Have you ever found yourself in awe of a breathtaking landscape — be it a stunning valley view in the mountains or waves majestically slamming against oceanic boulders — but then are instantly fraught by a growing knot in your chest at the thought of this natural beauty being lost? Have you ever felt like you’d better not think about the future, because otherwise, the fear (for you or your children) might eat you up? Has general unease, or that sense that something is wrong in the world, ever oozed into your dreams?

If you can relate, you have indeed experienced eco-anxiety, or a chronic, intense fear of environmental doom and emotional distress regarding climate change and ecological crises. For me, this brand of anxiety showed up as a confusing amalgamation of fear, grief, anger, and guilt. I thought choosing an “impact” career in climate would help ease some of this existential concern, but during the years I advised governments on a sustainable energy transition, my sense of inefficacy and hopelessness only increased. Year after year, I witnessed emissions projections inch higher and higher, whilst the world continued to break heat records and global politics spiralled into aggression, creating an atmosphere of existential fear. 

I felt powerless yet responsible, and angry at the mystical forces governing reality for having placed me on Earth at this time. A tireless sense of urgency was draining the joy from my life. It was a new type of fear, not only for my own future but for my way of life and that of generations to come; a grief not only for my dreams of a stable and happy future, but for that of non-human species and nature as a whole. I didn’t know how to name or recognize the emotions associated with this constant sense of impending doom, or how to engage with our culture that encourages avoidance, because it made me feel alone in these heavy, terrifying feelings. But, as it turns out, a lot of people are feeling exactly the way I do.

The emotional impacts of the climate crisis are not well-understood yet, but institutions such as the Climate Mental Health Network (CMHN) are working to change that. This is no easy undertaking, considering “eco-anxiety” often goes unrecognized, showing up as hopelessness or disengagement. Because eco-anxiety often reflects a complex emotional response to environmental change, and can feel removed from daily life, many people struggle to recognize and name what they are experiencing. It does not always look like climate distress. Someone might feel grief at the realization that distant landscapes are disappearing and their child’s world may look nothing like ours, while someone else may worry about job security, national stability, or community safety. In reality, these concerns are often deeply intertwined with environmental change. 

Psychologists understand climate change as a “threat multiplier,” in which resource scarcity, social inequality, and political instability spiral and amplify one another. Our collective anxieties are therefore woven into the fabric of planetary health, reflecting a shared existential response to life amid a cascading multicrisis. But recognized or not, there is suffering, and it demands our attention.

According to a major 2021 global study surveying 10,000 young people, 75% said they were scared of the future. In some countries, including the Philippines, that number rose as high as 92 percent. Nearly half of the participants reported that climate worries were already affecting their daily functioning. National surveys conducted since confirm that the magnitude of the problem has reached epidemic scale.

As eco-anxiety began tipping me into burnout, I sought help in traditional psychotherapy. And while teaching me literacy about my emotions, the approach of pushing me towards a “realization” that my anxieties were unfounded did not help ease my dread. The climate catastrophe is happening, and for the rest of my life, it will only get worse. How could I — how could any of us — hold suffering of such proportions? This is where psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and later Ayahuasca helped me. 

The power of plant medicine and psychedelics to bring about transformative relief to existential fears is one of the best-documented properties of the psychedelic experience. For example, 80% of terminally ill patients in clinical trials felt relief from their anxiety and depression after a psychedelic journey. Could the same drugs that ease the fear of one’s own death also help people mourn the slow unraveling of species, landscapes, and the world as we know it?

In the expanded consciousness that mushrooms and LSD opened for me, I found myself finally able to face my feelings — all of them. The despair that moved through my body was so deep I thought it would physically break my heart. But it didn’t. Instead, my heart became wider; spacious enough to hold the enormity of what is happening to the planet in all its different facets. I emerged from the experience with a sense of I can handle this. If we trust our own depth, our capacity to feel, we find that in fact, we can bear the unbearable. 

The key lies in our relationship to time, and to the future we constantly anticipate. When I finally gave psychedelics a chance, they showed me what had been buried under decades of “saving my future”: the abundance available in the present moment. Isabel Santis, PhD, an eco-psychologist and psychedelic coach whose dissertation research explored the healing potential of psychedelics for ecological distress, explained to me why this grounding is a life-changer. 

“A lot of fear and grief today is anticipatory,” Santis says. “People suffer in advance of what’s coming.” While eco-anxiety remained part of the study participants’ lives even after consuming psychedelics, they reported a significant change in the quality of that experience: more equanimity, less acute distress and overwhelm, and a greater desire to enjoy life. 

This deeply resonates with my experience. In the past, I couldn’t even look at a tree without seeing it burn to death. My attempts to turn my catastrophic thoughts into an appreciation of the present moment remained just mental acrobatics. It was psychedelics that made me capable of actually feeling gratitude. 

When the frightened chatter of our minds is silenced and being alive becomes an embodied experience, it allows appreciation to arise. Andrea Siclari, a cancer patient who says LSD helped him recover his love for life, told the European Parliament: “I am alive now. And that’s all that matters.” Without being grounded in the present, we struggle relentlessly to stop a world from changing, forgetting how to enjoy it.

