My understanding is that a significant amount of ecological anxiety is driven by ecological despair, which in turn is rooted in the reality that most of our "solutions" are not really proportional to the actual challenge. Therefore, when we prescribe "action" to remedy ecological anxiety, we might be ignoring the fact that the actions available to someone are wholly unsatisfactory.
Yes, which brings up the serenity prayer as a form of coping. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
About two years ago I was in the 'severe' zone. This was due to a combination of factors, and climate and ecological crisis awareness was a major part of that. I am now mostly in the 'mild / medium' zone. Many things have helped me to transition in to a better place. Joining the CPA was helpful, as was joining others locally who felt something similar to be active but also reflective. My wife went through the same and we have helped each other as well. If there is a single thing that has helped it has been really internalising the recognition that the feelings are both normal and shared by so many others. Caroline Hickman talks about the label 'eco-empathy' being a better one than 'eco-anxiety' and that is helpful I think.
Glad to hear you're in a much better spot with it now after doing that kind of processing. Yes I really like the eco-empathy or eco-compassion tagline that Caroline and others have used as an additional way to talk about eco-anxiety too.
I tend to float between 'significant and 'medium.' I try to do what I can, but at times it feels like what I do (recycle, pay attention to what foods I buy and where they come from, etc.) isn't enough and that increases my anxiety and despair.
I live in the United States, and it is hard to tell what foods come from sustainable sources. I have backed off beef and most milk products. At the same time, I live on a low and fixed income. I already have a lot of mental health issues to navigate. I have found it hard to know where to look to identify healthier food products for our environment. This can create tremendous anxiety while making a grocery list.
I like the both/and model. This is the same model that I use with my therapist. I am fortunate that she understands my climate anxiety. However, sometimes talking with her is not enough. I want to act and then find that I am extremely limited to how much I can do.
Thank you for creating this forum to discuss ideas and learn about environmental psychology. I am a student at my local community college. My major is in Human Services. I do not want to be a therapist, but I want to help people in some way. Your posts and the comment sections are a great way to help ease my anxiety. I know that I am not alone with these struggles.
By the way, any ideas on how someone on a low-income budget (who also happens to live in the southern United States) can create more individualized actions to help our planet, please let me know!
I'm so glad to hear that you find the connections via comments and posts on here useful for easing your own eco-anxiety. It sounds like you're very focused on personal impacts which I know can cause a lot of anxiety, guilt and shame. Many climate-aware therapists I've interviewed mention that this is a really common experience people have, but that they try to help people lesson the part of themselves that is putting so much responsibility for the crisis on themselves. Quieting that "inner environmentalist critic" through self-compassion and forms of flexible thinking while validating the feelings the person is having. This post touches on that a little bit: https://gendread.substack.com/p/a-therapists-tips-on-how-to-shift
I feel like I generally am at 'significant' these days. However, I occasionally dip into 'severe' if triggered by a combination of recording-breaking phenomena, such as rises in PPM, and natural disasters here or elsewhere. Oddly enough yesterday recognized I was starting to feel like that again. Coincidental as well is that my most recent recovery from 'severe' was due to activism in the form of environmental journalism and a podcast. However, this piece is giving me a lot to consider regarding the gaps in that form of response to eco-anxiety.
Sometimes it is the loneliness of eco-anxiety among my peers and family that makes me want to stir myself out of 'severe' symptoms like suicidal ideation, and so I rush out of it as soon as I can through activism and ungrounded hope and avoid sitting among those feelings. I'm going to try to do better at this though not yet sure what that means.
Lastly, I appreciate what you included about the harm therapists can multiply when reducing eco-anxiety to catastrophizing. That was very much my experience with two different therapists, and the only person I came out feeling seen by was a friend in a group therapy session who continues to be one of my best friends to do this day because we make space to allow each other to feel all this.
Sounds like a powerful friendship you've formed with that person, those kinds of relationships that give permission to these feelings/validate them are so necessary for so many people feeling stuck and alienated by the intensity of this awareness. Makes it a lot easier to live with. Glad you found them. Regarding therapists, here's a climate aware therapist directory in case you ever want to make sure that the one you're seeing understands the climate trauma lens https://www.climatepsychology.us/climate-therapists
It doesn’t exactly fit, but this week I’ve been swinging between significant and severe, because a rewilded space I have been pouring my time and love into protecting ( with a whole army of others!) all the creatures who live in it are under imminent threat of destruction. It all feels very real, because it is.
