How Global Uncertainty Affects Expats’ Mental Health: A Therapist’s Perspective

Why living abroad during times of crisis requires a different kind of emotional resilience, and when to seek support

In January 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission confirmed what many had already felt viscerally: 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022, with over 14,600 casualties, a 31% increase from the previous year. Long-range weapons expanded the geography of danger. Entire cities, far from frontlines, experienced nightly attacks. Millions lived under the constant threat of sirens, blackouts, and displacement.

If you’re an expat or international student living in Milan, Bari, or elsewhere in Europe, you might find yourself asking: why does this affect me so deeply?

I’m safe. I have a stable visa, a comfortable apartment, access to healthcare.

So why the persistent low-grade anxiety, the urge to check the news at 2am, the sense that the ground beneath me isn’t entirely solid?

The answer lies in a complex intersection of global uncertainty, displacement, and the psychological impact of living away from one’s primary base of safety and belonging.

In my work as a psychotherapist with expats and international professionals, I see this pattern repeatedly: individuals who have successfully navigated major life transitions find themselves destabilised, not by personal crisis, but by the emotional weight of world events they cannot control.

The mental health impact of living in uncertain times

The broader data is sobering. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1 in 5 people living in conflict-affected areas experience a mental health condition. Among forcibly displaced populations, now estimated at over 123 million globally, rates of PTSD, depression, and anxiety are significantly elevated, often persisting years after initial displacement.

You might reasonably think: but that’s not me. I chose to move. I’m not fleeing war.

And yet, from a psychological perspective, vulnerability to instability exists on a spectrum. Living abroad involves a continuous process of adaptation, often subtle, but ongoing. You are navigating a different cultural environment, often in another language, without the same implicit support structures that shaped you.

From a psychodynamic perspective, this matters. Our sense of safety is not only external, it is also relational and internalised. When familiar environments and attachment figures are distant, the system has fewer resources to regulate stress. This can make external uncertainty feel more immediate, more personal, and more difficult to contain.

Why expats and international students are particularly vulnerable

In clinical work, three interrelated themes tend to emerge.

Distance from primary support networks

In times of stress, we instinctively seek proximity to those who provide emotional regulation, partners, family, long-standing friendships. For expats, this proximity is often unavailable.

While video calls maintain connection at a cognitive level, they cannot fully replicate the regulating function of physical presence. From a nervous system perspective, co-regulation, being physically with another person, is a key component of emotional stability. Its absence can intensify feelings of isolation, particularly during global crises.

Cultural dislocation and identity strain

Living abroad involves a continuous, often unconscious process of translation, of language, social norms, and identity. This creates a baseline cognitive and emotional load.

Psychodynamically, this can be understood as a loosening of familiar structures that organise the self. When external uncertainty increases, this internal “grounding” may already be less stable, amplifying existential anxiety.

Research on doomscrolling supports this: individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty are more likely to engage in compulsive news consumption, which in turn increases anxiety. For expats, whose lives inherently involve uncertainty, this dynamic can become self-reinforcing.

Visa status and conditional belonging

Unlike citizens, your right to remain is conditional. This introduces an underlying layer of precarity that is often held in the background, until global instability brings it into sharper focus.

At this point, world events are no longer abstract. They become entangled with personal concerns: Will policies change? Will I still be able to stay? What happens if things shift?

From a psychodynamic perspective, this can resonate with earlier experiences of conditional belonging or instability, intensifying emotional responses in ways that are not always fully conscious.

How news consumption activates trauma responses

Modern media ecosystems are structured to capture attention through emotional activation. Repeated exposure to distressing content, war, displacement, crisis, has a direct impact on the nervous system.

When you engage with such material, the brain’s threat detection system activates. The body responds as if danger were immediate: increased heart rate, heightened alertness, stress hormone release.

Over time, this creates a feedback loop. Anxiety drives information-seeking (in an attempt to regain control), but increased exposure amplifies anxiety.

For individuals with trauma histories, this process is even more pronounced. News content can function as a trigger, activating implicit memory networks. Images of displacement, separation, or instability may resonate with personal experiences, migration, loss, bureaucratic struggle, even if the connection is not immediately conscious.

In this sense, the emotional impact of news is not simply about what is happening “out there,” but about how it interacts with what is already held internally.

The body keeps the score: somatic patterns

The impact of this dynamic is often most visible in the body.

Common patterns include:

• Sleep disruption, especially early waking with racing thoughts
• Digestive issues
• Muscle tension, headaches, jaw clenching
• Difficulty concentrating
• Emotional volatility or numbness

These are not signs of weakness. They are adaptive responses, your nervous system attempting to manage sustained exposure to perceived threat without sufficient regulatory support.

