Pervasive Anxiety After Covid: Why It Lingers and What Actually Helps

Pervasive Anxiety After Covid: Why It Lingers and What Actually Helps

When pandemic restrictions lifted, many people expected a psychological reset. Instead, a quieter phenomenon emerged: persistent anxiety without an obvious trigger. Not panic. Not crisis. Just a constant sense of unease; in meetings, decision-making, social settings, and daily life. This experience is widespread, and it isn’t a personal failing. It is a predictable response to prolonged collective stress. And I notice this everywhere I go now.

The Problem: A Prolonged Stressor Rewires Baselines
Covid-19 was not a single traumatic event. It was a multi-year period of uncertainty, threat monitoring, disrupted routines, and social isolation. Research in neuroscience and psychology shows that when stress is chronic rather than acute, the nervous system recalibrates its baseline. Heightened vigilance becomes normal. The stress response remains partially activated even when the original threat subsides. And this is unwelcome.

The concept of allostatic load explains this process: the cumulative physiological “wear and tear” caused by repeated or prolonged stress exposure. Elevated allostatic load has been linked to emotional dysregulation, fatigue, impaired cognition, sleep disturbance, and increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression. This helps explain why many individuals report:
Persistent mental fatigue; irritability or emotional flatness,
difficulty concentrating; exaggerated responses to minor stressors and a sense of “not being back to normal.” Boy oh boy are we not back to 'normal' whatever that was. In professional contexts, these symptoms are often misread as disengagement or burnout. In reality, many people are still physiologically unwinding from sustained survival mode.

The Insight: Post-Pandemic Anxiety Is Often Residual, Not Reactive

One of the most important reframes emerging from post-Covid mental health research is this: anxiety does not always reflect present danger. Instead, it often reflects stored stress. The nervous system learns through repetition. During the pandemic, unpredictability and threat cues were constant; infection risk, social separation, financial instability, and continuous media exposure. Over time, the brain adapted by increasing vigilance and reducing its threshold for perceived threat.

Neurobiological research shows that fear and stress conditioning are acquired faster than they are extinguished. This means that even when external conditions improve, internal stress responses may lag behind. This explains why reassurance alone rarely works. You cannot reason a nervous system out of patterns it learned experientially over years. Regulation occurs through repeated signals of safety, predictability, and connection, not simply through cognitive reframing.

The Solution: Re-establish Safety Through Consistency, Not Intensity

Research on stress recovery consistently shows that nervous system regulation is cumulative and gradual. There is no single intervention that “switches it off.” Effective recovery focuses on restoring predictability and reducing unnecessary threat signals:
Stable routines and structure lower cognitive load and uncertainty;
Physical movement supports stress hormone regulation and vagal tone;
Social reconnection counters isolation-related hypervigilance;
Boundaries around media exposure reduce chronic re-activation;
Realistic pacing of change prevents repeated stress cycling.

Organisational research mirrors these findings. Psychological safety, predictable workflows, and emotionally intelligent leadership are associated with improved wellbeing, engagement, and sustained performance.
From a leadership perspective, clarity, calm decision-making, and regulated communication act as stabilising signals for teams. Nervous systems co-regulate, particularly in hierarchical environments.

The Takeaway
We Are in a Recovery Phase, Not a Regression. The pandemic may be officially over, but its psychological effects are still resolving (and this takes time). What many people are experiencing now is not regression. It is delayed processing after prolonged strain. Historical research on collective trauma including war, economic collapse, and natural disasters consistently shows that recovery unfolds over extended periods, often years rather than months. Covid-19 was global, prolonged, and psychologically immersive. A gradual recalibration is not only expected. It is human. Let's take it a littler easier on ourselves.

The key takeaway is this. Pervasive anxiety after Covid is not a sign of weakness. It is evidence of adaptation. And adaptation can be reshaped.
Individuals and organisations that recognise this moment as a recalibration phase, rather than a failure to “bounce back”, are far more likely to build sustainable resilience. We do not move forward by pretending nothing happened. We move forward by acknowledging what did and supporting the nervous system’s return to balance.

Useful References
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. (Foundational paper introducing allostatic load).
McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine, 153(18), 2093–2101.
Holmes, E. A., et al. (2020). Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: A call for action. The Lancet Psychiatry, 7(6), 547–560.
Pfefferbaum, B., & North, C. S. (2020). Mental health and the Covid-19 pandemic. New England Journal of Medicine, 383, 510–512.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking.
(Widely cited synthesis on how stress and trauma persist physiologically).
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York: Norton.
(Explains nervous system regulation and safety cues).
Shanafelt, T. D., Ripp, J., & Trockel, M. (2020). Understanding and addressing sources of anxiety among health care professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA, 323(21), 2133–2134.
WHO (2022). Mental health and COVID-19: Early evidence of the pandemic’s impact. World Health Organization.

©Niall MacGiolla Bhuí, PhD. January 2026. (Niall wrote his doctoral thesis on the theme of resiliency. His latest co-authored book is also on this theme).