In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Charlie Glick, a musician in his late twenties living in California, was strolling through LA’s Atwater Village neighbourhood, thinking about work. Music was all he had ever wanted to do with his life, and before the pandemic, playing with his band had been starting to stabilize into something that looked like a career. Covid-19 upended all that, though. Lockdown and social distancing measures meant the band couldn’t go on tour or play live shows for who knows how long.

Charlie had always loved camphor trees, and on that day’s reflective wander, a remarkably large and friendly-looking one, rooted at a corner on Edenhurst Avenue, beckoned him over to it. He walked under its arms as they rustled in the breeze, and the shade the tree cast over him conjured a sudden intuition that made his blood run cold. “I just had this instantaneous feeling like, oh, the rest of my life is going to be this series of increasingly dire crises,” he told me.

It was in that moment, under the camphor’s leafy dome, that Charlie understood what many public health officials have said about the pandemic: It is a sign from the Earth that we are rubbing up against ecological limits, and a warning of much worse things to come. Whereas experiencing the climate crisis often meant processing warnings about ecological breakdown, living in a pandemic caused by a zoonotic virus was the ecological breakdown that climate rhetoric warned about. Whether the tree whispered this to him or it all clicked in that moment for a more rational reason doesn’t really matter; the result was that the pandemic and the climate crisis ceased to be separate concepts in his mind. One all-enveloping hazard foreshadowed the other and yet was simultaneously indivisible from it. Realizing this sent him spinning down a rabbit hole of grief and anxiety, where he imagined the gritty pain of climate disasters, dwindling energy supplies, political turmoil, and even more pandemics that would punctuate the rest of his life. He felt himself collapse—emotionally and physically—in the shelter of the tree.

“My whole idea of my life was gone. It was really traumatic and everywhere I looked, I would just see fossil fuels. I would see myself, literally, as a product of fossil fuels,” he told me. Charlie’s hope of being a successful musician relied on tour buses and planes and the countless gas tanks they’d empty, and imagining the pollution from each gig quickly took the shine out of that dream. And the more he thought of himself and the people around him as fleshy fossil fuel products, the more intolerable it felt to live in American society.

Charlie spent the entire summer of 2020 reading, thinking, and talking about ecological and societal collapse to anyone who’d listen. The idea of being a rock star felt absurdly unimportant in a world on fire. He told his bandmates that he needed to take an indefinite break to radically rethink his life.

Charlie’s turning away from the band right as they were finding success was an inexplicable move to everyone who knew him. It was cause for real concern. His personality seemed to have changed overnight, and although his bandmates were very angry with him for pulling the plug on their project, they were equally worried about his mental health.

Without playing music, Charlie had a lot of time on his hands. He filled it by reading things like the 1972 Limits to Growth report from MIT that simulated the dire effect on Earth’s nonrenewable resources of exponential economic and population growth, which people still debate. He also read Deep Adaptation, a 2018 non-peer-reviewed and controversial paper by a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, England named Jem Bendell that gained a large following for arguing that near-term societal collapse is inevitable. Both publications spelled out the end of the world, and they both felt impossible not to take seriously, despite the misgivings around them. Charlie also scoured the headlines each day for climate news, and read the writings of people expressing their personal climate grief. As his view of the future narrowed with each reading, and his obsession with collapse stories grew, he found himself in a very bad place, and one day he could no longer get out of bed. This went on for some days. That’s when he knew he had to do something to help himself.

Charlie had learned about the Climate Psychology Alliance in the UK from his readings, and he reached out to them with the hope of finding someone to talk to. They connected him with a climate-aware therapist, and after talking with her for the first time, he felt noticeably better. “We immediately had this connection, and it just felt so good to talk to her and feel like I wasn’t crazy, because nobody in my life was ready to talk about this stuff,” he told me.

“What’s the most helpful thing that your therapist has done for you?” I asked.

“The single thing that has really helped me the most is that she told me, ‘You have to find other people to talk to, you have to build community.’” His therapist was worried about the way he’d been educating himself about all the worst outcomes. He was cramming in tons of frightening readings within the span of a couple of months, and he was doing it all alone. In contrast, she was in her seventies and told him that it had taken her decades to internalize the same dire material, which allowed for a slower and more balanced type of intake. She urged Charlie to be very careful about his digital diet and to find others to speak with who “get it.”

He partly followed her advice. He couldn’t seem to crawl out of the tunnel of reading terrifying climate news stories and analysis about collapse, but he did take action to connect with local chapters of Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement, both prominent climate activist groups. Rather quickly, the personal connections he was forging through activism lessened some of the pain, as did his blossoming romance with a woman named Evelyn, who understood and accepted his concerns, even if she didn’t feel them as acutely herself.

