Your body wasn’t built for this

On collective grief, love meeting loss, and what happens when our nervous systems are asked to absorb the world all at once.

Loss - A sculpture by Jane Mortimer via Unsplash

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been absorbing one traumatic, heartbreaking moment after another.

And as a result, you may be grieving… just not in the way you think.

When most of us hear the word grief, we tend to think of death—someone we love dying. But grief is more encompassing than that. Grief is what happens when love meets loss.

Grief can be the loss of a home, community, a sense of safety, or the feeling of freedom. You can even grieve the loss of how things (or you) used to be. Grief can also be a loss of trust—in institutions, in humanity, and in the future—or even the loss of any sense that you can change what’s happening.

But the world doesn’t stop just because something horrible happens—even in death, life continues all around us. We still have to go to work, feed our families, pay rent, and make plans.

If you’ve felt disoriented by the need to function while feeling like the world is falling apart, you may be experiencing collective grief.

Collective grief is a shared emotional experience that occurs when a community, a country, or a generation is absorbing loss at the same time. This can include loss of people, but also loss of environment, freedom, and safety, which can cause widespread feelings of helplessness, fear, and anger.

(And eerily, we wrote about something adjacent to this almost a year ago in a piece called How to love a dying world. I mention thisbecause it still rings true today.)

The weight of witnessing

Take a 60-second scroll on your preferred social media channel and—depending on your algorithm—in between videos about home decor tips or a viral 2016 vs 2026 photo trend, you might see:

• A video of someone being murdered in the street.

• Live images of war.

• Someone snatched from their job or home.

• More shootings. More grief.

All in under one minute.

We’ve grown accustomed to thinking this onslaught of information is normal. And worse: many of us can feel that it’s harming us. Our nervous system evolved to handle immediate threats like running from a predator, not to witness suffering through a constant feed designed to fragment our attention.

As a result, most people respond to collective grief in one of three ways:

1) Doomscrolling
We’ve all done it. You open a social media app and what started out as a harmless scroll suddenly turns into doom and gloom. You keep looking, liking, commenting, and sharing because it helps you momentarily regain a sense of control. And maybe you question what it says about you if you don’t repost or engage.

But constant exposure to distressing information doesn’t make the nervous system wiser—it often makes it overwhelmed. And a never-ending pattern emerges: people feel numb or they grow tired or fed up with the news, then they feel ashamed for those emotions. Sometimes, that leads them to scroll more to “prove” they still care. That spiral is its own kind of exhaustion.

2) Outrage

Anger is an emotion that sometimes accompanies grief. Especially when what’s being lost feels unnecessary, unjust, or preventable. Today, that anger often manifests in arguments in the comment section, but it can also motivate people to get off their phones and into real life: organizing meetings, showing up at town halls, sharing donation links, attending vigils, gathering with neighbors, and protesting in the freezing cold.

We typically associate anger as a negative emotion, but that’s not always the case. If you feel furious, that makes sense. Anger arises when something you care about is threatened. The question is whether you’ll let the anger eat you (and your relationships) alive, or turn it into something constructive.

3) Total shutdown
Some people go offline completely—which is a totally sane response to apps that are designed to be addictive. But shutdown can come with its own guilt: If I look away, am I abandoning people? If I rest, am I complicit?

If you’re feeling numb or shutting down completely, it probably means you’re overloaded, which is natural. That emotional detachment is a protective response of your body—known as “dorsal vagal shutdown”—meantto help you survive the amount of suffering you’re being asked to process at one time. This is not a failure or weakness, but rather a survival mechanism. We’re trying to metabolize collective loss when we were never meant to.

We’re trying to metabolize collective loss when we were never meant to.

In the 1960s, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted this exact outcome in what he called the “global village” theory. He said that electronic media (initially radio and TV, later the internet and social media) act as an “electronic nervous system” that shrinks the world, enabling instantaneous, worldwide sharing of information and culture, extending our nervous system globally. It enables a “tribal” existence in which individuals are interconnected, driving high-velocity social change and constant, real-time awareness of events in other locations.

Whatever you think of his predictions, the lived experience today is familiar: log on to social media and something will make you cry, laugh, and angry all in one minute of scrolling.

So what do we do instead?

I’m not a doctor or a therapist, but I do know from personal experience that living in extremes of “feel everything” or “feel nothing” is not ideal, if we can help it.

So, instead, I want to offer you this:

Name what you’re feeling as collective grief. Then give it an outlet, so it doesn’t turn into cynicism or despair.

Understand that the grief you are feeling for your country and your neighbors is actually love. Love for human life, dignity, and the idea that people should be safe in their own homes. Love is why this hurts. It’s why you might be outraged and angry.

“Open your heart to love. Everything that you are feeling right now, name it love. Whether it’s fear or sadness. Everything that you are feeling, name it love,” said the late Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson.

If you want to take it a step further, try limiting your time on social media. When something you see upsets you or makes you feel numb, try moving your body for at least a few minutes. Other things that may help include taking action in your local community, such as volunteering for an organization you care about or getting involved in a cause. And don’t forget to let yourself rest. Taking time to rest is not disengagement or apathy. It’s a way to help your nervous system recover so you can stay present without becoming overwhelmed.

Something that’s inspiring me recently is this: a group of monks has been walking 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in a “Walk for Peace.” They’re traveling through winter weather, sleeping in tents, relying on kindness, and continuing despite serious hardship—including a devastating accident along the way.

Their message isn’t “ignore reality.” It’s the opposite: meet reality together. They aim to raise awareness of peace, loving-kindness, and compassion worldwide.

Maybe there’s something to learn in their journey: grief is heavy, but it can feel a little lighter when we carry it together.

— Maura