[Essay] Navigating Dread and Carrying the Weight of Tomorrow

A Guide to Staying Human (Part 2)

This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on May 15th, 2026 titled, “A Guide to Staying Human (Part 2): Navigating Dread and Carrying the Weight of Tomorrow,” from the series “A Guide to Staying Human.”

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These days, I find myself quite worried about the future and all the things happening in the world, especially in the context of Iran. While reflecting on this recently, I honed in on what exactly it is I’m feeling – dread.

Irrespective of how the situation in Iran resolves, I am already paying for it. Not specifically in money, loss of convenience, higher grocery costs, or unavailable parts – at least not yet. Rather, I’m paying for it in my lack of daily attention. In my poor sleep. And especially through a low-grade, but continual, tightening in the middle of my chest whenever my thoughts spiral and interrupt my day…which is often. Perhaps many of you feel something similar.

This is what the feeling of dread does. Dread is the tax we pay on a future we cannot escape, or at least believe we can’t escape. The insight I had this past weekend is that the dread itself is often worse than the event it’s directed at.

The work I do on this platform, The Great Simplification, has been a public anatomy of difficult truths: climate change, net energy decline, the end of material growth, the unraveling of the social contract, soft feudalism on the horizon, and accelerating biodiversity loss. These aren’t abstractions to me, they’re a synthesis I’ve spent my adult life building, and I believe more and more that the synthesis is roughly correct. Which means that I, and a growing number of you who have followed this conversation, carry around a particular kind of weight about what’s coming, akin to a psychological millstone.

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Carrying this weight around, day in and day out, is changing people. I see it in the emails and letters I get. I see it in the eyes of people who come up to me after talks. And I see it in myself. There’s a phrase climate psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren coined that I think encompasses this feeling: pre-traumatic stress. The actual trauma hasn’t happened yet, but the body is already responding as though it has. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain whose job is to scream “FIRE” when there’s smoke, is screaming. It has no way to know whether the fire is in two months, in twenty years, or is already smoldering in the floorboards.

But I do want to acknowledge something alongside this: if the work we do only ever delivers more reasons to be afraid, then we’ll have failed in an important way. Honest reckoning with what’s coming is necessary, but it isn’t the whole picture. The other half is the question of how a person and a society actually lives with this knowledge without being eaten by it.

That’s what this essay – the second part of a series I’m calling “A Guide to Staying Human” – addresses. The first part was about reclaiming agency. This one is about responding to dread, because for many of us who have come to see the shape of what’s unfolding in the world, dread is our daily weather. Learning to live inside it without being consumed by it is one of the foundational disciplines of the time we are in.

Today, I’ll give an overview of the science behind dread – what’s actually happening in the brain and body – and then offer some pathways on what we might do with it.

Stress Effects

Let’s start with the human brain, which is where we often start on every issue in the more-than-human predicament.

When you encounter a threat – a bear, an angry boss, an unpaid bill – your amygdala lights up. It has a direct, almost hardwired connection to your hypothalamus, which then triggers what’s called the HPA axis: hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal. Cortisol floods the bloodstream. Your heart rate climbs. Blood is pulled away from the digestive system and pushed into the extremities. Your pupils dilate. Your body, in less than a quarter of a second, has prepared you to either fight or flee.

This is one of the most beautifully evolved systems in biology. It saved our ancestors from countless lions, snakes, and rival tribes. In its proper context, this response is a gift – a literal life saver.

The problem is that this system was tuned for threats that are immediate, brief, and physical. The bear charges, you run, and you survive – or you don’t. Either way, the cortisol clears. But the amygdala does not distinguish well between a charging bear and a slow-moving systemic risk. For some, the amygdala reads civilizational decline as a threat. Net energy descent is read as a threat. The super El Niño now forming is read as a threat. The multiple ongoing wars are read as a threat. And the resulting increased food prices are read as a threat. Once the amygdala perceives a threat, it activates that same survival machinery. Except in this case, the machinery never has a chance to discharge. There is no running and there is no fighting the threat, just more cortisol in your blood – hour after hour, week after week, even year after year.

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This is what neuroscientists call allostatic load. It is the price of an ancient threat-response system colliding with modern, abstract, slow-moving threats. The cost of this load is significant. Sustained cortisol elevation impairs the hippocampus, the part of the brain that takes what happened today and turns it into a memory. Chronic cortisol elevation also compromises and actually physically weakens the prefrontal cortex: the part of the brain responsible for planning, nuance, and impulse control. It dysregulates sleep and compromises immune function. It also pushes people toward addictive behaviors, because addictive behaviors are (among other things) ways to temporarily silence the fire alarm ringing in our brain.

So the first thing to understand about dread is that in addition to being a feeling, it’s also a physiological state. In its chronic form, it actively narrows the cognitive bandwidth that you would need to face the very thing that you’re dreading. That’s the cruelest irony of dread: it shrinks the capacity we need to face the challenge.