Pretty soon, things started opening up. He could easily get himself out of bed, was having fewer breakdowns about the climate, and was able to better manage his emotions. For instance, when he and Evelyn took a trip to visit his sister in Chicago who’d just had a baby, he was able to button up the “Doomsday Charlie” side of himself, to not existentially stress his sister out about the fate of her newborn. This was great progress, but he was still struggling despite his growing resilience.

As eco-anxiety and eco-grief have taken hold of society in new ways over the past few years, the tendency to prescribe action as a tool to beat back the feelings has grown. And it’s true that when we act on our values, we put our core beliefs about how we ought to be in the world into practice, which can bring relief. Narrowing that gap through activism is an effective way to feel more at ease.

But climate-aware psychotherapist Caroline Hickman argues there’s a danger lurking in that sentiment. It’s a shortcut—a too-quick move from pain to action—and it threatens to leave people far less resilient and capable of facing the ecological crisis than they ought to be. It also supports the disenfranchisement of grief and mutes expressions of pain in favor of forward momentum.

To fully process these complex feelings, we must move away from the positivist psychological framing that sees some feelings as bad and others as good. Despair and fear are not inherently bad. Hope and optimism are not inherently good. In a course for therapists treating climate-anxious clients, Hickman noted that there are times to be cowardly and to recognize that it takes courage to be so. We must move from an either/or to a both/and model. There is meaning in every emotion.

Hickman says we need to not only grow up in the climate crisis by cultivating our imaginative, creative, determined, and hopeful capacities, we also need to grow down by building our tolerance for guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression. After all, life in an ecological emergency is not a linear progression. There are uplifting wins and, more often, crushing losses. We need to be able to flexibly bear both by growing up and growing down so that as we move forward in life, we become deeper human beings.

And herein lies the key to why it is unhelpful to say that activism is the cure for eco-anxiety and eco-grief. When we’re looking for an antidote to pain, we’re looking for “happiness,” or what we think of as strength. But that impetus tries to cut straight across the process of transition from the moment we feel fear encroaching to the place of moving forward. It refuses the painful process of integrating difficult emotions into our life that emotional intelligence requires. It is a flimsy kind of security that bounces back and forth between the onset of fear and the ideal of being a despair-free activist. Eventually, that elastic path will become less flexible and snap or burn out.

We all need to process some of the anxiety, grief, and depression that come with this entirely threatening situation, and learn how to fold them into our lives. This is what Hickman calls internal activism, and it is just as important as external activism—the more conventional kind. The trick is not to get lost in the dark places that internal activism brings us to—to keep moving—and to welcome the idea that we’ll cycle through the trenches again, because the climate and biodiversity crisis isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.

Via the digital channels of Extinction Rebellion LA, Charlie came across an article I published arguing that activism wasn’t always the answer to eco-anxiety and eco-grief. Afterward, Charlie reached out to me by email. He described to me his history of eco-distress, as well as how he’d jumped into activism to help alleviate it. He also explained that he had recently had to take a step back from activism because of exactly what I’d described in my newsletter. Like many people who’ve looked to external activism as a “fix” for internal pain, he dove in too quickly and tried to cut straight across the process of transition to being a happy, resolved, and resilient activist. He had confused the therapeutic effects of community, which his therapist wanted him to explore, with the idea that action in the direction of a more positive future would take away his anguish.

Don’t get me wrong—external action is absolutely vital. Society needs a lot more of it, and contributing to that momentum can bring some genuine calm because it means you’re addressing the thing that is stressing you. But bromides like “action is the antidote to despair” can oversimplify a complicated experience and indicate a society that is averse to difficult emotions.

As eco-anxiety researcher Panu Pihkala writes, “In (over)emphasizing action, one can also see traits that stem from a general avoidance of emotions or even a culture of belittling.” In many Western nations, where mental health problems are soaring, we tend to snuff out our feelings by working (too) hard, busying and distracting ourselves, retail therapy, eating and drinking too much, taking drugs, or explaining away our emotions with reason. This is the emotional immaturity of many modern societies at work, which will go to great lengths to block out the deep internal and collective external work that is required to face and process tough feelings to completion.

Charlie came to understand this, and rather than trying to paper over his feelings with action, he took more time to sit with them.

Activism, he had realized, was just one way of accessing other people who “get it,” which his climate-aware therapist rightly urged him to do. When he started reaching out to various writers online who were thinking about these topics (not just me) and having meaningful conversations with them, he quickly cultivated connections that could contain his deepest fears and frustrations. Each authentic conversation about the emotional toll of human-caused destruction of the environment made it all the more bearable, he said. Research backs up what he found, and shows that social support of this kind is vital for sustaining psychological health.

