. That part doesn’t wait for a better time.

Sunita, a 36-year-old public health researcher, described the early months of the pandemic this way: “I was studying it professionally. I knew what the numbers meant. And simultaneously, I could not get off my couch. I couldn’t reconcile those two things. Knowing what was happening and being completely undone by it.” The failure of her expertise to protect her from her own emotional response was disorienting. What eventually helped wasn’t better information. It was giving herself permission to be affected. To be a person, not just a professional, navigating an unmatched situation.

That permission. To be affected by what is genuinely affecting. Is one of the most important things you can offer yourself in times of collective crisis. You are not failing to cope. You are having a human response to inhumane circumstances. The goal isn’t to feel nothing. It’s to feel what you feel without being destroyed by it, and to build the practices that keep you functional without requiring you to be unaffected. Individual therapy is a reliable container for exactly this kind of complex, ongoing emotional navigation. You can also explore stabilizing practices through Fixing the Foundations.

Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes neuroception as the way the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates safety beneath conscious awareness. For driven women raised in environments where attunement was inconsistent, that internal safety detector tends to run on a hair-trigger setting. The room may be objectively calm, but the nervous system isn’t. Healing isn’t about overriding that signal. It’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past.

Warmly, Annie

Whatever trying time you’re navigating. Whether it’s a global crisis, a personal one, or the residue of collective difficulty that lingers long after the headlines have moved on. You are allowed to still be affected by it. You are allowed to need support. You are allowed to take it one small day at a time and let that be enough.

We get through hard times together, even when together looks different than we expected. Reach out. Let someone help you carry it.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how relational trauma changes the way the brain processes threat, attention, and self-perception. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The medial prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain that helps you contextualize what you’re feeling. Goes quiet. The default mode network, where the felt sense of self lives, becomes muted. None of this is metaphor. It’s measurable, and it’s reversible. The therapies that actually move the needle for driven women. Somatic work, EMDR, IFS, attachment-based relational therapy. Are all therapies that engage the body and the implicit memory systems where this material is stored.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PMID: 38198456.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. PMID: 19795402.
3. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. PMID: 40735382.
4. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Disorganized attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby's unpublished reflections. PMID: 28952412.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House, 1969.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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