105. When the World Feels Unsafe: How Collective Grief Shows Up in Your Body and Relationships

Have you been feeling heavier, more reactive, or emotionally exhausted lately, even though nothing specific seems “wrong”?
 In this episode of Speak Honest, I’m unpacking how collective grief, political unrest, and ongoing exposure to distressing news impact your nervous system and quietly spill into your closest relationships. We’ll talk about why your body might feel on edge before your mind catches up, how unprocessed stress shows up as anxiety or conflict at home, and why staying regulated is not avoidance but protection. This is a grounding, compassionate conversation for women who care deeply and want to understand what’s really happening beneath the surface right now.

You might want to listen if:

• You’ve been feeling more tired, irritable, or emotionally sensitive lately and don’t know why
• The news or social media has been leaving you with a low-level sense of unease or dread
• You’re noticing more tension, reactivity, or distance in your relationships
• You feel guilty for enjoying your life when so much is happening in the world
• You want practical nervous system insight without being told to “just calm down”

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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes from this information.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Today’s Focus
• 0:56 Collective Grief And The Body
• 2:23 Speak Honest Academy Invitation
• 3:58 News, Threat, And Biology 101
• 7:30 From Screens To Relationships
• 10:12 Attachment Triggers Under Uncertainty
• 12:18 Caring Without Carrying Everything
• 15:05 Simple Tools For Regulation
• 17:24 Choosing Grounding Over Collapse

