A recent Newsweek investigation into Gen Z women reveals what many of us already suspect: an entire generation is drowning in anxiety. Forty percent of young women want to leave the country permanently. A third feel anxious about the future almost all the time. Their friends are cycling through antidepressants like they’re trying on jeans.
The culprits are familiar. Economic precarity. Climate doom. A dating landscape that treats people like products. And underneath it all, the relentless hum of nervous system overload from being constantly online.
Serena, a 26-year-old social media manager from Louisiana, told Newsweek she’s not only bombarded with tragic news but also “this guilt that she should care.” That sentence is a perfect encapsulation of what happens when you can’t turn off the input valve. When your habits are shaped by algorithms designed to keep you scrolling, your reward center gets hijacked. Parasocial relationships replace real ones. You forget how to distinguish between content created to sell you something and actual wisdom.
🚪 Withdrawal Is Not Weakness
The yogic tradition has a word for what this generation desperately needs: pratyahara. It’s the fifth limb of the eight-limbed path, and it means withdrawal of the senses from external stimuli. Not forever. Not as escapism. But as a practice of reclaiming your attention from the thousand things demanding it.
Pratyahara is radical in a culture that equates constant availability with virtue. It asks: what if you didn’t need to absorb every tragedy, every opinion, every piece of breaking news? What if your capacity to feel didn’t require you to feel everything, all the time?
This isn’t about becoming numb or indifferent. Pratyahara creates space between stimulus and response. It lets you choose where your energy goes instead of letting the algorithm decide for you.
🧘♀️ Santosha in an Age of Scarcity
The yogic principle of santosha — contentment — sounds almost offensive when you’re 26 and half your friends are unemployed. But santosha doesn’t mean accepting injustice or giving up on change. It means finding stability within yourself when everything outside is unstable.
Young women are being told the world is ending while also being sold the idea that the right skincare routine or productivity hack will save them. That cognitive dissonance is maddening. Santosha offers a different path: cultivate an internal ground that doesn’t shift with every doomscroll.
This requires practice. Literal, embodied practice. Meditation that teaches you how to sit with discomfort without needing to fix it immediately. Breathwork that reminds your body it’s safe even when your feed says otherwise. Movement that reconnects you to sensation instead of abstraction.
💫 Getting Yoga to Gen Z
I know more people pushing 70 than pushing 20. That’s a problem. Not because older practitioners don’t deserve community, but because the demographic that most needs tools for presence and nervous system regulation is largely absent from yoga spaces.
We need to meet them where they are. That might mean shorter practices. It definitely means dropping the spiritual bypassing and wellness industry nonsense. Gen Z has excellent radar for inauthenticity. They can smell a sales pitch from a mile away.
What they need is simple: techniques that work. Practices that don’t require buying into a whole lifestyle brand. Permission to feel terrible while also learning how to not be consumed by that feeling.
Yoga won’t fix the economy or the climate or the dating apps. But it can teach you how to be in your body when everything else feels like chaos. It can give you a few minutes where you’re not performing, not consuming, not being sold to. Just breathing.
That might not sound revolutionary. But for a generation that’s never known what it’s like to be offline, it might be exactly what they need.
— MJH