There are many studies that capture this phenomenon and measure what dread actually costs a person. In a famous one in 2006, Gregory Berns and his colleagues put participants into an fMRI scanner and offered them a series of choices. Each choice was a tradeoff between pain and time. They could receive a more intense electrical shock soon, or a milder shock after a longer wait. Most people, sensibly, chose the milder option. But roughly twenty-eight percent of people – nearly a third – chose to receive more pain sooner, just to be done with the waiting. The researchers called these subjects the “extreme dreaders.” Later experiments by other researchers found an even more striking finding: at the limit, some participants would accept almost any additional shock just to escape the pain of the anticipation of pain. The dread of the thing was, in measurable terms, worse than the thing itself.

Think about that. A third of us, when offered a clean experimental choice, would rather suffer more now, rather than wait in anticipation of suffering less later on. The dread of waiting itself is a form of suffering, separate from and sometimes greater than the suffering of what we are dreading. Yet that dread is happening in the present, in the only moment any of us actually has. We are paying, in the real coin of our physiologies, for an event that has not occurred and may not occur in the form we imagine.

I invite you to pause for a moment and reflect on this as it applies to the more-than-human predicament. Because this is the bind we are in, those of us who hold a long-arc anticipation of civilizational difficulty, especially the young people among us. We are not necessarily “extreme dreaders” by temperament, we are “extreme dreaders” by information. The data we’re holding produce in us the same neurological state as a forty-minute wait for a stronger shock, except the wait is not forty minutes, it’s years. And the shock, in our case, is nebulous at the edges and ginormous in scale.

Types of Dread

Of course, not all dread is the same – there are different flavors.

There’s the kind of useful vigilance that gets you to winterize your house or make a doctor’s appointment. There’s rumination, which is when you think over and over about something, and it feels like you’re working through it, but in reality, it’s just circling endlessly in your mind. Then there’s full dread, where the future emotionally collapses into the present. It’s like you’re carrying an incredible weight, but can still function. Your friends and family don’t know your internal reality at all, just that you’re kind of sad, thinking about all this ‘tough future stuff,’ but not aware of your agony or the acuteness of it.

I’ve experienced all these flavors, and continue to. So the real question here is what to do with dread. Because it’s likely a constant companion for those of us paying attention to the biophysical reality that is the future of humanity within the biosphere. I only have partial answers, but I at least have directional advice to offer.

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Pathways Out of Dread

I have recently spent enough time in this headspace and read enough of the literature on chronic stress, trauma, contemplative traditions, and grief that I feel I can offer some pathways that might be helpful. None of them are silver bullets for dread. But all of them, used together, can begin to change our relationship with it.

The first pathway is mental reframing. Not denial – I’m not asking you to ignore the data or pretend the data is wrong. The data is what it is. But the meaning that we layer onto the data is something we have some say in. There is a difference between “We’re doomed“ and “We’re on the precipice of a historical period of profound upheaval and material contraction, and I am alive to witness and participate in that.” Both can be true. The first one freezes you. The second one orients you in reality. A slight reframing like this isn’t lying to yourself, it’s more like choosing – among the many true things you could think about the situation – the stories that leave you able to act. This is essentially Viktor Frankl‘s insight from “Man’s Search for Meaning:” even in conditions we can’t change, we retain the freedom to choose the meaning that we layer on top of them.

The second pathway is the body. This sounds almost embarrassing to say in the context of civilizational analysis, and I might have rolled my eyes at this a few years ago, but the most reliable way to interrupt the cortisol loop is not through the mind. It is through the breath, the vagus nerve, and movement. Purposeful long exhalations that are longer than the inhalation signal to our parasympathetic nervous systems that the threat has passed. Cold water on the face, or the full body, does the same. Walking, especially outdoors, measurably lowers stress hormones in study after study.

None of these responses solve the underlying problem. But they do give you a working nervous system from which to engage the underlying problem. And that’s how we respond to the metacrisis – one grounded nervous system at a time, which then enables further responses. Peter Levine has spent nearly 50 years studying and treating stress and trauma, and what his somatic work addresses is that for many of us, the unresolved fight or flight response has nowhere to discharge. So those of us that mostly inhabit our minds have to train our bodies to complete the response that the modern world prevents.

The third pathway is agency. I spent the first installment of this series discussing agency at length, because I think it is the foundational discipline – the one that makes the others possible. I won’t review that ground here, but I do want to connect how agency specifically meets dread. Dread is the experience of being acted upon by a future you can’t influence. Agency is the opposite stance. When you take a meaningful action within your reach, the brain’s threat system gets a different signal than the one it’s been receiving. Cortisol begins to clear. The fight or flight response quiets down. The body learns, slowly, that you are not purely a passive recipient of the future, which is how it often feels. You are also, in some small but real way, an author of it.

