It’s not you, it’s the world around you

Many of us describe intense anxiety about our place in a menacing world. We feel restless and worried, and we tend to interpret this as a sign of personal failure. We ask ourselves why we are not coping and why we cannot simply “pull ourselves together”. In many cases, our lives unfold within environments marked by instability and conflicting demands. The distress we feel is connected to these conditions. When the structures around someone are unsettled or demanding in contradictory ways, anxiety becomes a reasonable response. Self‑guilt about that anxiety adds another layer of strain and diverts attention away from the context in which people are trying to live.

Situations, not just selves

To understand what is happening, it is useful to start from situations that we all experience. The world we inhabit is shaped by overlapping pressures: ecological crisis, wars and mass violence, political extremism, regimes that restrict freedom or punish dissent. Bureaucratic systems can be opaque and slow, requiring repeated effort for basic rights or services. Information flows are dense, carrying news of threat and conflict into everyday life and creating a sense that danger and instability are always nearby.

Work regimes change quickly and expectations in organisations multiply. Housing can be precarious, with insecurity about contracts, rising costs, and limited space. Financial stress appears in the form of low or unstable income, debt, or the need to support others. Work can be precarious, with temporary contracts and dependence on decisions over which workers have little influence. Some people have no work at all or depend on employers under conditions that leave them little freedom to refuse demands or negotiate terms. Relations in the workplace can involve exclusion or direct exploitation, and these patterns affect how safe people feel in their professional lives.

Migration stress and gendered expectations often intersect with these conditions. People may carry the effort of adapting to a new country and a new language, while also navigating norms about whose labour is taken for granted and whose voice is listened to. In such constellations, anxiety and fatigue emerge from the way the world is organised around them. Recognising this shifts the question from “What is wrong with me?” toward “How are the structures I live in shaping my experience?” and establishes a more adequate starting point for work that takes seriously both individual agency and the limits imposed by the surrounding environment.

Working with worldviews and limits in coaching

Coaching takes place within these conditions and cannot undo them. The climate crisis will not recede because a single person changes their daily routine; wars and political extremism do not end when someone reframes their thoughts. The work in coaching concerns how a person relates to the world they inhabit, how they interpret it, and how they organise their life within it. This involves attention to their worldview: the assumptions they hold about what is possible, what is expected, and where responsibility lies. Many therapeutic approaches with a systemic or contextual orientation proceed similarly. They treat distress as embedded in relationships and environments and work with the meanings people give to their situations rather than treating symptoms as isolated defects.

In coaching, I am interested in how coachees describe the world around them and how they position themselves in relation to it. Some see the surrounding crises as signs that nothing they do matters. Others feel compelled to respond to everything and end up exhausted. Some internalise narratives that place the entire burden of coping on the individual, while leaving structural factors unquestioned. The coaching conversation becomes a place where these interpretations can be brought into view, examined, and sometimes re‑organised. Changing cognitions or behaviours does not remove external pressures, yet it can alter how someone moves through them, which sources of support they draw on, and how they distribute their energy and attention.

Naming the world and its effects

In practice, working with anxiety about the world often begins by describing more precisely what “the world” means in a specific case. Together with coachees, I try to identify the elements that feel most present: which crises they follow closely, which institutional pressures they face, which forms of insecurity and exploitation appear in their own daily life. The aim is to move from a general feeling that “everything is too much” toward a more articulated picture of what is happening around them. This does not solve the problem, but it makes it possible to see patterns and to distinguish between different sources of strain rather than treating them as one undifferentiated mass.

The next step is to explore how these external conditions register internally. We look at bodily responses such as tension, sleep disturbances, or changes in appetite; we consider recurring thoughts, images, and worries; and we ask how these affect relationships and work. Coachees often notice that certain news items, bureaucratic letters, or workplace interactions trigger specific forms of anxiety or exhaustion. Naming these links can be uncomfortable, yet it also reveals how the outer situation and the inner experience are connected, and how particular forms of vulnerability arise from that connection.

Once this map is more detailed, we begin to sort elements into different zones. Some conditions are outside the coachee’s reach: geopolitical conflicts, global economic trends, decisions taken far away. Others are not fully controllable, yet the coachee can contribute to shaping them, often together with others: workplace cultures, local initiatives, professional networks, community structures. A third set concerns aspects of life they can change more directly: routines, boundaries, use of media, interests, modes of engagement, and forms of rest. This hierarchy is not fixed; it is a working tool that helps distinguish where action is possible, where influence is partial, and where the main task is to find ways of living with what cannot be altered.

Designing a personal coping ecology

From there, the work turns toward coping and adjustment. I remember Joan Baez saying in an interview that “action is the antidote to despair”, and it expresses exactly what I personally feel: taking part in change, alone or with others, can counter the sense of complete powerlessness. I sometimes use self‑disclosure in coaching and say that, for me, some form of collective action remains important. This makes clear that I am speaking from my own position and not prescribing a rule. Just as it does for me, collective or political engagement becomes, for some coachees, a crucial way of relating to a disordered world. For others, constant action is not feasible or not desirable; they need different forms of response that do not require permanent mobilisation.

In coaching, we therefore look at several possible directions. Cognitive work can help distinguish between realistic worry and catastrophic imagination, clarify what someone is and is not responsible for, and reduce patterns of thought that keep anxiety high without adding information. Relationships and community can provide recognition, solidarity, and shared understanding; building or strengthening such connections is often central when external structures feel hostile or indifferent. Action can take many forms: from small, local initiatives to changes in professional focus or participation in broader movements, always calibrated to the coachee’s limits and commitments. Embodied routines around sleep, movement, and sensory exposure can stabilise daily life and support the capacity to stay in contact with reality.

The role of the coach is to accompany the coachee as they identify which combinations of these elements make sense for them. There is no single correct way to respond to a world that is in crisis, and I do not claim to have found one myself. Some people will move more into collective action, others into careful boundary‑setting and relational work, others into specific forms of creative or professional engagement. The task is to help them design a coping ecology that acknowledges how much is beyond their control, makes use of the levers they do have, and respects their own health and constraints.