Chapter 1: The Permacrisis

We are sharing this chapter of Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat by Katie Hodgetts for members of our Hopeful Book Club. The right of Katie Hodgetts to be identified as the Author of this text  has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

“The greatest danger of our time is the deadening of our response.”
– Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope

Let’s be real. We are burned out. Anxious. Disillusioned. Many of us want to help nurture a world in crisis, but the sheer scale of injustice, environmental breakdown and political chaos has left us overwhelmed and overloaded. Globalization of the 20th century promised prosperity and unity, yet we have grown up in a world with widening inequality and fraying global solidarity. At the time of writing, there are 59 large-scale conflicts happening in the world, a figure that has increased by 60–90 per cent over the past two decades.² What some now call the permacrisis – the “dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another” – captures this well, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner.³ With each event arriving before we’ve had time to process the last, we can feel breathless. We were promised a life of more beauty than this.

While global crises escalate, community-level engagement has thinned in many Western societies. We spend less time with our grandparents and in community spaces. We sharpen our morality less through scripture or intergenerational wisdom and more through 60-second reels and TikToks. All contribute to the loneliness epidemic. In the UK, almost 50 per cent of 18–24-year-old women identify as lonely.⁴ There is a sense that collectively we are experiencing the degradation of the soul – the spiritual, moral and social fracturing of ourselves in relation to others and Life. Yes, we were promised a life of more beauty than this . . . And we can still find it.

To transform the world, we first need to transform how we “do” changemaking. A different way of enacting change is not only possible, but it is necessary. I began changemaking with a laser-focus on action, but the deeper I went, the more I realized that external action alone isn’t enough for the long term. Not when burnout is becoming the norm. A paradigm shift is needed, one where engaging with climate justice or mental health or human rights doesn’t lead to inertia but enlivenment; where caring about the world doesn’t temporarily let in connection, care and kinship but creates an open-door policy.

There is a carousel of emotions that come with peering at the destruction of ecosystems, countries, Indigenous lands and livelihoods. To name but a few, you might resonate with the feelings of sadness, disbelief, anxiety, burnout, exhaustion, despair, rage, anger, resignation, hopelessness, frustration, loneliness, betrayal and insanity. You might swing between some of these emotions from hour to hour, minute to minute, or you might feel some of them at the same time. When we see headlines like “searches for climate anxiety increase by 73 times” we might understand why.⁵ Because it’s shit scary, and somewhere deep down (maybe buried really deep down for some), we’re all a little bit shit scared.

You might also cope by going into denial, which has many guises. Sometimes it is not suggesting that these horrors aren’t happening, rather that denial can be non-engagement. We are living through a truly unsettling period of human history, where your TikTok feed will take you straight from a funny cat video to a trending dance to a dead child in a conflict zone. Sometimes we choose to scroll. Sometimes our hearts cannot hold the grief of the world first thing in the morning. Sometimes boundaries around when we engage and when we don’t become less about virtue-signalling and more about safeguarding our capacity. In small and controlled doses, denial can be a helpful coping mechanism – perhaps you even skim read the first few paragraphs of this book? But in larger bouts and extrapolated to larger populations, denial and apathy have become two widespread emotions that are stifling progress. While denial and apathy are a privileged and dangerous choice, I understand them. Like my ex-colleague once said, social change is just “too depressing” to engage with. To thwart the deadening of our response, there is an increasing mandate to enliven our approach and our changemaking too.

Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat: Act

I began changemaking when I was 21, concerned primarily with the “Act” portion of this formula. I devoted myself to different campaigns and believed that change hinged on questions regarding action alone. Do we need electric cars or does their production exacerbate exploitative resource extraction? How can I limit my lifestyle emissions alongside my campaign work? Can AI be our saviour in finding a climate-emissions solution? What legislation is required? A salary ceiling? What does a Green New Deal paradigm look like? How can we push for legislative and societal change? As we balance on the brink of collective ruin, how we act and what we do will be the pressing features of our generation. What is required is a whole generation of changemakers, pushing in different areas of society for different solutions at local, national and international level. Yet staggering rates of burnout and fatigue are not only eroding the spirit of activism but are compromising our ability to act for the long haul. If we are to move beyond a “Feel helpless? Then do more” prognosis, we need to build our awareness of the deep psychological, interpersonal and spiritual barriers that can make taking climate or any social justice action unsustainable.