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Hello, and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, Jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal. What's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve? Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs, and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you have found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths, and honest conversations. Now, let's dive in. Hello, ladies, and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I am Jen Noble, your go-to relationship coach. And on today's episode, we are going to be talking about something that I know a lot of us are feeling in our bodies right now, whether honestly we have the words for it or not. See, there's a lot happening in the world right now, specifically in the US, and there's a lot of violence and fear, grief, and deep uncertainty. There are political decisions being made that affect people's safety for their families, for their bodies, and for their futures. And even if your own day-to-day life is moving along, even if you're going to work and taking care of your kids, checking all the boxes, you might be feeling that your nervous system is still acting up because it's not blind to what's happening around you. So today I want to talk about collective grief and what it actually does to our nervous system when the world around us feels unstable, unsafe, or deeply unfair. This episode isn't about telling you what to believe or what side to take, it's about helping you to understand why you might feel heavier, more emotional, more anxious, or more exhausted lately, even if nothing personal has gone wrong in your own life. It's about naming what your body is responding to instead of assuming something is wrong with you. Because for so many smart, capable women, the question right now isn't, what should I do next? The question is, why do I feel like I'm caring so much? And before we go any further, I want you to know this. If you're craving a space where you don't have to hold all of these feelings alone, that's exactly what the Speak Honest Academy is for. It's a space where we talk honestly about everything, about what's happening in the world, but also just about our attachment styles, our emotional overwhelm, and our relationship stress in the context of everything we're going through, not in some bubble where everything is supposed to be fine. And if that sounds like something you need right now, you can learn more by going to speakhonestacademy.com or by scrolling down in the show notes and clicking the link down there. And stay with me until the end of this episode because I'm going to give you a code so you can try out the Academy and have a community to lean on during these heavy times. Now, as you're listening, I want you to notice what's happening in your body. Not to fix it, not to judge it, just to notice it. Notice how you feel right now. Notice if you've been more tired than usual. Maybe you've been quicker to tears, more irritable, more on edge. Notice if there's been a low-level sense of unease or sadness humming in the background that you can't quite shake or explain. And as we move forward, I want you to hold a few things gently. Your reactions make sense. This is not a personal failure or a lack of resilience, and your nervous system may be responding to more than just your own life right now. Now let's dive in. All right, let's get into this. If you're watching the news right now, or even just casually scrolling Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter, whatever it's called now, you feel an extra sense of heaviness in your body. You're not imagining it. What's happening in the US right now is a lot. And even if you don't live here, what we're seeing globally on our screens is intense. There's violence, there's political instability, fear, grief, and a constant sense that things could shift at any moment. And here's the part that often goes unnoticed: that intensity doesn't stay on the screen. It seeps into our daily lives. We might feel more lethargic during the day. We might be more emotionally reactive to our husband or our children. We might snap a little bit more at our coworkers or our partners, or be more withdrawn with our friends without even realizing why. And that's normal. It's also something that can quietly start affecting our relationships if we don't understand what's actually going on underneath. So I want to talk about that. The first thing I want you to understand is this your nervous system doesn't wait for something bad to happen directly to you in order to respond, it reacts to perceived threat. And right now, there is a lot of perceived threat going on all over us. We feel unsafe. And research in neuroscience shows that the brain is constantly scanning our environment for cues of danger or safety. The amygdala, which is part of your brain's threat detection system, responds not only to things you experience firsthand, but also to things you observe, you hear about, or even imagine. This is why watching repeated news coverage of violence or scrolling through distressing stories on social media can activate your nervous system in the same way as a personal stressor would. And at the same time, when the brain detects threat, it shifts resources away from the parts of the nervous system responsible for rest and digestion, emotional regulation and connection. This is why, even if your life looks stable on paper, you might still feel on edge, emotionally tender. Maybe you can't seem to focus at work or you're chronically tired. Your body is operating as if it needs to stay alert. This is not a sign of weakness. Please hear that. Let me repeat that it is not a sign of weakness. It is biology. Humans evolved in communities where danger to one person often meant danger to the whole group. So our nervous systems are wired to take collective cues seriously. When the world feels unpredictable or unsafe, your body responds accordingly. You might notice this showing up as a constant low-grade anxiety, difficult concentrating. Maybe you feel a heaviness that doesn't really have a clear cause. And some women describe it as feeling like they can't fully exhale. Others say they feel emotionally flooded one moment and then numb the next. All of this makes sense in the context of prolonged uncertainty and exposure to threat-based information. The important reframe here is this: nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system is responding to the world you are living in. And the problem isn't that you are quote unquote too sensitive or overreacting. The problem is that your body is taking in a lot of information that signals danger. And it hasn't been given a chance to come back to baseline. That's really hard. And when we don't understand this, we often turn on ourselves. You know, we assume we should be coping better or staying calmer or being more productive. You know, I often catch myself thinking, but this isn't happening to me. So why do I feel this way? But pushing yourself to function normally when your nervous system is activated only adds more pressure to a system that is already overloaded. And understanding this, that's just the first step. And remember, this is not to fix it or to override it. I just want you to stop blaming yourself for a response that actually makes a lot of sense. And now, here's where this starts to show up in ways that feel more personal. I'll give you a real life example. So a client said to me recently, nothing actually happened to me, Jen, but I snapped at my partner for just breathing too loud. And she laughed as she was explaining this, but then she immediately felt ashamed. She started questioning her relationship and her patience and her emotional maturity she had worked so hard on. But when I asked her to slow down, what she realized was this. She had spent the entire week absorbing news headlines all over TikTok. She was watching videos of the violence that was happening in Minnesota. She's reading comment sections filled with fear and rage and trolls saying really mean things. And she's trying to hold it all together like everything was fine. I gotta break it to you. Her nervous system was not fine. Because her nervous system never got a break. And this is what research on emotional regulation and attachment shows us. When stress and grief don't have a clear place to go, they don't just disappear. They get discharged in the places that feel safest. