Collective Grief: Why You Feel Tired, Flat, or Snappy (and what to do about it)
Collective Grief: Why You Feel Tired, Flat, or Snappy (and what to do about it). By Tania Davies, The Consciousness Change Agent™
There’s a kind of tired that has nothing to do with your calendar.
You can sleep. You can take a day off. You can “be productive.”
And still feel flat, irritated, foggy, or like you’re holding your breath through life.
Sometimes that isn’t personal burnout.
It’s collective grief.
What is collective grief?
Collective grief is what happens when a group or society is impacted by shared loss, threat, or disruption, and the emotional weight spreads across communities and workplaces, even if each person’s circumstances differ.
This is why your body might feel unsettled even when your own life is “fine”.
Because your system is tracking the environment: News cycles. Social division. Cost of living stress. Global conflict. Climate anxiety. A low-level sense that the world is less predictable than it used to be.
And predictability is one of the nervous system’s favourite things.
How collective grief shows up for the individual
Collective grief doesn’t always look like sadness. It often looks like:
exhaustion that doesn’t resolve with rest
irritability and a shorter fuse than usual
numbness or “I don’t feel much”
low motivation and mental fog
more scrolling, more distraction, less presence
heightened worry about “everything”
less tolerance for people’s demands
A key point: these experiences can have multiple causes. I’m not diagnosing you through a blog post.
I’m simply naming a pattern I see a lot in my clinic at the moment.
And we have data that supports the broader context. For example, a major mental health poll reported that a sizable portion of adults said they felt more anxious than the previous year, with current events being a significant driver.
Why “try harder” doesn’t work here
When people feel heavier than usual, the default response is often: push more, fix more, be more disciplined.
That approach works when the problem is execution but it does not work when the problem is saturation. Grief isn’t solved by being efficient. It’s processed through honesty, meaning, containment, and support.
If you’ve been using productivity as a way to outrun what you feel, you’re not alone.
It’s a common strategy. It just work in the long run.
The spiritual layer
This is where I’ll be direct. Collective grief can be a spiritual threshold.
Not in a “everything happens for a reason” way. In a “your old identity can’t keep carrying life like this” way. A lot of women in midlife (and beyond) hit a point where the soul starts asking questions the mind can’t answer with another checklist:
What am I doing with my life?
Who am I when I’m not performing competence?
What’s actually true for me now?
What do I need to stop tolerating?
That’s not weakness. That’s initiation. But initiation without structure can turn into chaos: emotional spirals, impulsive decisions, or spiritual bypassing disguised as “growth.” That’s why I teach and coach with spiritual initiation + clinical precision.
A practical framework: contain the grief without shutting down
Here’s the structure I use with clients. It covers all four pillars: mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.
1) Mental pillar: Name the real context.
Your brain needs a clear label so it stops making the story “something is wrong with me.” Try this sentence: “This may be collective grief showing up in my system.”
Then ask:
What am I exposed to daily that my mind keeps absorbing?
What am I trying to carry alone that should be shared or reduced?
What is the smallest real change I can make this week?
Practical tip: create a “news boundary”. Pick a time window (e.g., maybe when you wake up) and stop doom scrolling the news.
2) Emotional pillar: Let emotion move
Many high-capacity women don’t really “feel feelings.” They manage them. I used to do this a lot.
Collective grief often sits in the body as:
tight chest
throat pressure
jaw tension
heaviness
restlessness
Your job isn’t to analyse it for two hours. Your job is to let it move in small doses.
Practical tip: Set a timer for 90 seconds and answer (on paper):
What am I actually feeling? (one word)
What does it want me to know? (one sentence). Then stop. You’re training emotional honesty without drowning in it.
3) Physical pillar: reduce baseline activation
When the system is braced, everything feels harder. Even small regulation practices can help shift physiology. HRV research supports the broader idea that autonomic flexibility is linked with emotion regulation and wellbeing, and HRV-based approaches are used in stress-related interventions.
No magic claims. Just physiology: better internal conditions make better decisions more likely.
Practical tip: Choose two basics for the week:
earlier bedtime by 30 minutes
a 10-minute walk without a podcast
hydration + protein at breakfast
sunlight before screens
Pick two only. That’s it. Consistency beats intensity.
4) Spiritual pillar: reclaim discernment and inner authority
Collective grief can make people either emotionally numb, or spiritually scatter (looking for signs, jumping timelines, trying to “manifest out” of reality - escape the matrix!). Discernment is the antidote.
Practical tip: Ask:
Does this information expand clarity, or increase agitation?
Does this practice make me more present, or more avoidant?
Does this choice honour my values, or just soothe my discomfort?
Spiritual maturity isn’t “positive vibes only.” It’s being able to face what’s real without abandoning yourself.
When support matters
If collective grief has tipped into persistent despair, panic, hopelessness or you’re feeling unsafe, get real-time support from a qualified professional or crisis service.
And if what’s happening is more like this:
constant over-functioning
chronic overwhelm
self-abandonment dressed up as “responsibility”
losing your inner signal and partaking in spiritual bypassing
wanting a structure that holds real change
That’s exactly the kind of work I do. If you want to explore the Pause with Purpose Collective, head to https://taniadavies.com/pause.
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