After ten years in the sector, I recognize that our obsession with external action alone could be part of the problem. What feels more important to me – and Human-centred is the basis for this book and my activism is work – is shifting human capacity to activism in its the centre of attention, with action the most alive form. byproduct. If revolutionary change lies in the ingenuity, empowerment and perseverance of common citizens, then my question has changed from “what is the right action and how do we take it?” to “how do we activate and sustain a generation of changemakers?” Because human-centred activism is activism in its most alive form.

In considering human capacity, we first need to design a new blueprint for changemaking that centres on sustainability – not the kind of sustainability that counts our emissions or recycles our placards (though that’s great). This is one of sustainability of the self, not just sustainability of the planet – the psychological and emotional sustainability that makes it possible to keep going for a lifetime, not just a season. To take the hits like soil takes rain. To develop an ability for emotional alchemy, transforming concern into courage. This is how we shift activism from a project we take on, to a posture we move from. Moreover, if we need agents of change across every level of society on multiple different fronts, then changemaking needs to become not the plight of a few, but an obligation and possibility for everyone. This includes your anarchist housemates, your school friends from home and yes, your nan. Our blueprint should redefine changemaking to make it more accessible, enjoyable, diverse and impactful, celebrating all forms of engagement, not just protests, and weaving in joy and extending the invitation to others. Perhaps that’s how I get my ex-colleague involved.

Another facet of human capacity is how we bounce back if we are burned out, a plight so many of us have experienced. Burnout, though highly complex and personal, is commonly associated with fatigue or tiredness. There is a heaviness that settles into your bones, a weariness so deep it can pin you to your bed or make the smallest task disproportionately overwhelming. But what I’ve come to see across the board is that burnout is about more than “tiredness”. Perhaps you’re not tired. Perhaps you’re impoverished. Perhaps you’ve become so absorbed by your cause that you’ve dimmed the lights on what you love. Perhaps you are impoverished in spirit, inspiration, connection and joy. That’s why a walk in fresh air, a plunge in cold water or the embrace of an old friend can feel so unexpectedly restorative. Placing human capacity at our centre is the route back to being ourselves. After all, it is a balanced you – your gifts, vitality and wisdom – that will drive lasting change.

“So, how do we do this?” has become my obsession. How do we revitalize changemaking as a pursuit associated with collective joy and the reweaving of community, rather than loneliness, restriction and burnout? How do we reapproach changemaking in a way that also addresses the mental health crisis? How do we unlock and preserve the latent power of humans without burning them out? How do we “save the planet” – and feel good doing it? Is that even possible? These questions became the starting curiosities for the organization I would set up aged 24, The Resilience Project, which would grow into a global organization.

Rest: Distress to De-stress

If to act is to declare this matters, to rest is to remember so do I. Rest is an integral part of changemaking, though we aren’t taught how to do it. It is sometimes associated with mindless social media scrolling and binge-watching Desperate If to act is to declare Housewives (at which I’m this matters, to rest is proficient), as if rest is to remember so do I. something you need to earn. 

Other times it is seen as exclusive to the wellness sector, as if rest is something you need to buy. Under these guises rest becomes mental inertia or physical abandon. Rest has more flavour, vibrancy and wisdom than the passivity of the armchair. It is more than moving from a place of distress to de-stress. Rest is where we find truth, in the mind, body and nervous system. If busyness and productivity are concerned with “what’s next”, rest is concerned with “what is”. It is a state of physiological and psychological quietening, where both consciously and unconsciously we convert our experiences into learning, uncover realizations and are offered a different pathway forward. Stillness brings truth: we pause to feel, not to retreat.

