Why 2025 Felt So Hard - and How to Move Forward Gently into 2026

If 2025 felt harder than you expected, you’re not alone.

This time of year, I often hear reflections on the previous year and hopes for the upcoming year in my work as a therapist. However, this year, I noticed more people than usual expressed a heaviness to their experiences in 2025. Some experienced a challenging moment or series of challenges. For others, there wasn’t a single crisis or defining moment. Life may have looked mostly fine from the outside. And yet, moving through the year felt heavier, more draining, or more discouraging than anticipated.

That experience doesn’t mean you failed to cope, or that you missed some opportunity to “reset.” Often, it reflects something quieter but very real: a gentle nudge to slow down.

Mental health doesn’t follow the calendar. Our nervous systems don’t automatically recalibrate just because a new year begins. When stress, uncertainty, and adaptation stretch across multiple years, fatigue can settle in.

If 2025 left you feeling worn down, flat, or unsettled, there are reasons for that. And understanding them can be a gentler place to begin than trying to push forward.

Why 2025 May Have Felt So Hard

You may be telling yourself, This wasn’t harder than other tough years...I survived 2020, 2008, 2001. But 2025 had its own kind of strain. Economic uncertainty, fast-moving technological shifts, and changing work expectations created an environment where many companies struggled to adapt. And in many cases, individuals bore the cost of navigating unpredictable job markets, rising expenses, and systems that kept changing beneath their feet.

National data suggests this experience wasn’t just anecdotal. In 2024, just over half of U.S. employees reported feeling burned out at work. By 2025, multiple surveys placed burnout well above 60 percent, with a majority of workers reporting moderate to high levels of workplace stress. At the same time, fewer employees reported feeling supported by their employers, reflecting a widening gap between rising demands and diminishing buffers.

Workplace changes played a significant role in this escalation. In response to economic uncertainty, many employers scaled back flexibility and incentives that had previously helped stabilize daily life, such as remote or hybrid work options, while maintaining or increasing productivity expectations. Research consistently shows that reduced autonomy and predictability at work are strongly associated with higher stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion, even when employment itself remains stable.

Another contributing factor was the pace of technological disruption. In 2025, rapid advances in artificial intelligence reshaped digital systems in ways that affected visibility, referrals, and job security across many fields. Surveys found that roughly half of U.S. workers were worried about how AI would impact their careers, with a significant portion concerned it could reduce their job opportunities. When systems that once felt reliable change quickly and without transparency, people often experience heightened vigilance and a loss of agency - both closely linked to nervous system stress responses.

Broader economic and social pressures further compounded this strain. Rising costs, global trade shifts, and increasing political polarization contributed to an ongoing sense of instability. By 2025, more than 60 percent of adults reported that societal division was a significant source of stress. Even when individuals were not directly impacted by specific policies or events, repeated exposure to conflict and uncertainty has been shown to increase emotional fatigue and disengagement over time.

Alongside these external pressures, many people were also carrying quieter forms of grief. Not just the loss of people or jobs, but the loss of timelines, plans, energy, and versions of themselves they expected to reclaim by now. This kind of grief often goes unnamed, making it easier to minimize, and harder to metabolize.

Taken together, these overlapping conditions help explain why 2025 felt heavier for so many people. Not because something was uniquely wrong with them, but because a system that had been adapting for years was being asked to stretch further with fewer supports and less certainty about what would come next.

When Survival Becomes the Default

When life stays demanding for long enough, survival can quietly become the default mode. Not in the dramatic sense of constant crisis, but in the everyday sense of doing what needs to be done while staying emotionally braced.

Many people didn’t enter survival mode in 2025 - but 2025 is when the limits of that survival began to show. After years of adapting, adjusting, and pushing through uncertainty, the strategies that once helped people function started to feel less effective. Energy felt harder to access. Emotional flexibility narrowed. What had been manageable began to feel heavier, even without a clear external trigger.

Instead of feeling actively distressed, people may notice more subtle signs: a persistent sense of exhaustion, emotional flatness, irritability, difficulty focusing, or trouble imagining the future with clarity or hope. Joy can feel muted, not gone, but farther away. Rest may stop feeling restorative. Even positive changes can feel like more to manage.

From a nervous system perspective, this makes sense. When the body remains in a state of heightened monitoring for an extended period, it prioritizes efficiency and protection over flexibility and expansion. This isn’t a failure of coping; it’s a biological response to prolonged demand.

Recognizing survival mode isn’t about labeling something as wrong. It’s about understanding why motivation, creativity, or emotional bandwidth might feel different than they used to. For some, it's using therapy approaches that support coping with uncertainty. When we understand the role survival has played, we can approach the next season with more compassion and with a clearer sense of what kind of support might actually help.

How to Move Forward Gently in 2026

As one year ends and another begins, it’s common to feel pressure to reset—to feel motivated again, to have clarity, to start fresh. Culturally, we treat January as a turning point, as if the calendar itself should bring relief or momentum.

But nervous systems don’t reset on a schedule. After a year marked by sustained uncertainty and adaptation, many people find that the idea of a “fresh start” lands flat—or even feels overwhelming. When energy and emotional bandwidth are already stretched, the expectation to immediately feel hopeful or driven can create quiet shame: Why am I still tired? Why don’t I feel excited?

