LOS ANGELES — On a warm Sunday afternoon, Skye Smith was painting posters in Los Angeles State Historic Park, a narrow stretch of green in Chinatown.

Smith sketched out the words "renewable energy now" before outlining them in black paint. She was joined by 20 other climate activists who are members of Sunrise Movement Los Angeles, a group dedicated to stopping climate change. 

The group was preparing for an upcoming climate rally. Smith, 21, is a college student and is onboarding lead with Sunrise. She joined the group to help fight against global warming but said spending so much time focused on the cause can be difficult.

“Even if you close your laptop at the end of the day, you stop taking messages, you stop working on an event, you’re still going to look outside, and something is on fire. It’s your neighborhood, or it’s your family. It’s not something you can escape from,” she said.

Smith noted that occasionally, she’s had to step back from her work with sunrise to protect her own mental health.

"Sometimes for your own health and so that you can keep working, you do have to shut yourself off for a couple days."

Smith not alone in feeling overwhelmed and anxious about the constant bad news surrounding the climate. A phenomenon called "climate anxiety" is on the rise and is now recognized as a medical condition in academic and psychiatric circles. A recent study out of the University of Bath looked at how 10,000 people age 16-25 in 10 countries, including the U.S., were responding to climate change.

The research found that 59% of respondents were extremely worried and “over 50% felt sad, anxious, angry and powerless and guilty.” The study concluded that “there is an urgent need for increases in both research and government responsiveness” to climate stress and anxiety.”

But it’s not just young people who are emotionally impacted by negative news about the climate. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is constantly examining facts and figures about climate change which can induce anxiety.

“I’ll wake up at 3 in the morning and feel this overwhelming sort of anxiety. It doesn’t happen too often, once a month or something. It’s more likely to happen if there are big emerging disasters, especially if they are close to me or affecting me personally,” said Kalmus, speaking on his own behalf.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Kalmus noted that what uplifts him is the work he does through climate activism.

“If I wasn’t working to create change right now, I would feel a pretty deep despair, and I don’t feel a deep despair right now. I have a lot of complicated climate emotions. But paralyzing despair isn’t one of them because I’m working with a lot of other people to create change."

At the University of Southern California, Professor Joe Árvai studies how climate change impacts decision-making, critical thinking and behavior. Árvai explained that for years, climate change has been put on the back-burner for many people but now things are shifting.

“Nowadays, what we are seeing is that the effects of climate change are hitting much closer to home and much closer to the present than the future. As that’s happening, obviously our concern is becoming heightened our anxiety is becoming heightened, our desire to act is heightened as well.”

Árvai added that the constant stream of information about global warming might lead to inaction.

“People don’t know how to deal with all that information. Cognitively, it’s difficult to deal with it all. The danger is analysis paralysis. You get into this infinite loop…and ultimately get frustrated with the fact that there is so much to consider.”

On the contrary, at Sunrise Movement, Smith said she had actually seen the opposite of paralysis.

“For all of the stress of this last summer and all the climate disasters…if there is a silver lining, it’s that our numbers have grown, and people have become more and more invigorated with the need to act.”