Eco-Anxiety, Moral Injury, and Why Everything Feels Harder Right Now
If you've noticed things feel harder lately — not just your personal stuff, but everything — you're not imagining it.
The news cycle, the wildfires, the political heat, the sense that somewhere something is always burning. People are walking into therapy sessions carrying a weight that isn't just about their own lives. It's collective. And it's exhausting in a way that's genuinely hard to put into words.
There are words for it, actually. Eco-anxiety is one. Understanding what's underneath that weight is the first step to being able to carry it differently.
What Is Eco-Anxiety?
Eco-anxiety is the chronic sense of fear, grief, or dread that comes from watching the climate
crisis unfold — and feeling like you can't do enough about it. It's not a diagnosis. It's a completely rational response to a genuinely difficult situation.
The Mental Health Commission of Canada has flagged it as a growing concern, and nearly a million Canadians report it as a significant source of distress. In BC, where wildfire season has stopped being a distant news story and started being the smoke in your lungs and the evacuation notices on your phone, the world doesn't feel abstract anymore.
Eco-anxiety can look like:
Doom-scrolling and not being able to stop
Feeling guilty for going on with normal life when things feel this bad
A low-grade dread humming in the background of everything
A lot of anger
Numbness, because you've run out of room to feel more
It can also look like nothing obvious at all. Just everything being harder, and you not quite knowing why.
There's Another Layer: Moral Injury
Moral injury is a term that usually comes up in military or first responder contexts. It belongs in a much wider conversation.
Moral injury is the specific pain of being unable to act in line with your values. It's not guilt exactly. It's more like — you care deeply about something, you know what the right response would be, and you can't make it happen at the scale it needs to happen.
You can't personally stop a wildfire. You can't fix a polarized political system. You can't undo decades of decisions that are now showing up as smoke in August and floods in places that never flooded before.
That gap — between how much you care and how little you can actually do — has a particular weight to it. It's demoralizing in a way that's different from ordinary stress or sadness. It can leave you stuck in a very specific, existential kind of way.
Why This Is Making Everything Else Harder
Here's the thing worth saying clearly: if life has felt genuinely heavier this year, the world is probably part of the reason. Not all of it. But part.
We're wired to care about our communities and our future. When both feel under threat — and when we feel powerless to protect them at the scale the problem demands — that registers as real, physiological stress. It's not weakness. It's not catastrophizing. It's what happens when your nervous system correctly identifies something is wrong, but can't find an adequate response to match the size of it.
What makes it particularly tricky is that the source is diffuse. It doesn't look like a crisis you can point at. So a lot of people end up carrying this extra layer without words for it — showing up more irritable, more depleted, wondering "why am I struggling? My life isn't even that bad." And because it's hard to name, it's hard to address.
What Therapy Can Actually Do with This
Therapy isn't going to fix the world. Worth saying plainly, not cynically.
What it can do is give you somewhere to take the weight that isn't just... carrying it alone. Sometimes the most useful thing is having space to actually say "I'm scared about the future" or "I feel helpless and I don't know what to do with that" — and have someone sit with you in it, rather than immediately offering solutions.
It can also help you figure out what a livable relationship with all of this looks like for you. That's different for everyone:
For some people it's finding a focused, bounded way to take action — and being able to stop there without guilt
For others it's learning to feel the grief without being flattened by it
For others still, it's understanding why this hits them harder than it seems to hit the people around them
There's no one-size answer. But there's something to be said for not having to figure it out alone.
If this resonates and you're in BC, our anxiety counselling and individual therapy services are a good starting point. Or book a free 15-minute intro call at innerspherewellness.janeapp.com — we can talk through what's going on and whether working together makes sense.
