This week, I cried at a tree. Then a spaniel rescued me. Later, a pug reminded me how to stay human. This is a story about surviving these times of accelerating anxiety.

It starts with me heading to the park in a daze. The end of a long working day as a psychotherapist is always a weird moment of decompression. Meet one of us in that exact moment, and you might assume we’d been in an accident. Honestly, a tree made me cry. It was an ancient oak, with a trunk so dead it was basically furniture. It’s said of oaks that they spend two hundred years growing, two hundred living, and then another two hundred looking for their spectacles. This one had given up and it was just standing there, arms raised to heaven, all its branches bare except one. On that single branch it had made one final batch of leaves, so tender and freshly green that something broke inside me. For its faith, I suppose: offering those last hundred leaves up to Heathrow’s deafening flightpath, unfurling them into London’s doubtful air. The tree had made those leaves as perfect as it could, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was doomed. This was its choice: to live as if it is still worth making good leaves.

I don’t usually cry at trees, but it had been a big day. I don’t have to go looking for humanity’s emotions anymore. When six visitors in a row bring a particular feeling into my therapy room, I suppose it’s the chord that’s playing in the world. There are days of fierce anger out there, and days of inconsolable grief. Humanity is turbulent in these times of ours. It roils and churns. An ancient wave is closing in on the shore.

These waves within human being are aspects of what the psychologist Carl Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’. I mean, you don’t have to agree with him. It’s not as if we’ve found the place where collective trauma lives in the brain, squeezed in between the amygdala and the region where you keep track of birthdays. So you can reject the idea of collective human emotions entirely, if you like. Or, you can think of the collective unconscious as a mystical thing, as a spiritual phenomenon, or just as the very practical consequence of a world in which our individual minds are infinitely connected by gossip, body language, social media, news, AI, messaging, and all the other channels of our confluence.

But if your chest starts to resonate, if you feel anxious or miserable for no obvious reason, or if you get a panic attack out of nowhere, maybe you can give yourself a break. Perhaps you can allow those phenomena to belong to the human race at the moment, as well as just to you.

By day you might be getting intuitions that prove almost prophetic, and at night you might be experiencing dreams so alien that it doesn’t feel possible they arose from within you. This is the stuff my visitors are reporting to me. If you’re young and you’re experiencing these things, you might imagine there’s something wrong with you. It’s easier for an older person like me, who has felt other waves break; who has seen the world’s seatbelt pre-tension and relax. I’m way past thinking that what happens in my mind is all me. I’m just an infusion of everyone: wise as evolution and mad as a balloon.

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Being a psychotherapist, in these times of escalating emergency, is quite something. My visitors have fled from the ongoing wars, or their professions are being hollowed out by AI, or their kids are so sick from the world’s collective trauma that they can’t eat, or they can’t start their lives. Anxiety, is the word we’re supposed to use. But that puts a lot onto the victim, doesn’t it? As if it’s somehow their fault; something they’re not doing right.

In the world’s heavier days I keep a slight professional detachment from myself when I’m working, because my job is to hold the world’s energies consciously. Your therapist is there to separate signal from noise: to hear your voice through the background scream of humanity. So it’s at the end of my working day that the human race’s trauma gets to me, personally. You can’t hold so much human intensity without sometimes feeling the pressure of it. Psychotherapists at the moment are wild-eyed submariners, listening to the hull creaking and the rivets beginning to pop as the depth gauge shows deeper and deeper.

Luckily, I have a spaniel. I say ‘spaniel,’ but really she is quite a magical creature, with a well-mannered spaniel for a mother, and an unknown father about whom legends are told. Extrapolating from the evidence, my best guess is that the old rogue loved people, and really fucking hated pigeons. I bet he liked the park, too, if my dog’s behaviour is anything to go by. I mean, assuming she’s inherited his gene for it, then I bet her father also liked to drag decompressing therapists to the park, eat quite a lot of long grass, and then look for situations in which to do good. She’s basically Lassie in a spaniel suit.

What’s that, Lassie? Younger readers won’t understand the reference to a classic TV show in which a loyal collie of that name repeatedly saves the day by alerting humans to trouble? Ah well, at least young people still have their looks.

While I was standing misty-eyed next to the dying oak, my spaniel detected some sound or smell of distant distress, and started pulling on her lead. This is how we happened upon an elderly woman who had lost her pug dog. My spaniel sat down, which is what working dogs do when they have located the thing they were looking for. It’s usually bad news when a sniffer dog sits down beside your carry-on at the airport gate, or – assuming you’re a pheasant – when a retriever sits down next to your lifeless feathered body. My dog is of a breed called ‘working cocker spaniel’, and while she was growing up I was always curious to discover what line of work she would choose. As it turns out, she likes to rescue. So long as it’s upwind of her, she can smell distress at two hundred yards.

When we found her, the elderly woman was in tears. Everything had gone wrong. It was hot, the bus hadn’t come, and her nephew had been supposed to call but he never did. Her pension wasn’t enough for the food shop anymore, and now her pug was nowhere to be seen – and the little creature was all she had for company in this world. The poor woman stood there, head down and sobbing, clinging to the end of her dog’s empty lead. She was at the literal end of her tether. This is all of us now, I suppose: desperately holding on to our end of nothing. There’s quite an art to living sanely in such times.