Psychedelics can help us relearn how to be present, particularly in a world where distraction has become the coping mechanism du jour. They equip us with the spaciousness and emotional bandwidth required to engage again. I spoke to Anya Kamenetz, a writer and mentor for navigating climate emotions. She co-created the climate emotions wheel and has long been vocal about acknowledging the positive feelings that these times can evoke in us, as long as we engage with the difficult ones. “It’s not only possible,” she says, “but quite probable that when you engage with the crisis, you will feel joy, gratitude, hope, inspiration, empathy, and many other positive feelings.” This is essential to counter the spread of disengagement. 

Joanna Macy, one of the greatest leaders in the Deep Ecology movement, agrees. "The love and the pain for this world are two sides of the same coin,” she says. “When we unblock one, we unblock the other." 

By (re)connecting to awe and wonder for life, psychedelics can open the door to genuine love for other humans and the rest of the living world, including those who are not alive yet. They can show us our inherent connection to everything alive, offering alternative stories as to who we really are. In other words, when the anxieties around self-interest and self-preservation that normally cloud our vision temporarily quiet down, we can finally see the consciousness all around us, the shared fears and longings, and feel our interdependent nature. 

“Once you allow [the consciousness all around us] in, it brings you into a realization that you are vastly more than a separate person, that you’re a doorway into a much vaster identity, and you can count on that identity to work through you,” Joanna Macy says. Our lives become interwoven with an ongoing mystical story much larger than ourselves.

When the world feels like it’s dying, the long chain of causes that led to this moment becomes painfully clear. LSD in particular revealed to me the mechanisms of my own mind, and I saw that each of my decisions, even each of my thoughts, is the product of my past. And my past is the product of my circumstances, or in other words, the rest of the world. When each individual's life path is linked to all others, the distinction between right and wrong breaks down. We are all products of our environments. This realization opens the door to compassion and reconciliation — both urgently needed in the years to come — as well as to acceptance. Maybe, at a level of magnification much beyond us, everything is right just as it is. 

In Isabel Santis’ study, participants shared this change in perspective, including greater acceptance of climate change. Nonetheless, there was no decrease in engagement. Like me, most people who were previously paralyzed by the climate crisis wanted to align their lives and work around their value systems and take positive actions. A release of control doesn’t mean we lean back in apathy. Taking fear, guilt, and righteous anger out of the equation not only made me a more joyful and resourced human being, but it also made me more passionately engaged in the world than ever before. 

“When you take away the denial, you’re left with what you really care about,” Kamenetz tells DoubleBlind. “That’s a great place to move forward into acting in concert with your values. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know if it’s going to get better, but I know how I want to show up.” 

The step from insight to action is essential for lasting healing. Psychedelics are not a panacea. They can provide an experience of interconnection, but to translate into real change, they need to be paired with a framework that centers our individual agency to step into service for our world. 

This framework, for me, was Joanna Macy’s idea of “Active Hope.” It guides people through a profound shift of perspective and engagement, approaching the multicrisis as a “Great Turning” that holds unprecedented pain, but also immense opportunity. Isabel Santis also uses “Active Hope” when working with her study participants or clients: “It’s about not expecting things to work out but creating conditions that will allow the emergence of what you want,” Santis explains. Hope like this becomes possible even in times of collapse, because it isn’t based on outcomes; it is based on input. It is meaning-based. Action-oriented integration is what turns a temporary experience of relief into lasting change for both person and planet. Because the two are inseparable. 

In recent years, new organizations have emerged that understand this principle, such as PSYCA (Psychedelics for Climate Action), which creates dialogue, community, and opportunities for action to shift fear to empowerment. "Turning towards your emotions informs us about where to invest ourselves," Marissa Feinberg, PSYCHA’s founder, says. “Feeling concerned about the state of the world has always been something that I turned into motivation to do something.” 

Psychedelic experiences intentionally tailored to address climate emotions remain largely unavailable. When I realized their potential to address this issue, I found myself stranded, exploring it alone. There is increasing awareness of the intersectionality of our world’s challenges with climate change, and eco-psychology is on the rise. So is access to psychedelics. But despite the huge potential for synergy between the two, very few healers in the mental health space have made the crossover. A new path seems to be opening up to support our mental healing at this time, one that combines the power of psychedelics to provide direct experience of interconnectedness with frameworks for meaning-making grounded in eco-psychology and deep ecology. Psychedelic experience has impacted me so deeply that I left my profession with a new mission: making such treatment more available. 

A psychedelic healing approach differs by miles from the type of therapy I received when I was in need. It’s not about “fixing” our issues, but about learning to live with them and turn them into meaning, because the climate crisis is here to stay. Most importantly, it’s not treating climate emotions, or “eco-anxiety,” as a pathology, and it doesn't focus on individual coping mechanisms as if our wellbeing were isolated from that of the world. The ecosystem of which we are an inseparable part is suffering, and feeling the pain of that is not a problem, but a healthy emotional response. 

“It is appropriate and normal to have deep and strong feelings about what's happening to the world,” says Kamenetz. The very term “eco-anxiety” is therefore wrongly pathologizing a sign of attachment to life and the living world, pointing to what's at the root of our crisis: our illusion of separateness. And while one-on-one or even solo journeys can bring us relief, psychedelics will help us navigate our climate emotions best when applied in communal modalities that honor our connection. 

Because ultimately, what needs to happen is this: Coming together and remembering that humans and the planet are not separate. And whether by evolutionary design or lucky coincidence, psychedelics are here to help.

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