This TED Talk features climate psychologist Renee Lertzman, recorded live at TED Women 2019.

It's deeply painful to face what's happening on our planet right now.

From forest burning, ocean plastic, species just gone each day, displacement.

It's easy to feel totally overwhelmed.

Maybe a bit helpless, powerless, angry, on fire.

Numb. Disconnected.

Perhaps all of the above.

These messy and complicated feelings, they make total sense.

I wish that someone had said this to me 30 years ago.

I was a college freshman taking environmental studies,

which is basically a semester of really bad news about all the ways that humans have profoundly

damaged our beautiful earth. And I felt like I had been dropped into a dark tunnel given no

tools to get out and yet expected to carry

on with my everyday life as if things were normal. But once you're exposed to that kind of

information, things are not normal anymore. And I was anxious, I was terrified. no one was talking about this, and I almost dropped out of school, for real.

But instead, I signed up for a field study in California, and we were backpacking together as a small group for two months,

which I know sounds very intense.

And it was, but what I found is that we talked a lot.

We talked about how we were feeling about the world openly and honestly,

and no one told me at any point to be more positive or more hopeful.

Not once.

And surprisingly, I found myself feeling better.

...