That sounds very painful, I'm sorry to hear that your special space and the creatures who live there are under imminent threat. It's wonderful and admirable that you care so much as to do that rewilding work. Thank you for that! But yes, when we care, we also suffer in this planetary health crisis
I fluctuate between significant and severe. My sleep is definitely disrupted, I struggle to get any respite, and I often wish I could just tap out of this slow-motion hamster wheel of climate work in the age of apocalypse. I work in local government climate change resilience in Florida and put my whole heart into my work and then do my best at home. I've had some well-meaning bully residents who have called me out on the few things I wasn't doing (due to finances) for the climate to the point of me needing to go to therapy. My therapist just said I was a perfectionist and the state of the climate is not within my personal ability to impact. I can't help but feel I've devoted my life to going down with the ship while the rest of the world just sees me as a 1970's stereotypical treehugger and can't even be bothered to fathom life devoid of fossil fuel consumption. I'm a millennial and get especially sad thinking about the generations younger than me and what they're going to have to live with. I feel very sad and alone. In my field, I don't think it's common to talk about our feelings but I really wish there was a support group for this in my region. Reading this helped, thank you.
I rarely find others who share my own personal experience, which is a complex matrix based on 50 years of trying to fight this fight and sound the alarm. (I'm 65 years old.) As I've watched the zeitgeist change over the decades, my optimism has waned. The idealistic, impactful work we did in the 1970s got lost in the me-first mentality of the 80s; then came the jaded and cynical 90s. In the new millennium, as climate change has become increasingly obvious, people's growing fear has turned into straight-up denial. We do all we can to reduce what is now being called our "climate footprint" -- and more critically, we are and have always been willing to follow and enact whatever sacrifices are necessary / legislated to turn things around. But it has never been enough, because the people with the power and the money just won't let go. Over the past ten years or so, when I try to mention to anyone just the changes I can see around our local area -- the more muted colors of green in our evergreen forests; the way the leaves don't turn in the fall (but instead half of them just die and fall off the the tree); the Douglas-fir clad hills around us freckled with red as more and more firs die of drought; the subtle fading of birdsong as species diminish -- people literally turn away, change the subject, don't want to hear it. About 10 years ago, an old high-school friend and fellow environmentalist from the early 70s sat at my kitchen table and we talked over coffee about how things looked to us at that point. "I don't ever tell anyone this," he said, "but you know we're hosed, don't you? There is no way out. Humans aren't capable of changing this." I could only nod my head in agreement. This is what I have spent decades trying to come to terms with. (Sorry to those on this forum who still don't want to hear it.) The only thing I've been able to do to keep myself sane and somehow soothed (but still grounded in reality) is to remind myself that really, in the end, life never about surviving in a certain way for a certain length of time. Any of us could always die at any time, even before climate change got to this dire point. It's about love. Bringing love into the world, cherishing the earth and each other for as long as we are given. "We are stardust, we are golden / And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
I too am 65 and have a very difficult time with dealing with this. You are absolutely right: "Bringing love into the world, cherishing the earth and each other for as long as we are given" is the answer to despair. When we are gone, new life will emerge. It will be hell before that though, and it breaks my heart to even start to imagine.
I bounce back and forth between significant and severe. Coming out of grad school (biology), I did climate change research for some years and also taught environmental science. I realized that the subject was really frightening for a lot of students, even though I tried to focus on success stories and on what we can do. However, personally I feel like I was trying to put up a good front and as a scientist, I see a lot of reason to fear. The most telling part of the eco-anxiety scale for me was "belief in others' ability to care." When the pandemic started, I thought maybe people would realize that we need to work together against these existential threats, but instead we got more polarized. If we can't even convince people that Covid is real, I don't see a possibility for progress on climate change. I tell my partner all the time that I think we are headed for a massive catastrophic extinction (including our own) but he says I'm catastrophizing. Thank you for your work on helping people build tolerance and resilience.