I am fanatical about rest going beyond bathtubs, foot spas and wellbeing. While this book will undoubtedly find a home in the “self-care and wellbeing” section, let it be clear from the outset: I don’t want or expect you simply to be well. When we make “wellness” our main aspiration, any deviation feels like a failure or a regression. Internalizing wellness as the goal makes it easier to vilify sadness, anger and malaise. Moving from a state of “well” to “worked up” can be regarded as a mark of inadequacy. This becomes especially pronounced in the changemaking space where grappling with big, complex emotions is part of the territory. But deviations from well hold great value. For example, there is value in feeling so inspired by the world that you throw back the curtains to your soul. There is great value in being outraged by the things you see around you and the systems that perpetuate harm and exploitation. Tended to properly, these emotional deviations are great catalysts to act. They aren’t to be suppressed, hidden or shamed, but understood, befriended and utilized.

Indeed, I want you to be both heartbroken by the losses we face and enlivened by our victories. Because the truth is the world will not be transformed by wellness alone. Many Western wellbeing trends exist to nullify sensation and minimize the discomfort of “strong” emotions. An unspoken emotional hierarchy is created, where peace, calm and serenity are upheld as the highest ideals, while emotions like anger, cynicism and scepticism are treated as computational errors to be corrected. The mantra of “good vibes only” may work to maintain a surface-level semblance of wellness in the short term, but it fails to honour the deeper currents of sadness and pain, which exist in us all. While I understand the sentiment that peace starts with each of us, that’s not where it ends. It ends with justice, redistribution, healing and change. Mindfulness and balance are essential, but it’s emotional abundance and emotional variety that I’m going to convince you will force personal and planetary progress.

Befriending, rather than rejecting, our vast emotional terrain opens space for the lessons that seemingly unpalatable emotions like rage and cynicism have to offer us. Navigating and sifting through this complex tangle of emotions – climate anxiety, intergenerational betrayal, despair, hope – the journey will undoubtedly make pitstops at wellness. While standing in the pain and suffering of the world might be antithetical to being well, I hope I can offer morsels of stories, evidence and text to guide you to finding wellness – not passive well-being but active well-finding. Wellness then becomes a by-product, rather than the focus.

Reset: From Self-care to Self-change

We then move from rest to reset. To reset is not to start again now that you’re not tired, but to understand why you became so tired in the first place and make the necessary changes: the process of installing the updates, identifying the bugs and rebooting the system. It is less about self-care and more about self-change. The terms “self” and “change” are both misleading here. First of all, “self” could imply that the burden is on you. If you change, the world will change. While I agree with that in part, what truly needs to change is much, much bigger than you – systems, structures and trajectories as well as legislation and elected politicians need to change. Second, while change happens within the individual, we’re not doing it alone. It is catalysed by community. The process is about the individual, though the work must be done collectively, which is why peer support plays a central role in our reset.

To reset requires more than a yoga class. It requires us to engage deeply with the collective and internalized narratives that might lock us into cycles of boom and bust. This might involve looking at communities we’ve found ourselves in and seeing if they’re propping up systems of harm or dismantling them. Or we might have to be honest with how we relate to our self-worth, and whether we consciously or unconsciously tie it to productivity. To reset is to turn our gaze counterintuitively from the external turmoil to our internal landscape and the strength of our social connectivity. This is not an invitation to stop pushing for systemic, legislative and discursive change, but realizing that without adequate internal resourcing we are likely to stifle the creative and long-term thinking required for success. It’s in the interplay between internal activation and external activism that resilience is found.

