Feeling unlike yourself: anxious, flat, or emotionally unrecognisable, is a normal response to collective uncertainty. Your emotions are not the problem. Fear, sadness, and anger are survival signals designed to guide you. When you learn to direct them instead of suppress them, they become tools for clarity and action.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about what I call our survival emotions. We’ve explored anger, sadness and fear; these emotions are designed to protect us, alert us and help us navigate the world around us. They are powerful, primal and deeply human. Now we move into the next layer. The social emotions. This is where it gets really interesting, because these emotions are not so much about life or death. They are not about whether the berry is poisonous or whether t