Yep. I work for a major advocacy group and if I'm being honest, after a few years I detached myself emotionally from what I do as a matter of self-preservation. I couldn't carry the weight of the problem around with me at work AND in my personal life. I still do everything I can in my personal life to lessen my impact, but I also know that individual actions are never going to be enough to save us, and I feel such despair at the problem of polarization which has made any kind of sustained collective action on a large scale virtually impossible, that I don't even want to talk about climate unless I'm at work being paid to do it. (I had the exact same experience of naively thinking, when the pandemic first started, that the shared experience of adversity and the need to work together would be a salve for the polarization problem, and the fact that the polarization hindered our response instead of our response lessening our polarization is deeply depressing.)
You just echoed my thoughts and feelings almost to the letter about others' ability to care. It helps to see I am not alone in thinking this. That said, I just read another article that suggested the future isn't written yet and it talks similarly to this article about processing the emotions, and letting go of and grieving old expectations for the future, before moving on to action. Best wishes.
Yeah, we saw the reactions to Covid by those not getting vaccinated and spreading lies. We will never do what it takes to save each other and the world from climate change. People are too selfish and shortsighted.
I was 'severe' until last year. I think I'm in a lethargic state now due to the aftereffects. I experienced extreme sadness and weight loss because the future is gloomy and society is unlikely to change due to climate change. Reading and studying about climate change science has improved a little, but the hardest thing is the indifferent attitude around me.( I living in Korea. It's a country that doesn't really care about climate change.) I found this site on Twitter and I'm so happy. I'm not optimistic yet, but I think it's important to get your act together amid the threat of climate change.
Wow. I have been somewhere between significant and severe for a long time, suffering in silence, most strongly at 2 am when there is nothing distracting between me and my thoughts, with no real outlet for my angst since talking about eco-destruction is mostly taboo. Strangely liberating to see an article about my grief and terror.
I have felt the dread of ecological disaster since childhood, constantly watching forests disappear to make room for houses. Perhaps an ungenerous attitude, but the globe is ALL our home, so maybe not so selfish either. I am glad to find this site. I appreciate the commentary, and it's good not to feel alone.
Read beyond the spectrum of bullet points. I am glad I did, as I feel differently at different times.
The article normalizes a broad range of emotions, low, high, and in the middle. The distinction is that the lows are lows that I feel and then pull myself out of.
Being able to feel the range of emotions and pull oneself up and out of a low, is Key.
I think of this a bit differently. For me, action is the antidote to despair, not because it leads to some kind of hope that action will change things but that I feel connected with other people. Seeing other people take action and talking with them about the action we are taking is reassuring, usually. Not always, I think it depends on the depth of connection that I feel. When I feel connected with others while taking action, I feel a sense of peacefulness and ease. I think that piece of connectedness is missing here in the figure above.
Well, you see, there is no "crisis". There is no need for any "eco-anxiety". There is no "anthropogenic global warming". There is no "greenhouse effect". (simply confused with normal thermal inertia)
There is no such thing as a "greenhouse gas". It's the biggest scientific hoax, mistake, scam in history. Here's the truth of the science (mainly my confrontation with Rick)
My understanding is that a significant amount of ecological anxiety is driven by ecological despair, which in turn is rooted in the reality that most of our "solutions" are not really proportional to the actual challenge. Therefore, when we prescribe "action" to remedy ecological anxiety, we might be ignoring the fact that the actions available to someone are wholly unsatisfactory.
Yes, which brings up the serenity prayer as a form of coping. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
Wise words, Britt.
Wishing you the very best for your future.
About two years ago I was in the 'severe' zone. This was due to a combination of factors, and climate and ecological crisis awareness was a major part of that. I am now mostly in the 'mild / medium' zone. Many things have helped me to transition in to a better place. Joining the CPA was helpful, as was joining others locally who felt something similar to be active but also reflective. My wife went through the same and we have helped each other as well. If there is a single thing that has helped it has been really internalising the recognition that the feelings are both normal and shared by so many others. Caroline Hickman talks about the label 'eco-empathy' being a better one than 'eco-anxiety' and that is helpful I think.
Glad to hear you're in a much better spot with it now after doing that kind of processing. Yes I really like the eco-empathy or eco-compassion tagline that Caroline and others have used as an additional way to talk about eco-anxiety too.
Thanks!
I tend to float between 'significant and 'medium.' I try to do what I can, but at times it feels like what I do (recycle, pay attention to what foods I buy and where they come from, etc.) isn't enough and that increases my anxiety and despair.
