Russia’s Energy Power Surge Is Creating a New Wave of Existential Anxiety — Are You Affected?

In October 2025, Russian citizens were asked by the Public Opinion Foundation to identify the word that best summed up the country’s sentiment. The outcome was clear. “Anxiety” was selected by 25% of respondents, a substantial victory. The word that received the fewest votes—just 3%—was “Love.” Regardless of how you interpret those figures, they reveal something genuine about the inner life of a nation that has been using energy as a geopolitical tool for years while its own citizens bear the psychological consequences of doing so.

The picture that is currently emerging from Russia is one that requires careful reading, in part because the information that is coming out of the country is incomplete and filtered, and in part because the story is truly complex. By March 2026, reports from a variety of sources detailed a quantifiable decline in psychological well-being among Russians, including rising rates of anxiety and depression associated with unstable finances, a deteriorating standard of living, and a growing sense that the future was unpredictable.

One phrase that analysts had started using to characterize the national mood was “the phase of deep disappointment.” Just 27% of Russians polled thought that things would get better in their country soon. That was the lowest number since the initial weeks of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

There is a traceable but not a direct connection between energy geopolitics and this psychological decline. A continent-wide economic shock was caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent cutoff of gas supplies to Europe. This resulted in skyrocketing bills, emergency government interventions, and spikes in inflation that affected regular households in ways unrelated to their choices. Families in Europe bore the immediate human cost of that disruption. However, the longer-term cost has been mounting within Russia itself, manifesting more slowly and subtly. Markets are under pressure due to sanctions. Once-reliable revenue streams have shrunk or been redirected in ways that haven’t paid for themselves. The anxiety figures that pollsters are currently recording are a direct result of the actual financial strain that Russian households are under.

This is part of a larger pattern that extends beyond the boundaries of Russia. Building a national economy on imported fossil fuels entails inheriting the geopolitical instability of wherever those fuels come from, something energy policymakers have known, but governments have chosen not to act upon. This was revealed when Russia’s war in Ukraine first cut off European gas supplies in 2022. Even though a pipeline is located in Europe, decisions made in Tehran, Moscow, or Riyadh determine its cost.

Since the 2022 crisis forced Europe to face this dependence, the continent has worked to lessen it by building storage buffers, diversifying LNG sources, and increasing domestic renewable capacity. Early in 2026, European officials stated that the continent was more ready than it had been four years prior. That’s most likely accurate. Additionally, it’s likely inadequate because readiness varies, and the current Middle East crisis is putting various pressure points to the test.

In late March 2026, The Guardian reported that therapists throughout Europe were observing a new trend in their consultation rooms: more clients were showing up with a generalized, low-frequency dread rather than a specific personal crisis. One therapist wrote that the human brain finds it difficult to comprehend truly unpredictable threats.

The combination of persistent conflict, fluctuating energy prices, and institutional uncertainty creates anxiety that is difficult to attribute to a single cause and, as a result, resists any one solution, in contrast to a clearly defined problem with a potential solution. This type of ambient threat is especially upsetting to people who are prone to anxiety because there is no obvious way to counteract it. The Strait of Hormuz closure cannot be resolved by contacting your bank. When a supply disruption occurs 6,000 miles away, you cannot think your way out of it.

The Russian experience might be an extreme form of something that people in many other countries are experiencing in less severe forms. The fact that the word “anxiety” is at the top of a national poll is startling, but anxiety as a background condition of modern life—connected to energy prices, geopolitical unrest, and the perception that the systems supporting daily existence are more brittle than they once seemed—is not exclusive to Russia. Anxiety has a particular physical component in Belgorod, where drone attacks are now a common occurrence. In places like Birmingham, Warsaw, or Seoul, it’s more subtle, but it’s still there. It shows up when a fuel bill comes in or a news headline appears at the wrong time.

There’s a sense that the psychological effects of energy geopolitics have been consistently overlooked as all of this has developed over the past few years. Thousands of analysts monitor the economic metrics in real time, including barrels per day, price per therm, gilt yields, and inflation forecasts. Seldom is the human interior of these disruptions measured, and people’s perceptions of the future are altered by persistent uncertainty. Subtly, a poll where “love” comes in last and “anxiety” comes in first is important information. It implies that, despite the geopolitical successes of Russia’s energy strategy, the country has extracted a cost from its own people that no official narrative fully accounts for. Deep disappointment is a real phase. And it’s still unfinished.