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on who you talk to, that is usually our closest relationships. So you might notice you're more reactive than usual. Maybe you might read into a text that wouldn't normally bother you. You might feel more easily overwhelmed or emotionally flooded. Or you might go to the opposite direction. Maybe right now, girl, you're shutting down. You're numbing out with the extra wine, maybe some more cocktails. Maybe you're drinking more during the week when normally you only drink during the weekends. And again, it's not to shame you. I don't care what you're doing. It's just I want us to be aware. Because for women with an insecure attachment, this can feel especially intense. When the world feels unsafe, the attachment system begins to go on hyper alert. The nervous system starts scanning for relationships, for stability, for reassurance, for safety. Small moments can suddenly feel loaded. Neutral behavior can feel like rejection, but conflicts, they just start escalating faster than we want them to. This doesn't mean your relationship is failing. Please know that. It means your nervous system is just overloaded right now. And here's the part I want you to hear really clearly. So come back to me if you got distracted, okay? This is not you being dramatic. It's not you making everything about your relationship, and it's not proof that something is wrong with your partner. It's your body trying to release pressure. But when we don't understand that, see, we misdirect our energy. And we start arguing about the dishwasher or his tone of voice or his timing or anything else that really irritates you. Or maybe like who didn't check in enough. Oh, he didn't text you good morning, he didn't text you good night. And suddenly we're in conflict about something small when what's really happening is that the world feels unsafe and we just want the safest person in our lives to make us feel better. See, the cost of not naming this is that we start outsourcing safety to other places. We expect our partner to fix our nervous system state that they never created in the first place, and that creates pressure, and pressure tends to backfire. It pushes this closeness and connection we want further away. But when we can name what's actually happening, we stop blaming ourselves and each other, and that alone can soften so much in our lives. And this is the part where I want to slow us way down because this is where a lot of women get stuck. There's this quiet belief that caring means carrying everything. Okay? This is so important for you to hear. So we don't have to carry everything to care. That maybe you believe that if you're not constantly plugged into the news, if you aren't outraged or grieving or going out there to protest or doing something about it, then you are doing something wrong. And for women especially, there can be this unspoken pressure to suffer alongside everyone else as proof of your empathy. But girl, here is the nervous system truth. Caring does not require collapse. Research on stress resilience and emotional regulation shows us that when the nervous system stays in a constant state of activation, our capacity for empathy, connection, and thoughtful response, it actually decreases. We become more reactive, less patient, less generous with ourselves and with others. And our relationships are often the first place. That cost shows up. This is why staying regulated is not avoidance. It's protection. It's how you stay emotionally available without burning out or turning on the people you love. You are allowed to feel grief without letting it consume your entire system. You're allowed to care about what's going on right now in the world, and you can still laugh over drinks with your girlfriends at dinner. You are allowed to rest without earning it through exhaustion or pain. Those things are not contradictions. They're signs of a nervous system that's being loved and cared for. Sometimes regulation looks very simple. It looks like noticing when your body is flooded and stepping away from the news for a little bit. It looks like putting a hand on your chest and reminding yourself that in this moment you are safe enough. It looks like naming what's actually happening inside of you instead of assuming something is wrong with you or your relationship. Because so often we're not arguing about the thing we think we are arguing about. We are arguing because our nervous systems are overwhelmed and looking for relief. And I want to say this clearly: choosing grounding does not mean you don't care. It means you care enough to stay human, to stay connected, to stay capable of showing up in your community with steadiness instead of with survival mode. You don't have to carry the weight of the world on your nervous system to be a good person. You don't have to feel everything all the time to be compassionate, and you don't have to collapse in order to care. And if you've been feeling heavier lately, more reactive or more emotionally tired than usual, it makes sense. This isn't a personal shortcoming and it doesn't mean something is wrong with you or your relationship. I want that to be very clear. You don't need to process everything today. You don't have to have the right emotional response, and you don't need to carry this perfectly. Just notice. Just notice what your body is responding to, and already that's a shift. It gives you a choice. It creates a little space between what you're feeling and how you act. And that space matters, especially right now. Now, before we wrap up today, I want to come back to something important. If this episode resonated with you at all, if you found yourself nodding along or feeling even a little bit emotional while listening, I want you to know that you're not meant to hold all of this pain alone. These are heavy times right now. And while self-awareness helps, community is what actually supports our nervous system regulation in the long term. And that's why the Speak Honest Academy exists. Not as a place where you have to show up polished or perfect or positive or doing it right, but as a space where your attachment, your emotional overwhelm, and your relationship stress are met with understanding instead of shame. It's where we slow things down, we work with the nervous system, and we learn how to stay connected to ourselves and our relationships, even when the world around us feels super unstable. Now, if you're curious, of course you can head to speakhonestacademy.com or you can scroll on down to the show notes and click on the link down there. And like I mentioned earlier, I want to make this super duper ridiculously easy for you to choose. Right now, with everything going on in the world, I just don't feel comfortable letting anyone miss out on what's going on in our community. So I want you to use the code secure start. That's S-E-C-U-R-E-S T-A-R-T. This is going to allow you to try out our community completely free for the first month. And if it feels right and supportive for you where you are right now, then you can stay on with us and you can keep healing. There's no pressure to commit. It's just an invitation to have somewhere safe to land. And if joining isn't right for you, I love that too. Listening to these podcasts, reflecting, and giving yourself a little bit more compassion this week matters more than you realize. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening today. I will speak with you all next week. Take care. As we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination. And it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today, be sure to head over to our show notes where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode right there. And please remember to rate, review, and subscribe if you enjoyed today's podcast. Your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast. Until next time, remember to speak up and speak honest.