An inspiriting guide for relaxing your nervous system, sourcing true resilience, and finding your center in an anxious age.

In an era of dumpster fires and doomscrolling, is there any such thing as a healthy relationship with our stress response? While we can’t avoid crisis, we can learn to move more gracefully through cycles of collapse and renewal. We can find the sustainability we seek in learning how to tend the very forces we once feared.

When the Los Angeles forest fires threatened their family home, Daniel Rechtschaffen—a therapist, celebrated mindfulness teacher, and toddler dad—officially went into panic mode. This near-miss prompted him to embark on a five-year study of ancient apocalyptic narratives to learn how we are shaped by the stories we tell about the end of the world, and what gives us the hope we need to keep going.

The Gift of Apocalypse offers a powerful antidote to modern anxiety, revealing how to find hope and resilience not by turning away from chaos, but by turning toward it with ancient wisdom as your guide. Greek mythology’s Persephone, Indigenous folklore’s Coyote, the Hebrew prophets, and the resurrected Jesus all offer themselves as archetypes of survival revealing:

• How to relax your nervous system even in the face of uncertainty
• Practices for waking up to the preciousness of life
• What resilience means for you today
• How to resist denial and despair and source honest hope
• What you can do to break out of the doom loop and start writing the story of the future

Consider this book your care package in times of crisis, and your map out of the woods into a future of our own making.