When Systems Fail, Your Anxiety Isn’t Personal

You know that thing where you see a news headline about massive government layoffs—especially in mental health services—and you feel this weird mix of anger and numbness? Like you want to care, you know you should care, but also… you’re just so tired of caring about systems that clearly don’t care about you?

Here’s what’s actually happening: You’re not becoming heartless. You’re protecting yourself from a truth that’s too painful to fully acknowledge—that the very institutions we’re told exist to help us are being dismantled while we watch.

I see this pattern weekly in my office. Someone will mention the latest healthcare crisis or funding cut, then immediately pivot to their personal struggles, as if the two aren’t connected. “I know I shouldn’t let the news affect me,” they’ll say, “but I’ve been so anxious lately and I don’t know why.”

Let’s be honest about this. When the CDC accidentally sends layoff notices to half their staff—accidentally—it’s not just administrative incompetence. It’s a perfect metaphor for how carelessly our collective wellbeing is handled. And your body knows this, even when your mind tries to rationalize it away.

Most people don’t realize that their personal anxiety often spikes not from their individual circumstances, but from sensing systemic instability. Your nervous system is designed to detect threats, and it doesn’t distinguish between a personal crisis and a societal one. When mental health services are being gutted, when public health infrastructure is crumbling, when disaster response teams are being eliminated—your body registers this as danger, even if you’re consciously trying to focus on your daily routine.

This isn’t about being overly sensitive or catastrophizing. It’s about being human in a world that’s increasingly unstable.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: The people who come to see me aren’t just dealing with their personal issues anymore. They’re carrying the weight of collective uncertainty. They’ll talk about their relationship problems or work stress, but underneath, there’s this pervasive sense that the ground is shifting beneath them. That the safety nets they assumed would be there are disappearing.

Your fatigue isn’t random. It’s brilliant. It’s your psyche’s way of protecting you from fully confronting how abandoned we’ve become by the very systems meant to serve us.

Think about it—every time there’s a mass shooting, a climate disaster, a pandemic surge, we’re told that help is available, that there are resources, that trained professionals are standing by. But then we read about confused mass layoffs in the exact departments we’d need to rely on. The message is clear: You’re on your own.

What if I told you that your increasing self-reliance, your tendency to minimize your own struggles, your reluctance to seek help—these aren’t personal failings? They’re rational responses to an irrational system. You’ve internalized the message that resources are scarce, that you shouldn’t be a burden, that you need to handle things yourself because, honestly, who else is going to?

I had a client recently who apologized for taking up my time with “small problems” when “other people have it worse.” I asked her, “What if everyone is minimizing their needs because we all sense there’s not enough to go around? What if we’re all performing this dance of being fine because we know the system can’t hold us?”

She went quiet. Then she said, “I never thought about it that way, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

The truth is: Your personal struggles and our collective failures are interconnected. You can’t heal in isolation from a sick system, and you’re not supposed to. Your anxiety about the future, your difficulty trusting that help will be there when you need it, your exhaustion from trying to be okay—these aren’t symptoms of personal weakness. They’re appropriate responses to systemic betrayal.

But here’s where the clarity comes in. Once you see this pattern, you can’t unsee it. And that’s where your power lies.

You can stop pathologizing yourself for feeling overwhelmed. You can stop pretending that positive thinking will fix structural problems. You can stop exhausting yourself trying to maintain normalcy in abnormal conditions.

Instead, you can start being radically honest about what you’re experiencing. You can name the fact that it’s hard to trust systems that are actively being dismantled. You can acknowledge that your hypervigilance makes sense when safety nets are disappearing. You can validate your own need for stability without apologizing for it.

Most importantly, you can stop treating your personal wellbeing as separate from our collective wellbeing. They’re the same thing. They always have been.

When I work with people now, I don’t just explore their individual patterns. I help them see how their personal struggles are often reasonable responses to unreasonable circumstances. This isn’t about blame or victimhood—it’s about clarity. Because once you see clearly, you can respond appropriately.

You’re not crazy for feeling like the world is less safe. It is. You’re not weak for struggling to cope. The coping mechanisms we’re taught assume a level of systemic support that no longer exists. You’re not selfish for wanting stability and care. These are fundamental human needs.

Here’s what changes everything: When you stop trying to be okay in a not-okay system, you free up enormous energy. Energy you’ve been using to maintain an illusion. Energy you can redirect toward what actually matters—genuine connection, mutual support, and the kind of clarity that lets you see things as they really are.

You’re exactly where you need to be, feeling exactly what makes sense to feel. The system is failing, and your body knows it. Your anxiety is information. Your exhaustion is data. Your desire to disconnect from the news while simultaneously feeling unable to look away—that’s the push and pull of needing to know the truth while also needing to protect yourself from it.

The clarity that changes everything is this: You don’t need to be fixed. The system does. And until it is, your job is to see clearly, respond authentically, and stop pretending that personal wellness can exist in a vacuum.

Your struggles aren’t separate from these headlines. They never were. And acknowledging that isn’t giving up—it’s the first step toward genuine, grounded, clear-eyed living in the world as it actually is.