Weather trauma is taking mental health toll as NZ gets battered by storm after storm
Monday, 18 May 2026
With New Zealand experiencing a storm on average every eight days, thousands of properties in coastal inundation and flood zones could become uninsurable. Our new series explores the impacts of relentless weather events on families and communities, asks for how much longer insurance will be available, and how the Government is planning to respond.
“Rain anxiety”, the spiking of anxiety during downpours, is being increasingly reported by academics studying storm disasters around the globe.
Professor Holly Thorpe from the University of Waikato led a team studying the human impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle, which struck Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne Tairāwhiti in 2023.
The researchers gathered testimonies from 143 people in the Gisborne Tairāwhiti region.
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“A lot of people didn’t know how to put words to it, but they talked about rain anxiety as a sort of umbrella term. It was keeping them up at night,” Thorpe said.
“Some parents talked about how when it would rain heavily, it would just send this terror through the household, and all the kids would jump into the parents' bed,” she said.
Some who underwent evacuation, rescue, damage or destruction of homes, or loss of a beloved community member, experienced high levels of stress, anxiety, grief and symptoms of PTSD including disturbed sleep and high blood pressure.
When insurer IAG published its Wild Weather Tracker report in April, it included a line reporting on storm anxiety, indicating 57% of people surveyed felt anxious about storms.
The insurer didn’t ask people to specify details of their anxiety, including its severity, or whether it stemmed from a personal experience in a storm or flood.
However, The Post asked IAG to break the data down to show where anxiety about storms, flooding and landslips were greatest, and the data indicated anxiety was in some cases highest in regions that had experienced recent weather emergencies.
Northland scored highest for anxiety over landslips, but it was Hawke’s Bay where storm and flood anxiety was worst.
However, it wasn’t a simple picture.
Thorpe, who lives in the Gisborne Tairāwhiti region, said a state of emergency was declared five times in the region in 2023 over weather-related events.
And yet in IAG’s data, Gisborne ranked below the national average for storm anxiety.
When Thorpe and her colleagues published their findings in 2025, it mirrored international findings which showed rain anxiety in communities many months, even years, after a flooding event.
And it contained direct quotes from people who experienced the full might of Cyclone Gabrielle, and who had had their relative powerlessness in the face of natural forces revealed to them.
One woman reported: “I think for me the stress is [impacting] physically. I think I did not sleep well initially. And I started having numbness. Recently I feel numbness in the right side. One day I went into emergency thinking that I'm having a stroke. So they tested me with some tools and they said you're fine, go home.”
Another said: “I don’t think we’re talking enough about the stress and the anxiety that people feel when it rains … It doesn’t matter whether you’re on a hill or on the flats, everybody’s affected, but affected differently. I think that there’s a whole level of stress here that nobody’s talking about.”
Another said: “I don’t sleep [when it rains], I keep getting up and looking at the river levels.”
Thorpe said others recalled the shocking crashing that logs and forestry slash made in the floodwaters.
It wasn’t only those who experienced the terrifying flooding themselves who experienced rain anxiety. It also included people who got through the worst relatively unscathed, but who volunteered to help dig out the homes of others, and witnessed the aftermath of the destruction.
Adults and children alike experienced ongoing weather-related anxiety.
One woman told researchers: “My four year old now actually suffers from a lot of nightmares. Like the rain, that’s really big for him. He’s like, to the point where it puts him in flight mode. Like, he hasn’t come out of it and relaxed, even though it’s been a while now. He’s got a bag ready to go if we need to go in the car now … it’s sad for me that he’s always stuck in that mode.”
Many reported “relentless uncertainty” over things like unstable land, river levels, and recovery work from government and local councils, but also over their financial futures, work and livelihoods. Uncertainty over insurance claims also took a toll.
Thorpe’s research was paid for by the Ministry of Health, however, she felt frustrated that there was no evidence it was leading to changes in systems and policies despite a pattern of increasing storm frequency.
“So many parts of our country now are experiencing rain, and these extreme weather events, on whole new levels. It is bringing new fears, new concerns, and new very real anxieties which our research showed are having real impacts on people’s health and well-being,” Thorpe said.
She said people who talked with her and her fellow researchers didn’t feel health and mental health systems recognised the impacts.