This is part of why agency work is so foundational. Because agency goes to work on the cortisol itself, it can reach places that reframing and reasoning cannot. As my coach keeps reminding me, we cannot brute force our way to calmer nervous systems. Most of what I worry about today, I cannot personally affect. But some small slice of it, I can have an impact on. I can plant potatoes. I can build a relationship with a neighbor. I can put words to what I’m feeling. The action does not have to be commensurate with the scale of the problem to be psychologically useful. It only has to be real and tip the scales just a bit in the direction you want – and it has to be yours.

The fourth pathway is community. I think this one is the most underrated and the most misunderstood. It’s taken me probably over a decade to not only learn this one, but to really feel it. Put simply, the dread you hold alone is heavier than dread held together with others. The neuroscience on this is pretty striking: the simple presence of a trusted other person dampens the amygdala’s threat response. We are a social species, and our nervous systems are designed to co-regulate. When you sit with people who also see what you see – not to amplify each other’s fears, but to witness together – something shifts. The dread doesn’t disappear, but it stops being so isolated and lonely. Lonely dread, I’ve come to believe and observe and feel, is the worst kind.

The fifth pathway I’ll call befriending the darkness. This pathway assumes some baseline stability to do the work from. If you’re in acute crisis right now, this is not the moment for this pathway. But there is a tradition across Buddhist contemplative practice, Stoic philosophy, the deep history of mysticism, and the work of psychotherapists like Francis Weller and the late Joanna Macy, who spent decades sitting with people in ecological grief. This tradition tells us that the way through dread is not around it. It is into it. You sit with the worst-case scenario and let yourself feel it fully. You don’t try to argue yourself out of the grief, the fear, or the anger. You just let your body have its response.

What tends to happen, if you can stay with it long enough, is something unexpected. The dread, when fully met, transforms. Not into hope exactly – I think hope is still living in anticipation, rather than in the present – but into something that is no longer purely negative. No, I think if you stay with and through dread, it transforms into presence. An open-eyed clarity that says, “Okay, this is the situation. Much of what I’ve taken for granted and love might be lost. And I am still here now – in this body, with these people, with this breath. With this meaningful work.”

The late teacher Stephen Levine, who spent decades working with those at the end of their lives, often noted how alive the dying frequently are. Not always, but often. There is something about directly facing the worst that strips away the noise and reveals what is actually here, which is mostly love, breath, and the strange luminous fact of being humans on Earth and being conscious at all.

The dread can, fully metabolized, become a kind of teacher. It tells us that this conversation, meal, thunderstorm, or these dogs and ducks running across the yard are the gift, and to not miss it.

A Guided Practice for Dread

This movement from dread into presence is the bridge into the next installment of this series. For now, I want to close with something practical. I know that for those of you doing this work, or for those of you who have come to this work simply by remaining awake in a sleepwalking world, the dread is real, and the abstractions can only do so much.

So when the dread shows up, here is what I would offer, based on the advice of many wise individuals who have helped me process these emotions.

First, name the dread, out loud if you can: “I am feeling dread about X, Y, and Z in the future.” Simply putting a feeling into words shifts brain activity from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. This is well-established neuroscience. Daniel Siegel calls it “name it to tame it,” and it works.

Second, locate the dread in the body. Where do you feel it? Chest? Stomach? Throat? Just notice. Don’t try to fix it. The problem for me is that I am so much in my head that it really takes a lot of time for me to articulate where I actually feel emotions like dread, but eventually I can. With practice, this gets easier.

Third, take five long exhalations. Not deep breaths. Long exhales. In through the nose and out much more slowly through the mouth.

Fourth, ask: “What is one thing, today, within my reach, that I can do?” Not solve or fix. Just do. And then actually go do it.

Fifth is to find one person to sit with this week. Not to fix anything. Not to spiral on these issues. Just to be in the present with. Tell them what you’re carrying. Let them tell you what they’re carrying. The carrying does not exactly get lighter, but it stops being yours alone and so it feels lighter. We evolved for this as social beings.

Concluding Thoughts

The Great Simplification is going to be hard. I cannot, and will not pretend otherwise. But the dread of the Great Simplification, if we let it run unchecked, will steal the very things we’re trying to protect. The point of seeing clearly is not to suffer in advance. The point of seeing clearly is to live with our eyes open, in the time we are given, with the people we are given, doing the work that is ours to do. I believe that work matters a great deal.

The dread many of us feel is real, because the situation is real. Ecological overshoot, the Carbon Pulse winding down, societal polarization, and all the things… These are not catastrophic predictions, they are emerging facts and realities on the ground. Our nervous systems are responding to information our culture is still pretending isn’t there.

Dread is like a reverse gravity that pulls us out of the present moment. Learning to metabolize it is what makes presence possible. That’s what I am trying to learn, and I haven’t yet. But I am trying, and I think that’s enough. I actually think that trying may be all of it.

Thanks for meeting me where my mind has been recently. The next part of this series talks about the default mode network and how it relates to staying present.

Thanks for reading – more to come soon.

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