Something has come up more and more with clients in my therapy sessions.
It has increased over the past several months – I’ve noticed the change in what people bring to sessions. Along with the personal situations that have always been part of this work – anxiety, burnout, relationship strain – there is something else there too. A collective emotional heaviness. A rumbling of dread that fluctuates but doesn’t ever really stop, even on good days.
People are worried. About their jobs and colleagues, their families and friends, their institutions and their world. About whether the structures they’ve relied on will hold. About life-altering decisions that seem to move faster than anyone’s ability to make sense of them. And many people are carrying a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from one hard thing, but from hard things arriving in waves, without any break.
If this particular kind of exhaustion sounds familiar, I want you to know: what you’re feeling has a name, a neurological explanation, and – most importantly – a way forward.
The Endless Sprint
When threats feel relentless, our nervous systems do exactly what they were designed to do: they stay activated.
This is the biology of survival. The brain’s threat-detection system – the amygdala – is highly sensitive to danger, and in times of genuine collective instability, it has good reason to stay alert. The problem is that this system was built for discrete threats, not chronic ones. A predator you can flee. A way of life eroding is impossible to outrun.
Research on vicarious and secondary trauma shows that sustained exposure to collective distress – even distress that isn’t happening directly to you – can mirror the neurobiological effects of direct trauma, specifically increasing amygdala sensitivity and reactivity over time. You don’t have to be personally affected by every crisis to feel the effects of it accumulating in your nervous system.
Constant vigilance also depletes the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for perspective, emotional regulation, and clear thinking. This is why, after weeks of staying informed and staying alert, many people find themselves feeling less patience with loved ones, struggling to concentrate on tasks, or lying awake at 2am thinking and re-thinking scenarios they can’t control. This isn’t a lack of strength – it’s a brain that has been running in a sprint for what is turning out to be a marathon.
The Ethics of Rest
I want to address something directly, because I hear so many people’s concerns about it:
Taking a break feels wrong. Like I’m looking away when others don’t get to. Like I don’t care enough.
I completely understand this feeling. In communities where the stakes are genuinely high – and in the DC area, many of the people I work with are living those stakes professionally and personally – stepping back can feel like a form of abandonment. If you care about what’s happening and the people it’s affecting, shouldn’t you stay present to it?
But there is a difference between staying informed and becoming immobilized. Between being present and burning out. Between bearing witness and drowning.
Audre Lorde wrote that caring for oneself is “not self-indulgence – it is self-preservation.” She understood, from her own experience during sustained struggle, that replenishing your capacity isn’t a retreat from the work. It is what makes continued engagement possible.
To care for your own nervous system right now is not negligence. It is stewardship of the resource your family, your community, and your work depend on most: your continued, grounded presence. As the saying goes, you can’t pour from an empty cup.
Hope as a Clinical Tool
Here’s something about hope that might surprise you:
Hope is not optimism. It’s not pretending things are fine, or believing everything will work out simply because we’d prefer it to. Jane Goodall, who spent decades working on problems most people would find crushing, described hope as something different: being very clear-eyed about the challenges, and believing there is a way through anyway.
That distinction matters clinically. Optimism is a feeling, hope is a practice – a deliberate choice about where we place our attention.
As a survival mechanism, our brains are built to attune to trouble or danger. But when everything demanding our attention is crisis, our attention can feel overwhelmed and it can be difficult to mindfully experience our thoughts – the practice of noting what is occupying our attention and the act of choosing what we want to include in that space. So then we stop noticing the neighbor who shoveled your walk without being asked. The colleague who sent a kind email on a hard day. The small, stubborn evidence that people are still choosing decency.
Fred Rogers, whose life work was helping children navigate fear and experience acceptance, offered one of the most practical pieces of psychological advice I know: look for the helpers. Not because the helpers cancel out the harm, but because they exist – and training our attention to find them is an act of deliberate nervous system regulation, not denial.
Desmond Tutu, who bore witness to some of the twentieth century’s worst atrocities and still chose hope, said it simply: hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. Not instead of it. Despite it.
This is what hope as a clinical tool looks like: not turning away from what is hard, but intentionally allowing other things into the frame alongside it.
Living as a Marathon
Resilience research is clear on one point that often surprises people: resilience is not a fixed trait. It is a process – something that is built and maintained through repeated cycles of exertion and recovery. The athletes who finish marathons are not the ones who never rest. They are the ones who have learned to pace.
If the current moment is a marathon (I believe it is), then the question is not whether you can afford to rest; it is whether you can afford not to.
Some practical starting points:
Scheduled limited news windows. Choose one or two specific times each day to check in with what’s happening. Outside of those windows, the app stays closed and the TV stays off. This is not avoidance – it is nervous system management.
Noticing the helpers. Actively, intentionally. Keep a note on your phone if it helps. The goal is to reset your attentional frame and mindfully include what we want and need to be there, not to manufacture false positivity.
Protecting restoration. Sleep, movement, real conversation, time spent in nature – these are not meant to be set aside as rewards for getting through the hard stuff. They are the heart of the infrastructure that makes getting through possible.
Talking to someone. If the emotional weight has become genuinely hard to carry, that is exactly what therapy is for. You don’t have to be in crisis to benefit from support. Showing up before you’re depleted is one of the most effective things you can do.
A Closing Thought
The people I most admire – some of whom have sustained decades of engagement with the world’s hardest problems – share one quality. Not relentless intensity. Not the absence of despair, but a practiced and deliberate return to hope. Again and again, as many times as necessary.
You are allowed to pace yourself. You are allowed to rest when you need to. You are allowed to look for the light without pretending the darkness isn’t there.
The marathon continues. So do you.
Cheryl Zandt is a Licensed Professional Counselor offering online therapy for individuals and couples in Virginia and Washington DC. She specializes in anxiety, burnout, and the particular exhaustion of trying to stay present and functional when the world feels unstable. If this resonated, her pages on Burnout, Anxiety, and Mindfulness may also be worth exploring.
Ready to talk? Request a free consultation →
References
Hensel, J. M., et al. (2015). Secondary traumatic stress: A review of the literature. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.
Cocker, F., & Joss, N. (2016). Compassion fatigue among healthcare, emergency and community service workers: A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2018). Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.Cambridge University Press.
Lorde, A. (1988). A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Firebrand Books.
