Staring down Armageddon

The fact that humanity is facing extinction is not an easy sell for a conversation. But if you are paying attention you know humanity could be devasted by not just one crisis, but by a variety of threats including climate change, nuclear war, ecosystem collapses and global pandemics. Because large scale destruction is a difficult topic, we tend not to discuss it. Our existential anxiety goes underground leading to a multitude of mental health problems and can prevent us from addressing the root problems. By addressing the impact of living under existential threats, we learn coping strategies, find sources of hope, and reduce and prepare for future crises. I entreat you to take a few minutes to think about the impact of these dark clouds on the horizon. I know that doing so in researching this article, helped me to push the doom and gloom back and become more proactice in trying to make a difference.

The impetus for digging into this topic came from warnings to avoid going outside as much as possible during parts of this past month. Here on the US’ east coast, smoke and ash from Canadian wildfires filled the sky. The lurid smell of the distant fires filled the air. The sky was white. Visibility was low. I was sneezing and had headaches. My home is more than 300 miles from the closest fire, it must be dire closer to the fires. A full 500 blazes were ragging across Canada as of June 29th. Locally, friends described the atmosphere as “spooky” and “apocalyptic”. When I ventured out into the nearly empty streets, I kept wondering if society was tottering ever closer towards dystopia.

I’ve read some activists claiming that the ash cloud will have the positive effect of shoving people into action. I’ve never been a fan of the stick approach and research on this topic suggests that carrots are far more effective at invoking climate activism. Local events can generate climate change concern and can promote action if the observer attributes the event to climate change. But even in these cases, abrupt events seem to impact our behaviors for only a very short period time. Yet the mental health impacts can linger. A meta analysis of 36 studies found that following disasters 7-40% of people showed at least one of the following: PTSD, anxiety, phobias, or substance abuse. After hurricane Katrina, one in 6 people living in affected areas experienced PTSD and a full 49% developed a mood disorder.

Climate change stress also impacts us. Today’s youth exhibits changes to behavior, development, memory, executive function, decision making, and scholastic achievement in response to climate stress. Of course, young folk today are the first generation to cope with social media’s impact of one’s own sense of worth. Combine this with existential threats, maybe we shouldn’t be surprise that young people’s mental health is under strain. 1 in 3 teenagers in the US say their mental health is poor, 2 in 5 say they have felt persistently sad or hopeless. 20% of high school students report serious thoughts of suicide, 9% have attempted taking their own lives. Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death for 15-24 year olds. Amongst grown ups, the stress of climate change is leading to greater rates of domestic violence, suicide, vascular dementia, mood and anxiety disorders, grief, disorientation, war, terrorism, and eco-anxiety. And, as is usually the case, the less wealthy suffer the most for they tend to have pre-existing vulnerabilities and less capacity to adapt. As noted in Psychology Today it is both natural and proportionate to be freaked out. But, it also critical to know there are things we can do to help us cope. And the first step is understanding how we respond to existential threats.

On the shortest of timescales, our immediate reaction to threats tends to trigger the one of the classic reactions: fight, flight, or freeze. And if we don’t find a way to cope with the induced anxiety, we tend to dissociate from the problems. In other words, we avoid thinking about them. When I was working as a climate change scientist, I somehow categorized the extinctions I was modeling as a puzzle box that I pulled out every day and worked on, rather than a dire warning to humanity. Only when I would write up my projects and synthesize the unfolding horror into a narrative, did the real world aspect of my work crush my spirit. I avoided thinking about the implications much of the time. Apparently, we are actually hardwired to avoid these kinds of issues. The part of our brain which copes with existential threats, the anterior cingulate cortex, is co-located with our behavioral inhibition system. In other words, when we notice an existential threat, our brain tends to trigger inhibitions that stop us from paying attention to the threat.

But burying our head in the sand isn’t helping solve the crisis, nor improving our own well being. The anxiety is still there, just buried and contributing to a baseline of stress. What can we do to reduce this anxiety? Turns out that mental health experts have been thinking about that question in detail for some time. In the event that you are feeling shut down and disassociated from the world, Psychology Today offers the following advice. First, be mindful of how you consume news - perhaps limiting your intake to once a day. Second, take care of your physical body through exercise and eating well. Third, when in the midst of an acute anxiety episode, make yourself feel comfortable and cozy with weighted blankets or familiar scents. And forth, remember that the threat of disaster is nothing new. Humanity has always been threatened with disasters, invasions, and plagues. In fact, we are living in one of the least violent periods of human history.