When to seek professional support

Not all anxiety in response to global events requires therapy. Some level of distress is appropriate, it reflects engagement with reality.

However, certain patterns suggest that additional support may be helpful:

• Compulsive or uncontrollable news checking
• Difficulty functioning in daily life
• Persistent physical symptoms without medical cause
• Social withdrawal or avoidance
• Intrusive thoughts or images
• A sense of being overwhelmed or unable to “switch off”

Therapy, in this context, is not about eliminating concern. It is about restoring the capacity to hold concern without being consumed by it.

Understanding anxiety through a trauma-informed lens

To understand this more fully, it can be helpful to look at anxiety through a trauma-informed lens.

From this perspective, anxiety is not something “wrong” with you. It often reflects how your mind and body learned to cope with difficult or overwhelming experiences.

Drawing on the work of Janina Fisher, these responses can be thought of as different “parts” of yourself that developed to help you survive. Some parts may be highly alert and anxious, scanning for danger. Others may shut down, withdrawing or numbing to cope. These reactions were adaptive at the time, even if they now feel disruptive.

A psychodynamic perspective, such as that of Jo Stubley, helps us see how these responses are also shaped by early relationships. Attachment experiences influence how safe we feel with others, how we manage emotions, and what we expect from the world. Anxiety may therefore arise not only from physiological arousal but also from internalised patterns formed in earlier life.

Trauma is held both in the body and relationally: in somatic memory and in internalised expectations of safety, trust, and support. Effective therapeutic work attends to both, helping you develop a compassionate, curious relationship with these internal experiences.

This understanding lays the groundwork for practical strategies: regulation of nervous system states, developing awareness of internal patterns, restoring agency, and learning to engage with uncertainty without becoming overwhelmed.

What therapy can offer: a trauma-informed, psychodynamic perspective

Therapy does not aim to reassure you that the world is safe. Instead, it creates a space where uncertainty can be experienced, explored, and understood without overwhelming the system.

• Developing Emotional and Nervous System Regulation
  The work involves staying present with difficult emotions without becoming flooded or disconnected. Attention to the body, pacing, and gradual expansion of tolerance for emotional experience are central.
• Understanding Internal Patterns and “Parts”
  Different aspects of the self, vigilant, avoidant, helpless, are explored with curiosity. These responses are not pathological; they are meaningful adaptations to past experiences.
• Restoring a Sense of Agency
  Therapy helps differentiate what is within your control from what is not, supporting grounded and intentional responses.
• Reworking the Relationship with Information
  Awareness of how news consumption affects your internal state, and setting boundaries to avoid overwhelm, is part of the process.
• Creating Space for Vulnerability
  Recognising that strength includes acknowledging difficulty, therapy encourages self-compassion and supports integration of past and present experiences.

Living with uncertainty

The world is, undeniably, uncertain. Your response is not irrational, it is shaped by current realities and personal history.

Therapy does not remove uncertainty. What it offers is the possibility of relating to it differently:

• A space where anxiety can be understood rather than acted out
• A place to disentangle past and present experiences
• A setting where the nervous system can move out of chronic alarm

Ultimately, sustaining yourself in uncertain times is not a retreat. It is what allows you to remain meaningfully engaged with the world, grounded, connected, and alive.

Sources & Further Reading:

Sources & Further Reading

• UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. “2025 deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since 2022” (January 2026)
• World Health Organization. “Refugee and migrant mental health” Fact Sheet (September 2025)
• Shabahang, R., et al. (2024). Doomscrolling evokes existential anxiety and fosters pessimism about human nature? Evidence from Iran and the United States. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 15, 100438
• Türk-Kurtça, T., & Kocatürk, M. (2025). Beyond the scroll: Exploring how intolerance of uncertainty and psychological resilience explain the association between trait anxiety and doomscrolling. Personality and Individual Differences, 233, 112919
• Satici, S. A., Gocet Tekin, E., Deniz, M. E., & Satici, B. (2023). Doomscrolling Scale: its association with personality traits, psychological distress, social media use, and wellbeing. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 18(2), 833–847
• Albelbeisi, A. H., Hajizadeh, A., Al-Zeer, A. M., Saeidpour, J., & Kakemam, E. (2025). Prevalence and associated factors of mental health disorders among internally displaced persons in Gaza. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 31(2), 81–88
• Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. New York: Routledge.
• Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. New York: Norton.
• Stubley, J., & Young, L. (Eds.) (2022). Complex trauma: The Tavistock model. London: Routledge.

About the Author

Antonio Danzi is a psychotherapist and counselor based in Milan and Bari, Italy. He specializes in working with expats, international students, and professionals navigating cross-cultural transitions. His practice integrates trauma-informed approaches with attention to the unique stressors of living abroad. He offers both in-person and online sessions in English and Italian.