It’s hard to find a person who has never heard about global warming, environmental pollution, animal extinction and the destruction of the Earth’s ozone layer. Environmental issues are on the current agenda, and every now and then we come across their discussion. But how each of us reacts to this information determines our psychological state and affects the subjective feeling of well-being and satisfaction with our lives in the future. In this article Let's try to figure out how to cope with emotions about environmental problems and what to do to maintain your own mental health and at the same time help the planet. Let's start with the fact that a normal and natural emotion in response to news about environmental deterioration is anxiety. Any person will develop fear of the future and its uncertainty in such a situation, but the question is to what extent it is realized. In other words, it’s great if you can track the presence of such anxiety in yourself; it is much more difficult if not, because repressed experiences can be transformed into other symptoms. Anxiety (in adequate quantities) is a useful feeling and can even become your assistant - internal energy that pushes you to change the situation towards providing yourself with greater safety and better living conditions. Metaphorically Such a reaction is presented as follows. Somewhere inside, in response to bad news about the environment, a light comes on and a signal sounds: “Attention, alarm!” It is important not to miss it and decide what you will do next: look for a way out, rush around in a panic, or pretend that you don’t see anything and you don’t hear. Everyone uses their own ways to cope with this anxiety - they are called coping strategies (from the English cope - to cope). Denial, unwillingness to participate in solving a problem, downplaying it and ignoring it (“pretending to be blind and deaf”) are, in fact, negative coping strategies. The paradox is that they help you cope with difficult information right now, but in the long run they worsen your life satisfaction. Because no matter how much you deny (“this doesn’t concern me personally,” “it won’t help in our country anyway,” “my actions won’t change anything,” “the media invents these nightmares to intimidate”), somewhere on The thought will always loom in the background that the problem remains, and you are doing nothing about it. Some do not find a way to process the anxiety (“rush from corner to corner”), and then the so-called eco-anxiety develops - a variant of neurotic anxiety disorder. There even seems to be a correlation between the frequency of mention of environmental problems and the prevalence of these symptoms in developed countries, where they really talk about it a lot. Along with anxiety, helplessness comes in, and it seems that an individual person really can’t do anything at all about the impending catastrophe; the problem is so huge that it is insoluble. Panic prevents you from seeing real opportunities, and the ability to adequately assess the situation is temporarily lost. Oddly enough, it is in this state that there is a temporary salvation for a psyche overloaded with information. An additional difficulty is that with a neurotic disorder, the symptoms can be divorced from the real problem. Anxiety sometimes covers up a person’s current life difficulties, switching attention from personally important areas where for some reason he cannot cope, to something more distant, but at the same time understandable—for example, ecology. Outwardly, he can use positive coping strategies (we’ll talk about them in more detail below) and look quite advanced in this topic, but in the rest of his life (everyone except him) a deep failure is visible to the naked eye. Roughly speaking, a simple and well-structured action in the form sorting waste becomes an obsession (compulsion), helping to overcome the frustration and anxiety of not having important things like work or relationships that bring.