We're anxious because we should be. But that's a good thing

What humans do in the next 10 years will determine our survival on earth.

Extinction. It's the reality we face without urgent, immediate action. And it's not in the distant future. It's probably in your lifetime. And definitely in your children's lifetime

That sounds like the blurb to a terrifying sci fi movie but it's the truth of where we are today. 

And yet we are still talking about our "mental health crisis" like it is not directly linked to the very real threat of extinction we have created. 

We are animals. We have, like all other creatures on this beautiful planet, an inbuilt, innate survival instinct. It is a phenomenal aspect of evolution that makes all animals react and respond in ways we barely comprehend. 

So this age of anxiety that we live in - I believe it is exactly that. I think it is our species' inbuilt survival instinct sending unavoidable warning bells to us that something is drastically wrong and needs urgent attention.

Our day to day lives are all small, relative to the global environmental crisis. So this inbuilt anxiety crippling us is bigger than anything we can socially comprehend. It's mother nature calling to us that we've got some things wrong and they need fixing. So where are we going to find the answer? In mother nature. 

Let me explain.

My personal mental health has been a car wreck for around a decade now, fuelled by anxiety. Constant panic attacks at my first job were so debilitating I nearly quit, multiple times. Anxiety showed up as a constant internal monologue of "I'm not good enough". I convinced myself I'd be found out and watched my phone relentlessly, expecting a call from my boss at any minute saying I'm fired.

The call never came. But the panic didn't go away. 

Then my mum, my best friend, became very unwell, very quickly. A late diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer pushed her into a spiral of panic attacks - symptoms for which were often worse than the cancer itself. Her body went into abject panic - because it knew what was coming. 

Then she passed away and the world turned grey. The type of darkness that only grief can bring. A seemingly-eternal shutdown of anything that mattered. I'd experienced depression before but this was something else entirely. Existentialism on steroids. 

I'm not looking for a pity party, I'm trying to explain that I do, truly, understand the debilitating hell that it is to be mentally unwell. 

I'm one of the lucky ones who has an incredible support system, people who allow me the safe space to feel what I feel without question or criticism. But who also say "come on, we're not staying here" while leading me out of a hole. 

So back to the environment. What has this got to do with climate change and environmental breakdown? 

let's be honest, the environmental crisis we are facing can only leave us with sheer terror and panic. We've heard of "climate anxiety", and you'd be excused for thinkings it's reserved for a middle class, Green Party activists who have two decades of activism under their belt. But it's not, it's something that affects every single human on this planet. Gaia is sending us warning signals and frightening the shit out of us, for good reason. We should be scared. Nothing has ever mattered like this matters. We've reached tipping points on so many areas of our environmental impact that we're literally creating our own extinction. And we're on a runaway train in some senses because we don't even fully understand how we got here. Or how to turn back. The changes we need to make are so enormous they are unimaginable for most of us.

And in an extra shower of shit, we've created complex (and bullshit-based) societies that are too full up of worry over imaginary numbers (aka the economy), what you look like or some inane societal construct that there's no space left for legitimate worry - like whether the air we breathe is killing us. We've built societies so removed from nature that some people have to take a day trip to see a tree. Societies that consider "environmentalism" a "somewhere-else" issue. Societies that have their priorities so, so wrong.

Humans have ravaged the planet for our own greed. We've destroyed nature, pillaged the earth, polluted the air, acidified the seas, massacred wildlife. The damage and ruin is unthinkable and difficult to quantify. We think of environmental issues as separate to us and that's where we've really gone wrong. That's what we need to change. Because the environment is not a separate thing to us. It IS us. 

We are animals. We live, breathe, eat, fuck and act like all other animals. Except with one difference - our exceptional consciousness. Now this isn't a debate about which animals have consciousness, there's no time for that. But it's unarguable that we have the most exceptional consciousness - it's how we have taken over this planet and the animal kingdom. 

