It starts as a prickle at the nape of your neck and becomes a permanent knot in your stomach. Twisted tighter by every headline about genocide and unbridled greed. The rubble-strewn photographs from war zones. The racial hatred and casual misogyny spreading through your feeds like a toxic mould. It all adds up to an existential dread you just can’t seem to shake.
The Germans have a word for this: weltschmerz. Roughly translating to ‘world-pain’, it’s an unsettling sadness at the state of the world that feels almost inevitable in the age of the polycrisis. “I’m increasingly seeing clients, especially younger people, coming to me with fear about the future and their place in it,” says Dr Dwight Turner, an integrative psychotherapist and author. “Even when our lives are not directly affected by things like climate disaster or political turmoil, we are all connected. Collective anxiety comes from the awareness of a generalised threat to life, and the first step in dealing with it is to realise what a normal part of being human it is.”
While the uneasiness we feel can act as a signal, telling us where our morals lie and inspiring us to fight for them, living in this state of low-level anxiety is exhausting. Here’s what you can do to manage it – and make the world a little better in the process.
Don’t fight uncomfortable feelings
The urge to push (or swipe) away negative feelings is natural, but it can result in a tangle of untended anxiety sitting at the back of your mind. “When someone comes to me and says, ‘I’m worried about the world’, I encourage them to sit with that worry. Try not to dismiss it,” says Bárbara Godoy, existential psychotherapist and clinical director of Therapy Harley Street. “In order to be resilient we have to engage with what’s difficult, otherwise we’re not exercising the muscles that help us cope. Allow yourself to say: this worries me, this makes me sad, this makes me angry. Be aware of it for a few moments, then bring your awareness back to where you are, who you are and what you can actually change.”
Balance out your worldview
Doomscrolling keeps us stuck in a negative feedback loop, we know this. In 2024, researchers studied 800 people from the US and Iran and found that excessive time spent consuming negative news led to feelings of existential anxiety, distrust and despair. There is such a thing as knowing too much.
“Because of the addictive nature of social media it’s difficult to pull ourselves away, but you can end up pouring an endless supply of fuel onto the belief that everything is awful,” says Turner. “It’s very important to take time away and find moments of lightness and brightness. There is a lot of beauty out there, still, and noticing it can really change your outlook.”
Bring your attention to the big, positive strides – take, for example, the fact that 36% of the world’s population was suffering from extreme poverty in 2000 and today that figure is at 10%. But even a silly video shown to a friend or a shared smile with a stranger in the queue for coffee acts as a circuit breaker, reminding you that people are fundamentally good.
Prioritise IRL community
“We’re living in an atomised world, and that adds to this feeling that we’re alone and powerless in the face of huge global issues,” says Turner. This is where leaning into community can have a magical effect. Not only does voicing your worries to like-minded people immediately take the sting out of them, but hearing that they also care about the same issues sparks hope that things can change.