You may have noticed it's a touch, hmm, sultry out. Maybe it's the persistent low-grade headache. Or the palpable lack of motivation to accomplish a single task. Or the way your dog, forced outside for 30 seconds, glares up in an uncanny Jack Nicholson impersonation.

In these dark days of repeated temperature advisories from the National Weather Service, many of us have lost our sense of reason. We've squinted at the thermostat and cheered it on, like, "You can do it, little buddy," knowing the unit is not designed to cool the home more than 20 degrees below the outside temperature. The math does not work out when the planet is flirting with a new Cretaceous Period.

And what of the workers who simply cannot escape brutal conditions? Very few states have legal safety standards to protect laborers from heat that kills thousands of U.S. workers per year and injures many more. What about the people living without air conditioning or on the streets?

If you're anything like me, next comes the panoply of guilt and confusion. You understand that this heat wave is a symptom of more overwhelming existential problems. You do your best to make responsible daily choices that offset your personal carbon emissions. Maybe you bring your grocery bags, adjust your diet, order less disposable stuff online. Then you remember how forecasters are calling for an above-normal hurricane season because sea surface temperatures are offsetting the El Nino.

You recalibrate back to a simple act, like leaving bottled water on the porch for delivery drivers, but then you get caught in a cycle of torment about how plastic bottles helped get us here in the first place. This mental mayhem leaves you feeling like a tiny, useless toddler when it comes to the systemic changes needed around energy and food and labor sectors, not to mention, you know, governments working in concert for the global good, ha-ha.

It's tempting to devolve into apathy and cynicism over climate change, biding our time until the malaria hits and the hour comes to seek refuge near our new southern U.S. border of Kentucky. Counterpoint, though: Diagnosing how bad everything is from the comfort of an air-conditioned office is, um, fairly annoying.

Well, this has been a fun conversation.

Let's pause for a moment. You there, seeking refuge in a chilled Wawa beverage, take a minute and stare into that glassy convenience store door, upper lip sweat caterpillar in place. Let's admit the disorientation. Let's proclaim, "All these things are true at the same time. I am cynical and scared and angry and apathetic, and I am also sweating like a wrapped Kraft Single on a sidewalk."

How can we push through, psychically and heuristically, until temperatures drop from "dangerous" to "merely insufferable"? That should be around Halloween.

Do not go into a dark hole, informationally speaking. Staying up to date on news, while exhausting, empowers us. However, literally going into a dark hole might be a good idea. A movie theater is the perfect cool, shadowy place to regroup for a few hours. On your third viewing of "Oppenheimer," your mind will likely wander to the question of climate change causing the collapse of an ocean current that disastrously could shift weather patterns from here to Europe.

Walking through the mall and Target can be a crisp respite, even though it will stir up angst about overconsumption and the planetary impacts of fast fashion. Uh, sports? Bowling? Roller skating while researching local solar energy projects in between obsessing over Florida's coral bleaching crisis?

The point is, we cannot escape conflicting truths. Collapsing glamorously on a fainting couch for dramatic effect is a decent option, but intellectually collapsing is not. We have to weave the harsh whys of the extreme heat into our daily attempts to escape it; this looks like helping each other where we can, tweaking our own choices and staying engaged in our ever-sweaty political arena.

And hydrating. Wipe off the lip sweat. Walk through the doors of that Wawa. Get a water. But maybe get the kind in the can so you can recycle the container later.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on Twitter or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: Bluewater Sweden at Unsplash