On a weekend getaway up the California coast this summer, temperatures neared 100F (38C) as we reached our destination in the hills above the Mendocino wine country. Worrisome, but with wildfires ravaging Canada and Europe that week, the Golden State, for once, had been spared major conflagrations.

Relaxing on the deck, we noticed a gray-tinged cloud floating above a forested ridge on an otherwise blue-sky afternoon. Reflexively, I checked Watch Duty, the go-to disaster app of the Anthropocene. It wasn’t a cloud. A fast-moving wildfire had broken out several miles away, by the vineyards we had just passed.

As authorities ordered evacuations and shut down the freeway, I started plotting escape routes and drove down the hill to charge the car, just in case. Bags were repacked, and after a fitful sleep punctuated by wildfire alerts, we awoke the next morning to the sound of sirens and helicopters churning overhead as another fire broke out in the tinder-dry hills directly west of us.

Being a Californian means living with a certain level of existential anxiety. After all, a cataclysmic earthquake could strike before you finish reading this sentence. But when the Big One will hit is unknowable; wildfires, by contrast, are now year-round. Watch Duty’s distinctive and unceasing pinging reminds me I must always be ready to run.

This isn’t garden-variety climate anxiety but something new: Evacuation is becoming a mindset as one climate shock after another rewires our brains to prepare for disaster rather than worry about it. Thanks to climate change, any of the spot fires that routinely erupt near my Bay Area home when temperatures soar could explode into an urban inferno within minutes. So when Watch Duty calls in the middle of the night, I pick up.

Around the world, climate-driven catastrophes are no longer random, distant disasters happening to someone else; they’re everything everywhere all at once. The toxic smoke from remote wildfires; the waves generated by a Pacific storm taking out multimillion-dollar beach houses a thousand miles away; the drying up of the Colorado River and its reservoirs; the glacier in Nepal that collapses in an instant. But threats feel more personal, knowing that when you leave your home it might not be there when you return.

“Our nervous systems are constantly being hijacked, and our windows to adapt are getting shorter and more compounded,” says Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at Stanford University. As Heinz and I chat, a Watch Duty alert sounds. “Is that yours or mine?”I joke, sort of but not really. It’s hers.

Shortly after Heinz’s young family moved to Healdsburg in Sonoma wine country in 2017, they had to evacuate their new home as the first of California’s climate-driven megafires erupted nearby, killing 22 people and incinerating more than 5,000 homes in the region. “I knew that we would never go back to normal,” says Heinz.

They didn’t. Two years later, Heinz’s family fled again as another firestorm approached. When a third massive wildfire ignited in 2020, they stayed put due to another existential threat that year. “It was super complicated because my 3-year-old had active Covid when evacuation was recommended,” she says.

“No one sleeps on a hot, dry, windy night here,” adds Heinz. That changes daily life. “I’m always monitoring the wind and the red-flag warnings, and probably in a way that’s unhealthy,” she says.

It’s been a relatively calm wildfire season in the Bay Area, but last Wednesday Watch Duty triggered my reptilian brain with an alert about a fast-moving wildfire in the Berkeley Hills while I was at work in San Francisco. It happened to be the 35th anniversary of the Oakland-Berkeley Hills firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed 3,000 homes, a searing trauma that I covered as a young journalist. Firefighters extinguished Wednesday’s blaze before it reached homes, but the adrenaline blast lingered.

“There’s a kind of hypervigilance that many people are experiencing,” says Britt Wray, an instructor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford who studies climate stress. “With the climate crisis, we understand that these are realistic threats, and when we see it on our doorstep it activates your threat-appraisal system.”That vigilance is being supercharged by this year’s super El Niño, which is spiking temperatures, raising sea levels and precipitating destructive storms worldwide. As I write, California is sweltering through a record October heat wave and tens of thousands of residents are evacuating as wildfires break out across the state.

Meanwhile, a Kelvin wave approaches the coast. A once-obscure meteorological oddity that in 2026 has entered the lexicon, Kelvin waves are slow-moving underwater waves spawned by El Niño’s extreme ocean warming. They can raise coastal sea levels more than a foot, magnifying the havoc of storms now brewing in the Pacific and increasing the risk of flooding that could force residents to evacuate.

Elsewhere, wildfires burning in Indonesia are blanketing Southeast Asia with toxic smoke while extreme rain and flooding are afflicting countries in Asia, Africa and South America. But evacuation watchfulness is also a privilege of those with the resources to escape and somewhere to go, an option not available to much of the world.

Still, governments in Australia, Europe and the US have begun encouraging evacuation mindfulness among their residents as climate calamities pile up. In Australia, which faces shortening cycles of drought, deluge and bushfire, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service urges residents to “consider your physical, mental and emotional preparedness” and “plan to leave early, well before a fire reaches your area and well before you are under threat.”

“We are now living in an era of cascading traumas,” says Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco who helps college students cope with climate stress. “The new normal is to expect disaster. We don’t know when, but it could be at any time.”Epel’s climate vigilance kicked off one morning in September 2020, when she and the rest of the Bay Area woke to apocalyptic orange skies from wildfires burning across Northern California.

This always-on alertness feels different from the general eco-anxiety many experience when thinking about a climate-constrained future, or the trauma suffered by those who’ve survived a wildfire or hurricane.

Climate vigilance creates stress but can also have an upside, spurring people to make their homes more disaster-resilient and to develop and act on evacuation plans. That sense of agency and being ready for the worst can help keep watchfulness from spiraling into chronic stress, according to mental health experts.

As our Mendocino weekend ended, the fires continued to burn, and the freeway remained closed. Forced to find a route around the wildfire, we ended up driving down a less-traveled road that winds through a bucolic countryside of vineyards and orchards. Watch Duty, for a blissful hour, fell silent.