We cannot let go. We grip the thought, the fear, the memory.
Brazil has the highest number of anxious people globally, with anxiety and depression rising 25% during COVID-19's first year. Common anxiety symptoms include constant agitation, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and physical manifestations like headaches and digestive issues.
- Brazil has the world's highest number of people with anxiety disorders
- Anxiety and depression rose more than 25% in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Persistent anxiety symptoms lasting two weeks warrant professional evaluation
- Aerobic exercise, yoga, meditation, and nature contact show measurable anxiety reduction
Brazil faces the world's highest anxiety rates, worsened by pandemic-related economic and social pressures. Experts recommend exercise, meditation, nature contact, and professional help for persistent symptoms.
Brazil is living through an anxiety crisis unlike anywhere else on Earth. According to the World Health Organization, the country carries the world's heaviest burden of anxiety disorders. The numbers tell a stark story: in the first year of the pandemic alone, anxiety and depression spiked more than 25 percent across the population. A 2022 survey by Ipsos spanning 34 countries found that concern about mental health had nearly tripled in just four years. The weight of this collective distress is not random. It is the accumulated pressure of economic collapse, job loss, social fracture, and political instability—forces that have left millions feeling trapped in a state of permanent threat.
Psychologist Ilan Segre, based in São Paulo and author of "Integrative Therapy," frames the crisis this way: people are drowning under economic, social, and political strain and have no idea how to respond. The pandemic did more than kill people and separate families. It destroyed livelihoods. It erased savings. It left a significant portion of the population in what Segre calls hypervigilance—a constant state of alert, a perpetual sense that something terrible is about to happen. This is not individual weakness. This is a collective condition, a shared atmosphere of dread that everyone is breathing.
The body keeps score. Anxiety announces itself in ways both obvious and subtle. There is the constant restlessness, the inability to switch off, the legs and arms that move without permission, sometimes accompanied by a rise in body temperature and sweat. There is the worry that spirals—about yourself, about people you love, about disasters that have not yet occurred. Sleep becomes a battleground: insomnia, or waking too early and then lying awake for hours. The mind fractures. People cannot read a book, watch a full film, or concentrate at work. They feel compelled to stay plugged in, scrolling through phones and screens as if disconnection itself is dangerous. The fatigue that follows is not ordinary tiredness. It is exhaustion that sleep cannot touch. Headaches bloom at the base of the skull. The shoulders lock. The stomach rebels. The irritability that emerges is not a character flaw—it is a symptom.
When does worry become a problem that requires intervention? Segre offers a clear threshold: if any of these symptoms persist for two weeks or longer, you are living through a period of anxiety that warrants attention. He draws a comparison to the animal kingdom. A deer being chased by a predator experiences intense anxiety, but once the threat passes, the animal returns quickly to equilibrium. Humans are different. We cannot let go. We grip the thought, the fear, the memory, and we do not release it. When this state of imbalance stretches across weeks and months, it begins to damage the body in measurable ways—gastritis, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, diarrhea—and the mind in equally serious ways: deep fear, insomnia, the inability to think clearly.
The path forward requires both professional support and practical intervention. Working with a psychologist or therapist helps identify what triggers the anxiety and builds strategies to manage it. But there are also concrete practices that research has validated. Aerobic exercise is particularly effective at reducing anxiety and improving sleep quality. Yoga, meditation, and breathing exercises all show measurable benefits. Nature itself is medicine: walking outdoors, especially in parks or on beaches or in open fields where you do not have to remain vigilant against traffic and theft, genuinely calms the nervous system. Planting things, tending a garden, touching soil and grass and sand—these small acts of connection ground people in something real and alive. Pets offer similar relief. The simple act of petting an animal quiets the mind.
The larger shift requires reclaiming time and attention from the digital world. Segre notes that the modern world has become one vast anxiety generator—work pressure, social roles, endless obligations all feel like weights too heavy to carry. The antidote is not willpower or positive thinking. It is deliberate withdrawal from the screen and deliberate reconnection with people who are physically present. It is choosing a walk with a friend over a scroll through a feed. It is recognizing that the crisis is real, that the pressure is real, but that the body and mind have ways of healing if given the space and the tools to do so.
Notable Quotes
People are feeling very pressured by economic, social, and political factors and do not know how to respond to that feeling— Psychologist Ilan Segre
The pandemic created a state of permanent alert and threat that generates anxiety—a global, social, collective scenario in which we are all immersed— Psychologist Ilan Segre
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why is Brazil specifically the most anxious country in the world? Is there something particular about Brazilian society that makes it worse than elsewhere?
It's not that Brazilians are inherently more anxious as people. It's that the country has been hit by a specific convergence of pressures—economic instability, job insecurity, political turbulence—all at once. The pandemic amplified existing vulnerabilities rather than creating new ones.
So it's not a mental health crisis in the clinical sense. It's a social crisis showing up in the body.
Exactly. The psychologist in the story calls it hypervigilance—a state of permanent alert. When your economic survival is uncertain, when you've lost income or watched others lose theirs, your nervous system stays switched on. That's not pathology. That's a rational response to genuine threat.
The article mentions that animals shake off anxiety quickly once the danger passes. Why can't humans do that?
Because we live in our thoughts. A deer's threat is immediate and physical. Once the predator leaves, the danger is gone. But a human can replay the threat endlessly in their mind. We worry about what might happen next. We ruminate. We cannot convince ourselves the danger has truly passed.
Two weeks seems like an arbitrary threshold for seeking help. Why that specific timeframe?
It's not arbitrary. It's the point at which the body starts to accumulate damage. A few days of poor sleep is normal. Two weeks of it begins to affect concentration, mood, physical health. It's the line between stress and injury.
The remedies listed—exercise, nature, meditation—they sound almost too simple. Do they actually work?
They work because they interrupt the cycle. Exercise burns off the stress hormones. Nature removes you from the environment generating the threat. Meditation teaches the nervous system that it's safe to relax. None of it is magic, but all of it is evidence-based.
What about people who cannot afford therapy or who live in cities where nature is not accessible?
That's the real gap. The article doesn't address it, but it's the question that matters most. The advice works if you have resources and access. For many people living through this crisis, those things are exactly what they've lost.