Resilience is how we weather storms, not the absence of storms. The absence of storms is toxic positivity, outlandish optimism or sheer denial. Resilience, on the other hand, is how (not how quickly) we bounce back from difficulty, and how in adversity we may not become buried but planted. As a concept, resilience isn’t binary. One isn’t either resilient or not. It’s not a skill we acquire for life or a destination we reach. Resilience is a practice, rather than a given state, shaped by intention, identity and community. Just like a river, which runs wide and sometimes narrow, our sense of resilience will meander in response to our changing internal and external landscape, our levels of support and our position within the world. Over time, some streams will deviate from a river, depleting our stores, while at other points streams join the river, adding to its strength and power. Some things, like mutual aid, feelings of safety or climbing a mountain, will add to how resilient we feel. Others, like financial instability, grief of loved ones or systemic oppression, will detract from it.

If the goal is resilience rather than wellness, reset – or self-change – becomes central. Self-change guides us in understanding the patterns that don’t serve us or our activism, and to acknowledge and honour the work we’ve already done to bolster ourselves. Change is uncertain and unsteady by its very nature, so changing the world will be unsteady too. And changing ourselves – our narratives, our relationship to our emotions, our understanding of burnout, our understanding of who we are – might be a little messy as well. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not the most gratifying adventure of your life: to truly know and accept yourself.

Repeat: A Rhythm Not a Regression

Repeat is an important part of this formula because healing, growth and resilience are not linear journeys. We may recover from a bout of burnout only to feel it happening all over again. Developing our sense of resilience does not make us immune to burnout, but it arms us with the learning and wisdom to enable us to make a quicker or more gracious recovery. It is likely that you will feel burned out more than once, because life is full of stress. Campaigns fail. A fascist is elected. Our loved ones get sick. Repeat is a life-long journey of an unknown number of repetitions.

I know this from my own journey. In 2019 I burned out from climate campaigning, resolute in the aftermath to learn enough about it to prevent it in others. Two years later, I was running residentials and workshops on resilience and burnout. I had assumed that made me resistant to it. When I received some devastating family news later that year, I realized that learning about resilience won’t keep you safe from pain. Here I discovered the wisdom that not just campaigning, but Life itself is a journey of Acting, Resting, Resetting and Repeating.

Climate Activation

Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat has been written to consolidate the learnings of a decade in activism, the “youthquake” of the 2019 climate movement and over half a decade building an organization – The Resilience Project – which explores with young changemakers how we take action without burning out. It was established in 2020 and I have since spent each year at The Resilience Project designing, delivering and weaving youth-led spaces for peer support, inner development and intergenerational mentoring. All of our work is underscored by our Climate Activation model, an inner-led, peer support learning journey facilitated in youth-led space. It has been designed by psychologists and youth activists and its impact researched by Dr Britt Wray (Stanford University) and Dr Emma Lawrence and Daniella Watson (Imperial College, London). It is becoming increasingly recognized that positive social impact hinges not only on policy change but on personal reckoning with the inner dimensions of change. Simply put, Climate Activation is a model to facilitate this inner-led journey, which happens in community over eight weeks, to build our self-awareness, levels of connectedness and feelings of hope as a strategy for world change.

Note that activation differs from activism. While history is a written account of activism changing the world, the imagery of activism has shifted in the last few years from Parks, the Suffragettes and Stonewall to superglue, disruption and crime. The word “activism” has become intentionally sullied by both the media and governments, reducing public support for activism, and making our movement seem less about community and more about criminality. Whereas activism is an event or campaign wedded to outcomes and impact, activation is a journey involving discoveries and learning. Taking action, in all its manifest forms, becomes a by-product of climate activation. The model runs so that we don’t know what kind of action we’ll be designing or taking after moving through the eight weeks – nor do we prescribe it – but it will be one underscored by self-knowing, imagination, support, care and inspiration.