What he was still struggling with when we spoke was a burning need to extricate himself from industrial society as soon as possible. He felt enormously tempted to skip town, move to the woods, and learn to live off the land. Away from the bustle of the big city, he at least wouldn’t have to be painfully reminded that the water coming out of his tap was being pumped by fossil fuels from a reservoir 300 miles away. But then he’d think of all the children in LA who’ve never had the opportunities he had as a kid to chase their dreams, play music, and just enjoy being young without the specter of the climate emergency and a pandemic hanging over their heads. Wouldn’t he be abandoning an entire generation that needs help fostering their resilience if he just checked out of society and hunkered down for the apocalypse? Responsibility was on his mind. What, after all, do we owe each other at the end of the world as we’ve known it?

The solution to his predicament wasn’t yet possible to know. The answer for now was to take more time—time away from activism, time away from expectation, and time toward experiencing all the individual feelings in the moment as they came and went. He took some months to do this. Then, one day while he was out on a walk, a new realization suddenly clicked (a familiar story by now). “Oh! I should move in with Aunt Wilma so she won’t have to live alone!” Charlie had always loved spending time with elderly people and felt there could be a deep exchange between himself and his 94-year-old aunt in these troubled times. He sat on the feeling for a couple of days before calling her. When he finally did, Aunt Wilma gladly welcomed the idea. So he packed his bags for Delaware and took Evelyn with him.

Learning to live with eco-distress can be a very uncomfortable process and take several months or years. It is an act of labor. It is real emotional work. It can affect your relationships. It can change what you do for work, where you live, and how you spend your days. As Panu Pihkala once told me in an interview, “We need to have enough energy, time, resources, and support to process these existential questions and emotions in order to harness them.” We must essentially have our basic hierarchy of needs met, so socio-economics plays a role. In this sense, the ability to live well with eco-anxiety is a justice issue in itself.

Several climate-aware therapists shared with me that their clientele tends to be white, middle-class, university-educated types who are overwhelmed by the frightening nature of what they know about the environment. Therapy is expensive and therefore off limits to many people, especially those most exposed to the hazards of climate and environmental change—namely, people of color and poor people.

Jennifer Mullan is a clinical psychologist who focuses on decolonizing therapy, which means using alternatives to the mainstream mental health model that can further emotional wellness on a larger collective scale for communities of color. Her own clinical practice is centered around the fact that the standard for therapy that’s widely in use today, which happens one-on-one and at high cost, was built from a colonial and individualistic biomedical perspective. “The mental health industrial complex, the way that it is set up, continues to serve the elite, or at least the middle-class white person,” she said.

Front-line communities may be better served in group therapy in community centers, or in one-on-one therapy at low cost. Honoring ancestors and spirit—as Mullan puts it, “We’re going to need to hang on to something outside ourselves,” whatever that may be—is a meaningful practice in various cultural contexts. Religion and spirituality may factor strongly into one’s worldview and coping strategy—anchors that “mainstream” therapy isn’t always comfortable addressing. However, climate-aware therapy is in a good position to dismantle the traditional clinical model—it’s already doing so in some ways—and to lead toward a more equitable, multi-dimensional approach to mental health. De-pathologizing eco-distress and treating it as a collective experience are major facets of this shift, alongside an interest in uplifting community support. The Climate Psychology Alliance, for instance, hosts Climate Cafés—human-centric, emotion-friendly group meetings where people can safely express what they’re sensing about what the climate crisis means, not in some far-out future way, but for their own lives and loved ones. They are relational and permission-giving spaces that help people work through their fears and frustrations together.

Charlie’s first tour down the rabbit hole of eco-anxiety and grief under the camphor tree is an example of how this form of emotional grappling is relational. For Charlie, he was relating to a changing sense of the future itself, and the disappearance of the vision of a relatively disaster-free life that he’d grown up to expect. As with any kind of grief, bidding adieu to the stories you used to live by will carve your stomach out, and that is never not disruptive. Psychologist Ginette Paris writes that the psychic space between old stories and new ones in times of transition “often feels like a deadly zone.” It beckons primal emotions and existential feelings about our security, identity, and place in the world.

Eventually, through mourning, our dwelling in this deadly zone and learning to say goodbye makes room for new, nourishing narratives to live by. We need help finding and creating those new positive stories, which is partly why his therapist’s advice to build community with people who “get it” was so crucial. Even more so, she knew that Charlie needed to find people who could tell him, “I too have felt myself in that deadly place, and I am still alive.” They’d be able to show him how the only way out sometimes is through, and that it is indeed possible to find a way through the most intense forms of this distress.

Excerpted from Generation Dread by Britt Wray. Copyright © 2022 Britt Wray. Published by Viking Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

• 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!
• Sober influencers and the end of alcohol
• For mRNA, Covid vaccines are just the beginning
• The future of the web is AI-generated marketing copy
• Keep your home connected with the best wi-fi routers
• How to limit who can contact you on Instagram
• 👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database
• 🏃🏽‍♀️ Want the best tools to get healthy? Check out our Gear team’s picks for the best fitness trackers, running gear (including shoes and socks), and best headphones