For each Our Changing Climate video I make, I sit down, turn on my computer, and consume the apocalypse.

Whether it's Disaster Capitalism or the Fashion Industry, I’ve spent countless hours reading and watching how our racist, fossil-fuel-addicted capitalist economy is tearing itself apart.

It’s hard to feel happy or optimistic when you read about massive ice sheets on the verge of collapse, and then read how fossil fuel companies are posting record profits.

I frequently fear for the future and grieve the damage that climate change has already foisted on this world, but I also know that I’m not alone.

A 2019 poll by the American Psychological Association found that 47% of respondents aged 18 to 34 said that their “anxiety about the climate was affecting their daily lives.”

While a global study of 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 found that 84% were at least moderately worried about climate change and 45% said that their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.

Climate anxiety is widespread, and is disproportionately affecting the youngest generation.

A generation whose very future seems uncertain.

Often this climate anxiety is not just tied up in the collapse of a future world, it is exacerbated by the perceived failures of governments and leaders to adequately address this crisis at the scale it requires.

This was the impetus for Greta Thunberg’s school strike, it’s what drove activist Vanessa Nakate to speak out, and it’s what’s propelling millions of people towards climate movements across the world.

We are living in an era where a climate crisis is already driving extinction-level events and killing millions, and yet our global leaders are doing very little to prevent it.

The anxiety that I and many others feel as a result of this inaction and uncertainty makes sense.

And this climate distress is made even more acute for the survivors of climate disasters.

As the climate crisis gets worse, the number of those who must live with the trauma of hurricanes tearing apart their homes and families, droughts rendering whole livelihoods unfeasible, and wildfires burning hometowns to piles of ash, will only grow.

Four months after Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, a survey found that 18% of respondents were experiencing serious psychological distress.

While in the wake of Hurricane Maria, 7% of Puerto Rican students surveyed displayed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

And as the world heats up and the atmosphere fills with carbon dioxide, it will be even more difficult to deal with the emotional scars of climate change than it is right now.

In part, it’s because it’ll be physically harder to think in hotter climates.

Study after study has found that warmer temperatures lead to worse mental health outcomes, and even our ability to do basic thinking could decrease by 25% by the end of the century due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And as temperatures rise, so too does the rate of those taking their own lives.

This paper found that unmitigated climate change could cause an estimated 9-40 thousand additional suicides by 2050 in just Mexico and the United States alone.

These immensely turbulent times are leaving us with turbulent emotional landscapes.

We are anxious because the world is burning right in front us and those with power seem to be doing very little about it.

We’re anxious because our whole world has been upended by disaster.

And we have very few tools at our disposal to process it all.

This anxiety and the complex emotional landscape that rises from it is, as Britt Wray notes, “hard to grapple with… inside a culture that values capital over compassion and the well-being of the poor, the “Other,” and the not yet born.”