Each year we train a small cohort of young climate leaders across the world to host these eight-week communities of care and belonging, which we call “Resilience Circles”. These circles meet weekly to talk candidly about the realities of the polycrisis, explore resilience-building practices and to build a new constellation of care and kinship, rather than competition. Our community-led model means that Resilience Circles are specific to movements, geographies or shared lived experience, hence we’ve established Circles for young People of Colour, Queer+ folk and COP27 campaigners. Through working with thousands of young activists, holding interventions in 25 different countries, our work celebrates “depth” over “breadth”. All of our programmes, from youthled book groups to mindfulness programmes to Resilience Circles, run between eight weeks and nine months to facilitate the long and often difficult work of change – something the urgency narrative of our crises held us back from doing.

I admit up front that I’m not a psychologist. I was a youth climate activist who campaigned and mobilized over 80,000 people onto the streets for climate justice. Setting up The Resilience Project in my early twenties grew out of my own story of burnout and a growing unease with the dynamics I witnessed in the youth climate movement. There was exceptional talent, but also in-fighting, toxicity and the deep currents of the existing societal legacies of racism, colonialism and patriarchy. I witnessed the glorification of burnout and a kind of internal collapse that mirrored the very systems we were resisting. We were losing ourselves in our “activist” label and burning more bridges than we were building. It was clear to me that while we championed being “anti-capitalist” and “feminist”, the learned teachings of these systems, such as ego, individualism and competition, still played out in our groups. Sound familiar?

Exploring a more human-centred activism has been my passion for ten years: progressing from establishing a “Wellbeing Officer” for various youth movements age 21, to scaling The Resilience Project and our Activation model from the UK to Europe and East Africa. Activation brings all the human facets of changemaking to the foreground. It begins at the heart – understanding the vast emotional terrain of change – to root us in our “why”. It’s not a healing journey, but a “wholeing” journey, to help us better understand, appreciate and value all of what and who we are – even the less light and bright bits. It says that this too is welcome here. The anger, rage and disappointment and longings. It progresses to the realm of the mind (cognition, culture, consciousness) and highlights the narratives we subscribe to which may limit our capacity as changemakers. Then beyond us, it works to build a strong, caring community, with peer support as the keystone for sustainable change. Finally, we explore a holistic approach to taking action, which isn’t just something exclusively “out there”, but rather is to live as though another world is not only possible but is already unfolding through us.

How to Use This Book

While this book moves through eight tangible themes that align with the eight-week Climate Activation model, this is not an “eight-step guide to ultimate resilience”. There are Resilience cannot be no hacks to changing the world bought or read but or changing your life. There lived and unlocked. is only deep work where the cost is our time, but the reward is our truth. Appreciating that resilience cannot be bought or read but lived and unlocked, reframes this book as a guidebook rather than as an instruction manual. All eight chapters in Part Two feature at least one exercise that is explored in our Climate Activation model. While the focus was specifically on climate, the guideposts have been expanded to speak to all forms of changemaking, because the 21st century is calling for our work to feel more interconnected. I encourage you to engage with these exercises in pairs or groups. You may want to find a group to work through the chapters with and build your own Resilience Circle. Though it may be tempting to skip these exercises, I implore you to engage with them. Resilience is an active practice and though we can read about it and intellectualize it, its staying power stems from how we metabolize it into our bodies.

The research conducted by Imperial College London found that Resilience Circles are proven to significantly improve emotional wellbeing, support the navigation of complex emotions, strengthen emotional and collective resilience and identify helpful self-care tools.⁶ The chapters in this book are inspired by this validated approach, the stories of many participants and the work informed by young people across six continents. However, what I speak of here may not necessarily reflect your own experience. I invite you to take what is helpful from this book and iterate the model in your own communities in the way that feels most authentic, because we need fewer gurus and more community. While the model’s effectiveness has been demonstrated by mixedmethod studies, I must stress that like all models, it is nonexhaustive and fallible. It has been inspired largely by US and European thinking and institutions from the Global North, hence it may not capture the spirit of other parts of the world. That said, we have tested parts with international youth and found that the essence remains the same across borders: changemakers need places to be heard and understood, to share all the “arrghs” and “eeks” of modern life and find spaces of genuine connection where they are loved and feel worthy as a human first, a changemaker second. I wrote this book as a love letter to those hungry for change, in the hope that they would see their pain and confusion mirrored back to them and know they’re not alone.