Coping with less acute, more chronic anxiety can be managed with additional actions to develop our mental fitness. Much like working out and watching what we put into our bodies, we will cope better with existential threats if we have solid mental health practices. These include activities like staying connected to other people, spending time outside, mindfulness practices, and monitoring how we are thinking about these issues. We must also remember that the stress of climate change won’t go away until we solve the underlying problem. So it is good for our mental health to be part of the solution.

Based on a comprehensive analysis of studies of the mental health impacts of climate change, the American Psychologist Association, the APA, recommends building a belief in one’s own resilience. We are advised to foster optimism by cultivating active coping and self-regulation skills. This will take a different form for each of us but might include meditation, prayer, yoga, gratitude practices, talking therapies, or learning about cognitive behavioral therapy. A massive life lesson for me has been learning to be optimistic about other people. I grew up in a stimulating household - lots of great conversations and support for whatever you wanted to pursue. But we were steeped in a culture that thought most of humanity were self serving. It took marrying into a deeply Christian family to teach me that the vast majority of people never mean to hurt us. It is so much more loving, and pleasant, to see and interact with the world with optimism.

The APA recommends that we further develop our resilience by fostering practices that provide a sense of meaning. If you don’t feel you’ve found your own purpose, be patient with yourself - it can be a lifelong journey to define it. You could check out resources like this one from the Greater Good Science Center or join the cause aiming to protect life on our planet. In addition to developing our mental fitness and our sense of purpose, the APA recommends making emergency plans. When my two sons were going to live overseas, it helped me a great deal to make them an emergency kit with medications and so forth. It eased my mind not only because I wanted them to have these emergency supplies to hand, but also because I knew I had done something.

Which brings up the very import concept of agency. When we take action, we make an impact. There is the physical impact of the action itself, but also the shift in ourselves towards identifying as an eco-advocate, as well as the societal and financial signals we send. Our positive actions rightly improve our self-worth and increase our confidence. This is agency - understanding where we are, what’s happening around us, and taking steps to improve our circumstances. As we become more environmentally active, we learn how much is actually being done about climate change and learn that we have to solutions to fix climate change to hand. What we need is the societal conviction to undertake the fixes. This requires shifting the collective mindset to prioritizing environmental protection. And how best do we do that? By taking personal actions like reducing our own footprint, pressuring our politicians, and talking about we are doing. The more we identify as eco-activists, the more we do, the more we influence the collective mindset.

A short aside here- though I am talking mostly in terms of climate change, the cocktail of existential are all interconnected. As we develop our agency around any of the major issues facing humanity today, we come to see that addressing one requires addressing many of the problems facing humanity. While this may feel even more overwhelming at first, in the long run we learn that positive behavior changes have impacts across the spectrum of societal ills. For instance, our spending patterns have a massive reach - which is both a responsibility but also very empowering. And note that we are far more likely to engage in these actions, and encourage others to follow our lead, if we concentrate of the benefits of eco-consious living. For example, rather than scolding our selves or someone else about driving somewhere, focus instead on the many health benefits of walking.

So that’s a lot of tactics to help us cope with existential threats, including physical health practices and mental health practices, building our own mental resilience and developing our communities’ resilience, and of course personal action to address climate change. The latter being essential for our own peace of mind - knowing we are doing our bit, learning about the many positive actors and solutions, and developing a sense of agency. But none of the reports discussed above mention two coping mechanism that I find particularly helpful: facing my own mortality and appreciating the beauty that surrounds me. When I am stressing out about the crises facing us, I find it (perhaps bizarrely) comforting to remember that in 100 years, we’ll all be dead anyway. This too shall pass. On super long timescales, regardless of what I accomplish or don’t, regardless of how humanity evolves, our sun will burn out. Barring a miraculous event, life on Earth will one day end. Most likely, all our struggles will just be a blip in the story of life on a rocky planet orbiting one of 100 billion stars in our Milky Way, which is one of billions of galaxies. Acknowledging our finiteness, and indeed our minuteness, takes away some of the sting of existential threats. Which is not to say I’m ready to give up the good fight. Quite the contrary. For life on this big blue marble is awe inspiring perhaps even more in the context of universal scales. When I die, indeed as I live, I want to be satisfied that I have done what I can to help life continue to thrive on our beautiful blue marble and that I took time to appreciated the beauty of it all.