Nupoor Mohan
11-Sep-2026
The volume is rising, and it is not rising equally for everyone.
By Nupoor Mohan, Founder & CEO, The Full Circle, an online mental health platform democratizing access to quality therapy.
Anxiety has become the background music of modern Indian life. It hums under our commutes, our notifications, our carefully curated feeds and our five-year plans. Most of us have learnt to live over it. But as someone who has spent the last few years building a mental healthcare platform, I can tell you that the volume is rising, and it is not rising equally for everyone. Understanding who is most vulnerable, and why, is the first step toward doing something about it.
The young are carrying the most
If anxiety has a centre of gravity in India today, it sits between the ages of 18 and 35. This is the life stage where every major uncertainty stacks at once: education, career, money, relationships, identity, and now a digital life that never switches off. The Economic Survey 2025-26 flagged that young Indians are spending five to seven hours a day on screens, and what strikes me is not the number itself but what those hours contain, endless comparison, endless news, endless opportunity to measure your ordinary Tuesday against someone else’s highlight reel. On our platform, a significant number of first time therapy seekers are under 35, and anxiety is consistently among the most common reasons they come. That is worrying and hopeful at the same time: this generation is more anxious, and also far more willing to do something about it.
Women carry a distinct, heavier load
Globally, anxiety disorders affect more women than men, as per the World Health Organization, and the Indian experience adds its own layers to that. Many women in their twenties, thirties and forties are running what I think of as parallel operating systems: a career, a household, caregiving for children and often for parents, and the invisible job of managing everyone’s emotions but their own. Hormonal transitions, from the postpartum months to perimenopause, add biological weight to an already full load. What concerns me most is that women are frequently the last to classify their own experience as anxiety, because they have been taught to read it as duty, or as simply being a woman. It is neither. It is a health signal, and it deserves the same attention as any physical symptom.
The high functioning are hiding in plain sight
Here is the pattern the statistics miss and the one I see most often: anxiety loves competence. Some of the most anxious people in the country are the ones excelling, the top performer who rechecks every email, the founder who cannot sleep after a good day, the fitness enthusiast whose workout is less about joy and more about control. High functioning anxiety hides behind achievement, which is precisely why urban professionals are such a vulnerable group. A ManipalCigna survey conducted with YouGov this year found that an overwhelming majority of urban Indians report experiencing stress, and my experience says a meaningful slice of that is anxiety wearing the costume of ambition. Success is not evidence of wellbeing. Sometimes it is the disguise.
Lifestyle is the multiplier
Across age and gender, the same lifestyle patterns keep turning the dial up: compressed sleep, blurred work boundaries, sedentary days, caffeine as fuel, doomscrolling as wind down, and cities that give us proximity to millions of people and genuine connection with very few. None of these causes anxiety by itself. Together, they create a nervous system that never fully powers down. The good news, and this is where I want to leave you, is that lifestyle is also the lever. The same wellness choices this magazine celebrates, protected sleep, movement you enjoy, real holidays, nourishing food, screen free rituals, are not indulgences. They are the daily infrastructure of a calmer mind.
And when anxiety persists despite all of it, when it starts interfering with sleep, work, relationships or joy, that is the moment to treat it the way we treat any health matter: with professional help. Therapy is not a crisis measure. It is maintenance for the mind, as ordinary as a gym membership or a skincare routine. The most vulnerable person, ultimately, is not the young professional or the multitasking woman or the high achiever. It is anyone who believes they must carry anxiety alone. You do not.
All image credits: Unsplash
