Polycrisis, Anxiety, and Women's Mental Health: The Inheritance Nobody Talks About

Here we are, living in a time of multiple global-level crises or what some call a polycrisis. Many crises all at once, tangled together, influencing each other. If it feels stressful, your body is responding to the situation correctly, but it's more than normal stress. It does not have a deadline. The threat never resolves. And even if it did, the news cycle wouldn't allow it to be gone. It needs to harvest your attention.

If it feels overwhelming, you're right. Your physical, mental and emotional health is systematically under attack. Being stuck in high-alert without seeing a way out cannot be sustained for long. Add doomscrolling to it, and day and night, you are under siege.

Why the polycrisis hits women's mental health differently

Women tend to carry collective anxiety differently. We're wired, hormonally, socially, culturally, to attune to threat, not just for ourselves but for everyone around us. It's one of our greatest strengths.

It's also a significant vulnerability in a world that is genuinely, measurably more threatening than it was a decade ago. Most of the women I work with aren't anxious because something is wrong with them. They're anxious because they're paying close attention to a world that is asking an enormous amount of their nervous systems.

That's not pathology. That's a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances.

The inherited part matters

The world being on fire is one thing. Your nervous system adding fuel to it is another. The news plays a large part in it, yes, but there is something else that contributes to this overwhelming stress response. It's caused by what's already inside you. The inherited beliefs. The old survival patterns. The subconscious programming written long before the polycrisis existed, in your childhood, your family's history, a voice that sounds a lot like someone you loved.

Research suggests we arrive already primed, shaped by our mother's nervous system, her anxiety, her stress response, before we've drawn our first breath. And she inherited hers from her mother before that. It's a generational pattern.

You cannot think your way to calm inside an overactivated nervous system. The rational mind doesn't have the keys to that car. The subconscious does.

That invisible anchor my hypnotherapist helped me find during a global pandemic and identity crisis? I wrote about my own experience of this here. You have one too. Most of us do. The question is whether you're ready to find out what it is.

If this is resonating

The polycrisis isn't going away. You don't have to burn through your nervous system trying to meet it. The inherited fear can be released.

If you're ready to find your anchor and cut it loose, I'd love to work with you. Reach out directly to enquire about hypnotherapy sessions.

Not quite ready? There's a free hypnosis recording on my website. A good place to start.