For many people, the pressure to move forward doesn’t feel inspiring, but rather compulsory. There can be an unspoken belief that rest should be brief, recovery should be visible, and forward motion should be quick. For some, learning how to move forward gently after a difficult year is the greater challenge when their resources are spent. When that expectation isn’t met, it’s easy to interpret the body’s slowness as resistance or failure, rather than as information.

For some, what’s needed at the beginning of 2026 isn’t a reset, but a pause. Not stagnation, and not giving up, but a shift away from urgency. Toward steadiness. Toward allowing recovery to happen at a human pace, rather than a symbolic one.

A new year can still matter. It can mark intention, reflection, and choice. But it doesn’t have to demand transformation. Sometimes, the most supportive way forward isn’t a fresh start; it’s more support around the life you’re already living.

What Taking a Pause Looks Like in Real Time

As a therapist, I often use abstract terms like mindfulness, embodiment, or pausing without always making them concrete for the individual. It can be difficult, because part of pausing is reflecting on your own needs in that moment which may change how pausing looks from situation to situation. Here are a few ways to practice pausing in your day-to-day.

Observe your bodily and sensory experience

In a therapy session, I might guide a client through a Body Scan, like in this handout, helping the person I am with notice sensations, urges, or thoughts when putting their awareness slowly on each part of the body starting with the toes and working upward. Sometimes, the intention is to noticed to change, and sometimes the intention is to just observe.

Filling the Pause with Regulating Actions

For people who are use to always doing, the thought of observing and sitting with experiences can be a big step. Finding actions like taking deep breaths or self-massaging a tight muscle can offer something to do. It's not to say that increasing tolerance to inaction isn't helpful, but small actions can help bridge the habit of overdoing to truly pausing without action. Keep in mind, regulating actions are not mindless actions such as doom scrolling, but actionable things that release muscle tension, slow your breathe, and help your body feel more at ease.

Using Questions to Check In

For the individual that prefers a cognitive stance over an embodied one, asking oneself questions can offer a moment to stop and reflect on what you need - not just in life, in general, but in that specific moment. Maybe stimulation. Maybe connection. Maybe boundaries. Finding the answer still requires noticing and observing, but helps keep things cognitive if embodied work is too difficult right now.

Mindfully Observing the Moment

Sometimes a pause is just needing time - time to slow down and take in the moment. Instead of noticing your own sensory experience, shifting your focus to external sensory input can be calming and offer the blessing of time to slow down. Mindfully Observing a moment is not just doing "therapist-y" things like lighting a scented candle or drinking an herbal tea (although it can include those things). It is taking in a moment with intention. It's observing, describing, and participating. Not just drinking the tea, but noticing the feeling of drinking the tea. Noticing the aroma and you draw the mug closer. Delighting in the taste as it hits your lips.

More Support (Not More Pressure)

Moving into a new year doesn’t require a surge of momentum or a clear plan. For many people, what’s most supportive after a year like 2025 is not more effort, but more scaffolding around what already exists.

Support can take many forms. It might look like fewer commitments held with more care, or clearer boundaries around time and energy. It might mean revisiting routines that once felt manageable and adjusting them so they ask less of you now.

Moving into the year with support also means allowing change to be incremental. Relief doesn’t arrive all at once. Stability builds through small, repeatable experiences of safety- being listened to, and not doing everything alone.

For some people, support will come from relationships or community. For others, it may involve professional care. It may also come in the form of accepting or asking for help.

You don’t need to prove readiness for the next year. You don’t need to rebrand yourself or push past your limits. Moving into 2026 can be quieter than that—guided by steadiness, responsiveness, and the understanding that support isn’t something you earn after a hard season. It’s something that all people need at a core level.

Beginning Where You Are

Carrying uncertainty, adapting again and again, and doing your best with limited clarity leaves an imprint—and recognizing that is part of moving forward. You don’t need to feel ready for what comes next. You don’t need to catch up, reclaim who you were, or turn the page all at once.

As you move into 2026, it’s okay if your pace is slower than the calendar suggests. It’s okay if what you need most right now is steadiness, not momentum. Pausing, seeking support, and allowing yourself to meet your emotional needs are not signs that something is wrong—they’re signs of emotional responsiveness.

If you’re looking for support as you move into 2026, at your pace, therapy can offer a steady space to pause, reflect, and feel less alone. Learn more about working with our team at Libra Virtual Care.

References

1. National Alliance on Mental Illness. (2024). The 2024 workplace mental health poll. https://www.nami.org

2. American Psychological Association. (2023). Stress in America 2023: A nation recovering from collective trauma. https://www.apa.org

3. American Psychological Association. (2024). Stress in America 2024: Cumulative stress in uncertain times. https://www.apa.org

4. National Alliance on Mental Illness. (2025). The 2025 NAMI workplace mental health poll. NAMI. https://www.nami.org/research/publications-reports/survey-reports/the-2025-nami-workplace-mental-health-poll/

5. American Psychological Association. (2025). Work in America™ survey 2025. APA. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/work-in-america/2025

6. Robinson, B. (2025, February 8). Job burnout at 66% in 2025, new study shows. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/02/08/job-burnout-at-66-in-2025-new-study-shows/

7. Aflac Incorporated. (2025). Aflac WorkForces Report: An employee benefits survey. https://www.aflac.com/business/resources/aflac-workforces-report/default.aspx