Part One traces the emotional and theoretical underpinnings of the Climate Activation model, detailing my own experiences of powerful action and my resulting burnout during the 2019 Greta Thunberg-inspired “Youthquake”. It explains the concept of “innertersectional changemaking” and how a renewed emphasis on our individual inner landscape can contribute to stronger collective units. Part Two introduces the Climate Activation model itself, moving through the eight guideposts for taking action without burning out. Grounded in psychology, it answers big questions on pushing for change. For example, how do we avoid burnout? What is the rich variety of rest I’ve alluded to? What can we gain from embracing our anger and is there space for joy and fun? (Spoiler alert: absolutely.) Finally, Part Three explores the notion of “Repeat”, which considers how we can unlock resilience and come back to it time and time again, citing my own experiences of repeat emotional collapse. There is great irony and richness that writing extensively about burnout has not made me immune to it. Part Three also looks at my second burnout in light of my sibling’s cancer diagnosis, and the powerful reminder that the personal is deeply interwoven with the political. The person standing behind a cause is very much still that: a person. What we endure and unearth from strife and challenge can offer morsels of learning to our changemaking efforts, and vice versa.

A Note on Language

Throughout this book I use the terms “eight-week model” and “Climate Activation model” interchangeably. I also use terminology to delineate peoples and geographies, including but not limited to the Global North and the Global South to distinguish between geographies, and MAPA (most affected people and areas) as a group of peoples. MAPA highlights the disproportionate impacts of climate change on certain communities and regions. It underscores the reality that those who have contributed least to the climate crisis, such as Indigenous peoples and low-lying island nations and communities, are often the most severely affected by its consequences. I anticipate that as all language does, it will shift and change to better define the people it represents. I use the term “Global Majority” to refer to Indigenous people, people of African, Asian or Latin American descent, as they constitute approximately 85 per cent of the world’s population – far from a minority. I intentionally use the word “changemaking” more so than “activism”. Words carry power and my choice for changemaking stresses the importance of change as well as action, Reset as well as Act. By using changemaking, which is wider in its remit, I hope to invite in those beyond climate and those who feel “activist” isn’t a label that represents them. Imposter syndrome stopped me from self-identifying as an “activist” for years. In using “changemaker”, I say to those somewhere on the spectrum of taking action and to those who care deeply about positive change: I see you. I will also refer to spirituality. Please don’t confuse this with crystals etc. By spirituality, I am referring to the “non-material” – for example feelings such as love, connection, inspiration and interconnectedness – as opposed to the “material”, by which I mean tangible things such as clothes, cars or physical protests.

This book will not instruct you how to deliver a campaign, but it might inspire you to do so. Through the guideposts outlined, I endeavour to shine The solution to a light on how to transform avoiding burnout is yourself into an empowered not to feel less but  changemaker for the long term, to feel more. with mental fitness at the centre. 

This offers a different approach to leadership in the polycrisis, where the solution to avoiding burnout is not to feel less but to feel more: specifically, more aliveness. Because numbness is understandable, but aliveness is revolutionary. My hope is that it will transform the eco-worrier, the eco-resigned, the eco-angry and the eco-it’stoo-fucking-late into the eco-empowered, the eco-engaged and the eco-alive. I’m not asking you to change the way you live, to stop going on holiday or to glue yourself to trees (but that’s a bonus). I am inviting you to come with me and explore the deep, inner and collective transformation the 21st century requires of us: a paradigm shift so we live fuller, more connected, enriched lives while honouring planetary boundaries. This version of changemaking is not just about the output but about the path itself. Because when we engage from a place that is grounded, supported and connected, something powerful happens: we don’t just avoid burnout, we start to uncover larger versions of ourselves. Changemaking stops being something we do and becomes part of how we are in the world.

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