Picture this: you’re in the break room with your coworkers, the TV plays a random news channel, mostly white noise, until a red banner flashes across the screen – another economic jolt, another climate emergency, another headline marked by uncertainty. You sense something shared settling in the room, a quiet, collective unease. In moments like these, we’re not just individuals sharing a space; we’re part of a collective experience shaped by the same angst. This shared emotional response isn’t a coincidence; it may be the early sign of what we understand as collective anxiety.
What Is Collective Anxiety?
Although this is a relatively new concept with no structured definition yet, there has been a growing body of literature since the pandemic examining how unpredictable societal stressors and large-scale instability can generate anxiety not only within individuals, but across entire communities. The term now is being used to refer to anxiety that is shared, socially transmitted, and shaped by collective exposure to threat. Therese Stahl, a practicing psychotherapist defines it as “It happens when these big events happen and we know they will affect us. It’s when we realise that all humans are inextricably linked to each other and that each individual’s suffering easily could become our own suffering”.
Events such as pandemics, political unrest, economic instability, or even sudden shifts in climate patterns can create a sense of internal unrest (Abrams, 2024; Hickman et al., 2021; Sarı et al., 2024; Venkateswaran et al., 2020). While these experiences are rooted in societal conditions, the emotional responses may often parallel features of individual anxiety – persistent worry, mental fatigue, irritability, and an overarching sense of instability. However, in collective anxiety, these reactions are not confined to one person. What may begin as individual responses can become widespread, simultaneously experienced by large numbers of people and reinforced through shared environments, media exposure, and collective interpretation of events.
Indeed, people, to cope with this unpredictability often try to regulate their discomfort through avoidance, or adaptation, social support, or even information-seeking. In fact, the Uncertainty Management Theory talks about how in times of societal upheaval, individuals may seek out information about systems they do not fully understand even if that information heightens fear (Brashers, 2001). This explains the surge in news consumption during crises, as people attempt to correct their reduced knowledge. In a digitally saturated world; communities often turn to the same sources of information, interpret the same cues, and engage in parallel coping behaviours. Yet this very process can amplify collective anxiety, as the flood of information often leaves one with more distress.
This becomes more prominent in a digitally connected society, as Metzler et al., (2023) notes, “sustained emotional expression” between individuals through social media may lead to the “emergence of collective emotions”. Social contagion theory supports this, showing how emotions spread rapidly within groups, especially when shared through digital networks (Goldenberg & Gross, 2020). This simultaneous exposure, as well as collective appraisal of threat create conditions where anxiety becomes socially synchronized rather than individually contained.
In fact, collective anxiety takes the shape of the sum of personal worries of individuals. It is a shared emotional climate, marked by chronic worry about the state of the world, feelings of helplessness or hopelessness about social issues, heightened interpersonal conflict over differing viewpoints, and emotional exhaustion.
Given this vicious cycle, where some form of societal stressor is always present, and where constant information overload is the norm, yet it is important to resist framing collective anxiety as a pathology. Instead, it should be understood as a rational and comprehensible response to systemic instability.
At the same time, it must not be normalized, as doing so risks allowing its significance to be overlooked. With acknowledgment, we may create spaces for conversations about resilience. To echo a long-held argument – systemic problems will require systemic solutions. This is not simply a call for individual therapy in isolation, but for collective responses in terms of community support, policy change, organisational responsibility, and social infrastructures that reduce uncertainty rather than intensify it (Goveas, 2025). How we respond, adapt, and attempt to stabilise ourselves in the face of uncertainty may shape how we evolve as societies. To borrow Jung’s words:
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
About the Author