That consciousness is a gift and a curse. It has given us opportunities for our human societies that no other animal has had. We've built, created, explored, imagined and conquered more than there's enough time to explain. And now we find ourselves in a collective state of terror in the societies we've created. We're all scared. 

We think we're scared of not being good enough, fit enough, pretty enough, smart enough, a good enough friend, a good enough parent, a good enough worker. We think we're scared of messing up, getting it wrong, not doing the right things, not "living our best life". 

We think we're scared of an infinite amount of societal constructs that we've been told to be scared about. 

But what if our collective fear is actually our survival instinct? What if we cut the bullshit of what we think we should think and brought it back to what matters to all animals - survival. We're scared because we know we've built systems, communities and societies on an unsustainable foundation. We're scared because we know our survival - our children's survival - is at risk. So our fight or flight response is in overdrive - frightened about everything. 

We are not living alongside nature and so nature is repelling us. 

We're already seeing extreme weather events. Now there's a global pandemic. Our fragility on this planet is becoming clear - there's lots to be scared about. 

But we can, will, and MUST act. 

Environmentalism has never been about saving the planet, because the planet will save itself. It's about saving our existence on the planet - and hopefully many of our animal species siblings along the way. 

I sound extreme. People will be rolling their eyes at my hyperbolic preaching but the situation IS extreme. And the good news is we're gifted with an expectional consciousness to try to understand "extreme".  

We've created religions, faiths and spirituality in vast forms to try to understand what our collective consciousness means. We know there's something bigger and greater than us, we know it innately. Yet we often give it a strange human-image, peculiar names or stories. We've built churches and religions from it. Waged wars over it. We've endlesslessly misunderstood it rather than recognised that it is the very thing that keeps us all alive and connected.

- Mother Nature. 

Ultimately the anxiety we are all suffering can be boiled down to two fears: fear of not being alive, and fear of not being connected. 

Our expectional consciousness is screaming at us to pay attention - and sometimes the best thing you can do for anxiety is to sit down and pay attention. 

Thankfully some people's exceptional consciousness has led them to science, which has given us answers about what it is we should be paying attention to. 

We are beginning to understand that we cannot take what we want from nature and expect it to continue hosting us. "Sustainability" is a word that is overused and but not understood. We cannot take infinite amounts. We cannot consume infite amounts. We can take enough. Just enough. What we need to sustain ourselves - food, water and air. We need to stop living in a mindset of instant gratification. The planet is not there so we can have everything we want. We are lucky to be here and should take no more than we need. 

That alone will be a challenge for our exceptional consciousness - to retrain ourselves to seek only what we need instead of everything we want. 

And I think this could be the answer to our abject misery. Because we are never happy or content when on an endless quest for everything we want. It's only when we appreciate having just what we need that happiness or contentment even becomes possible. 

The earth wants us to be content. It wants all animals to be content and in harmony. That is the intricate, complicated beauty of nature in that there is just enough of everything to sustain everything. The complexity of biosystems relies on each tiny thing to work - there is just enough of everything. Our climate has stayed at a stable temperature for 10,000 years because there were just enough gasses to balance the atmosphere at a perfect point. Animals, plants and everything else in the environment have been perfectly balanced to sustain one another. 

And it is our incessant quest for more of what we want (though we've no idea what that is) that has unbalanced the harmony of the environment. More cars, more imaginary economic growth, more money, more industry - it has skyrocketed us to an unsustainable, unharmonious and soon unlivable world.

We're scared because we know this. And now we have to find a way to unlearn the things we thought we knew. To return to taking only what we need, to putting back what we take, to replenishing what we've already taken.

The anthropocene (the time during which human activities have impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change) doesn't have to end in our extinction. We have an exceptional consciousness that allows us to be aware of our impact. We have an intelligent survival instinct that warns us when we've gone too far. We have science to aid our discovery in ways to fix so much. This incredible time doesn't have to be a devastating sci fi novel. It could be a new age of collectively living in harmony with this planet, which I believe will create the harmony in ourselves that we all so desperately seek.