This chapter explores the role of the arts and humanities in mediating the affective dimensions of environmental breakdown. As climate change and biodiversity loss intensify, individuals increasingly experience emotions such as ecological grief and anxiety. In the absence of established cultural frameworks for processing these feelings, literature, film, and other narrative forms offer crucial ways of making sense of them. The chapter examines how cultural texts articulate and structure these emotions, granting them legitimacy and shaping collective responses. As one example, it considers pre-traumatic stress syndrome (PreTSS), a concept that captures the distress caused by anticipating future environmental catastrophe, demonstrating how cultural narratives give form to such anxieties. By engaging with artistic representations of PreTSS and the scholarly debates surrounding them, the chapter argues that storytelling and the critical study of cultural narratives play a vital role in fostering emotional literacy, resilience, and advocacy in the face of planetary crisis.