Are you familiar with pugs, as a breed? If not, I should tell you how pugs are made. In Switzerland, at a large physics research facility named CERN, is located the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider smashes subatomic particles together to investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe. After hours, to make up their pay, the scientists accelerate ordinary dogs to near-light speed, collide them with 1970s comedians, and put the resulting creatures through a shrink ray. What comes out is a pug, and a good example can sell for up to $5,000. This is why particle physicists drive Porsches. The pug has a squashed face from the immense collision, and two bulbous eyes that look as if they kept going for a while after the abrupt deceleration brought the rest of the body to a standstill. The pug has a beer belly, and an unreformed sense of humour. The elderly woman’s pug wasn’t nowhere-to-be-seen at all. It had just gone far enough for her not to see it. They’re smarter than they look, pugs, and this one was hanging out just beyond the perimeter at which its elderly owner’s eyesight became a blur. It was rolling around on its back, ignoring her calls, and having a lovely time.

I only needed to pick it up off the ground. I can report to you that harvesting pugs like this is very satisfying, even if you only find one. They lick your face very happily, they smell exactly the way the word ‘pug’ sounds, and their bodies are still warm from the heat of the collision that formed them. Handing it back to its owner was nice, too. She became happy again immediately. She was beaming. It was like watching the air go back into a bouncy castle. I felt myself returning to life, too. People are good medicine. We chatted for a few moments, and then my own dog took me home: back past the ancient oak in the last summer of its life, and back into this summer in the last third of mine.

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Is anxiety surging, and panic quite close to the surface? Is it hard to focus or think straight? Do you constantly blame yourself for not having made choices that would have kept you and your loved ones more secure? Do you suddenly get heartsick or down? Do you feel overwhelmed by dread of what might happen, and do envy or fury stab at you when you think of those who are safer or better off? Do you find temporary relief in fantasies of revenge or conspiracy? Will your thoughts not let you sleep? Are petty frustrations standing in for something bigger, something unsaid? Can you somehow not make yourself do the simple things that would obviously make things better? And does there seem to be a vast ocean of feeling inside you that doesn’t even connect with the surface layers?

If even a few of those are true for you, then you’re not alone. You’re simply alive to what it means to be human right now. If you’re in a position to talk to a friend or family member about this stuff, it might be an eye-opener for both of you. It’s more common than you might think. This is the stuff my visitors are reporting – and visitors to therapy are just ordinary people who are taking the sensible step of examining their lives. These things they’re reporting are your things and my things, too. A lot of these symptoms belong to the world’s emergency at the moment. Of course it bleeds into your personal existence, if you have any kind of sensitivity. Only psychopaths have untroubled souls right now.

The rest of us, right now, exist in fear of the near future. In terms of its effect on mental health, it’s as if some future horror has already struck, like a dark comet. Shockwaves run back through time, arriving in our days. We feel them, using some wise and unsung time sense. We humans are all prophets. This is why we are anxious. This is why your daughter won’t eat, why your son won’t start his job search, and why you won’t let yourself sleep through the night. You might find an apparent cause closer to home – some proxy of that future comet – but the deep cause is our own human gift for clairvoyance: literally, clear sight.

Hopefully we’re wrong, and the future will be fine. But in the meantime, you and I need to find a way to experience that clear human sight, without losing our solidarity and our connection with each other. Try to stay conscious of the source of the mental shockwaves that buffet you and your family. It’s not all coming from within. Once you notice that your symptoms are humanity’s symptoms – at least in some part – then you won’t be panicked into the mad remedies that are so seductive in these times: the quack cures, conspiracist fantasies and desperate hopes with which people tend to treat their anxiety. You won’t need the bottle so much, either, if that’s one of the things you tend to lean on.

Sanity is not an individual sport. Solidarity and connection are the basis for surviving these times with your mind intact. So, if you can, let your soul connect. Take a moment – if you can bear the word – to notice that you really do have a soul, which is different from your mind. Your soul and mine, being human, would immediately know more about each other than our minds could ever discover. We notice our souls most vividly when we’re in connection with one other, or with the creative outputs that we put into the world to connect with each other. Music, in particular, is the soul’s key fob. It will make your soul beep and unlock, if you ever forget where you parked it.

Another way you can locate your soul is by noticing its suffering when it connects with our collective trauma in these times. The human soul doesn’t have pain receptors. It can only communicate to you by means of anxieties, the same way your hand communicates to you with pain if it touches a hot pan. And just as physical pain serves a purpose, so do unbearable emotions. In fact, if you can still feel your desperate feelings, your soul is very much alive and kicking. Good. The only job of sanity that you ever really have – in peacetime or in war – is not to let your soul die before your body does. In other words: to choose courage. Let’s have the courage to keep living for one another, and so keep our souls alive. I don’t know another way to be sane in these times.

Please take great care of yourself, and of each other. It is still worth making good leaves.

You’ve been reading Human Again , a weekly dispatch on how humanity's collective trauma shows up in our personal mental health – from Dr Chris Cleave, psychologist in clinical practice, existential psychotherapist, and #1 New York Times bestselling author.

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