Why Everything Had to Slow: Burnout, Anxiety and the Snake Year of 2025

By January 2026, most people are desperate to be “moving on.”

New year. Clean slate. Fresh energy. Forward motion.

But here’s the thing no one really wants to admit:2025 didn’t finish neatly.

For many of us, last year was a Snake year in the truest sense — not symbolic, not mystical, but lived. Slow. Pressurised. Uncomfortable in ways that were hard to explain. A year where things didn’t dramatically collapse, but quietly stopped fitting.

Snake years don’t shout. They rub.

They show up as irritation you can’t shake. Fatigue that doesn’t respond to rest. Anxiety that feels more existential than situational. Roles you suddenly can’t perform without cost.

I felt it myself throughout 2025. And I saw it daily in my psychotherapy practice here in the UK.

People weren’t coming because everything had fallen apart. They were coming because holding it together had become unbearable. High-functioning, capable people — many of them men, many carrying years of responsibility — quietly realising that the way they’d survived was no longer sustainable.

Snake energy doesn’t ask you to reinvent yourself. It asks you to tell the truth.

What are you still carrying because it once kept you safe? What are you loyal to that now drains you? What version of you is being maintained out of habit, not choice?

Shedding isn’t dramatic. It’s not a breakthrough moment. It’s often lonely, awkward, and unseen. There’s grief in it too — grief for the effort it took to keep things going, and grief for what you hoped they’d become.

This is the phase people call “stuck.”

But it isn’t stuck. It’s discernment.

Slowing down in a Snake year isn’t failure. For anxious nervous systems — especially those shaped by long-term stress, trauma, or relentless responsibility — slowing can feel threatening. Stillness removes distraction. It asks you to feel what’s been muted.

Snake doesn’t slow you down to punish you. It slows you down so you don’t bolt in the wrong direction.

As we stand in January 2026, on the edge of the Chinese New Year threshold in February, it’s worth saying this clearly:

If last year stripped things back instead of building them up, nothing went wrong.

Nothing is shed by accident.

And what comes next — the movement, the Horse energy — needs the honesty that Snake demanded first.

If you recognise yourself here, in the slowing, the shedding, the quiet reckoning; you’re not late, and you’re not failing. You’re doing the work that can’t be rushed. We don’t move forward cleanly by pretending last year didn’t matter. We move forward by telling the truth about what it asked of us.

I’ll walk this next stretch with you. Quietly. Honestly. At the right pace.

— Sarah x