Eco-Anxiety and Solastalgia — When the World Around Us Affects the World Within Us

Imagine living in the same place your entire life, but the landscape around you is no longer the same — the forest has burned, the river has dried up, winters no longer resemble the winters of your childhood. You haven't moved anywhere, yet you feel nostalgia for a home that no longer exists. This is precisely the feeling that psychology calls solastalgia.

What Is Solastalgia

The term was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who describes it as distress caused by environmental change. The word combines the Latin solacium (comfort) and the ancient Greek algia (pain) — literally, "the pain of lost comfort."

Unlike nostalgia, in which we long for a place we have left, solastalgia is the reverse: the place leaves us, while we remain standing on it. People who have lived through devastating wildfires, droughts, floods, or the industrial destruction of their native landscape describe a sense of loss, powerlessness, and existential insecurity — without ever having moved anywhere at all.

Solastalgia is part of the broader concept of eco-anxiety — a chronic fear of ecological catastrophe that in recent years has become firmly established in public consciousness and in clinical practice.

What Happens in the Body and the Brain

It's important to state this clearly: anxiety related to the climate is not a mental disorder. It is an understandable and largely rational response to a real threat, not a clinical pathology. The problem is that our body responds to this threat in the same way it responds to any other danger — through the stress system, which was never designed for threats stretched out over time, with no clear end point.

When the brain registers a threat — whether it's a predator in front of us or news of yet another natural disaster — the amygdala sends an alarm signal, and the hypothalamus activates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. Adrenaline and cortisol are released into the bloodstream, heart rate increases, muscles tense, and attention narrows. This is the well-known "fight or flight" response, but researchers today speak of four responses rather than two: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — the latter expressed through attempts to soothe or please others in order to reduce the perceived danger.

In the face of acute danger, this system works flawlessly — it mobilizes us within seconds and then switches off. The problem with climate-related threats is that they are chronic, abstract, and without a clear end, so the stress axis remains activated for long periods. Chronically elevated cortisol is linked to sleep disturbances, impaired concentration, increased irritability, and greater vulnerability to anxiety and depression — the bodily price the brain pays when the survival system never receives a clear signal that "the danger has passed."

This is precisely where the root of the problem lies: a body that is constantly on alert can no longer distinguish between anxiety that serves it and anxiety that merely exhausts it. And it is exactly this boundary — between the alertness that protects us and the chronic tension that wears us down — that we rarely manage to recognize on our own.

How Working With a Psychologist Can Help

Eco-anxiety and solastalgia are insidious precisely because they seem "justified" — in a world that is genuinely changing, the anxiety feels like nothing more than a sober assessment of reality. That's exactly why many people carry it for years without seeking help: they assume that because the feeling is logical, it isn't a problem. But it is one thing for anxiety to inform us, and quite another for it to live permanently in our body, stealing our sleep, our concentration, and our ability to enjoy things that are still good. When anxiety has begun to run daily life rather than simply accompany it, this is no longer "normal concern" — it is a signal that the body and mind need support.

Working with a psychologist for this kind of anxiety accomplishes several things that rarely happen on their own, without a guided process:

It gives language to something that would otherwise remain unnamed. Many people feel a heaviness, sadness, or tension connected to the environment, without ever having named it as such — and it is precisely the unnamed feeling that is hardest to carry. The therapist helps this vague weight take shape, become recognized, spoken, and validated, instead of quietly smoldering.

It teaches the body to exit a state of constant alarm. Since the response is above all physiological — an activated nervous system, elevated cortisol, a tense body — conversation alone is rarely enough. The psychologist also works with body-based techniques: breathing, grounding, and nervous system regulation, which restore a sense of safety here and now and interrupt the cycle of chronic activation before it leads to exhaustion, insomnia, or disengagement from daily life.

It distinguishes healthy concern from paralyzing anxiety. On our own, it is difficult to see our own limit — the point where concern pushes us toward meaningful action, and the point where it simply blocks us instead. The therapist's outside perspective helps make exactly this distinction, so that the energy behind the anxiety can be redirected instead of continuing to consume us.

It creates space for grief that would otherwise go unspoken. Solastalgia is often a form of loss — loss of a landscape, of a sense of stability, of an image of the future. Society rarely recognizes this kind of grief as "real," so it remains unprocessed and continues to weigh silently. In therapy, this loss gains legitimacy and space to be fully experienced, instead of suppressed.

It restores a sense of grounding and direction in place of helplessness. The feeling that the problem is too big for one person is at the core of the distress. The psychologist helps identify concrete, realistic steps — personal or shared with others — that restore a sense of meaning and control, without requiring the person to carry the weight of the entire crisis alone.

It breaks isolation. Solastalgia is an experience that many people carry separately, even though it is widely shared. Group and family work are especially valuable here, because they show a person that they are not alone in this feeling — and shared anxiety weighs differently than anxiety carried in isolation.

If you recognize yourself in what has been described — anxiety that doesn't settle, sadness about a world changing before your eyes, a sense of helplessness that interferes with your sleep or concentration — this is not something you have to carry alone, and it is not a sign of weakness. It is a signal that it is worth seeking out a conversation with a psychologist. Addressing these feelings early not only eases their weight, but also protects against the deeper exhaustion and disengagement that chronic, unaddressed stress can lead to over time.