I live in the United States, and it is hard to tell what foods come from sustainable sources. I have backed off beef and most milk products. At the same time, I live on a low and fixed income. I already have a lot of mental health issues to navigate. I have found it hard to know where to look to identify healthier food products for our environment. This can create tremendous anxiety while making a grocery list.
I like the both/and model. This is the same model that I use with my therapist. I am fortunate that she understands my climate anxiety. However, sometimes talking with her is not enough. I want to act and then find that I am extremely limited to how much I can do.
Thank you for creating this forum to discuss ideas and learn about environmental psychology. I am a student at my local community college. My major is in Human Services. I do not want to be a therapist, but I want to help people in some way. Your posts and the comment sections are a great way to help ease my anxiety. I know that I am not alone with these struggles.
By the way, any ideas on how someone on a low-income budget (who also happens to live in the southern United States) can create more individualized actions to help our planet, please let me know!
I'm so glad to hear that you find the connections via comments and posts on here useful for easing your own eco-anxiety. It sounds like you're very focused on personal impacts which I know can cause a lot of anxiety, guilt and shame. Many climate-aware therapists I've interviewed mention that this is a really common experience people have, but that they try to help people lesson the part of themselves that is putting so much responsibility for the crisis on themselves. Quieting that "inner environmentalist critic" through self-compassion and forms of flexible thinking while validating the feelings the person is having. This post touches on that a little bit: https://gendread.substack.com/p/a-therapists-tips-on-how-to-shift
I feel like I generally am at 'significant' these days. However, I occasionally dip into 'severe' if triggered by a combination of recording-breaking phenomena, such as rises in PPM, and natural disasters here or elsewhere. Oddly enough yesterday recognized I was starting to feel like that again. Coincidental as well is that my most recent recovery from 'severe' was due to activism in the form of environmental journalism and a podcast. However, this piece is giving me a lot to consider regarding the gaps in that form of response to eco-anxiety.
Sometimes it is the loneliness of eco-anxiety among my peers and family that makes me want to stir myself out of 'severe' symptoms like suicidal ideation, and so I rush out of it as soon as I can through activism and ungrounded hope and avoid sitting among those feelings. I'm going to try to do better at this though not yet sure what that means.
Lastly, I appreciate what you included about the harm therapists can multiply when reducing eco-anxiety to catastrophizing. That was very much my experience with two different therapists, and the only person I came out feeling seen by was a friend in a group therapy session who continues to be one of my best friends to do this day because we make space to allow each other to feel all this.
Sounds like a powerful friendship you've formed with that person, those kinds of relationships that give permission to these feelings/validate them are so necessary for so many people feeling stuck and alienated by the intensity of this awareness. Makes it a lot easier to live with. Glad you found them. Regarding therapists, here's a climate aware therapist directory in case you ever want to make sure that the one you're seeing understands the climate trauma lens https://www.climatepsychology.us/climate-therapists
It doesn’t exactly fit, but this week I’ve been swinging between significant and severe, because a rewilded space I have been pouring my time and love into protecting ( with a whole army of others!) all the creatures who live in it are under imminent threat of destruction. It all feels very real, because it is.
That sounds very painful, I'm sorry to hear that your special space and the creatures who live there are under imminent threat. It's wonderful and admirable that you care so much as to do that rewilding work. Thank you for that! But yes, when we care, we also suffer in this planetary health crisis
I fluctuate between significant and severe. My sleep is definitely disrupted, I struggle to get any respite, and I often wish I could just tap out of this slow-motion hamster wheel of climate work in the age of apocalypse. I work in local government climate change resilience in Florida and put my whole heart into my work and then do my best at home. I've had some well-meaning bully residents who have called me out on the few things I wasn't doing (due to finances) for the climate to the point of me needing to go to therapy. My therapist just said I was a perfectionist and the state of the climate is not within my personal ability to impact. I can't help but feel I've devoted my life to going down with the ship while the rest of the world just sees me as a 1970's stereotypical treehugger and can't even be bothered to fathom life devoid of fossil fuel consumption. I'm a millennial and get especially sad thinking about the generations younger than me and what they're going to have to live with. I feel very sad and alone. In my field, I don't think it's common to talk about our feelings but I really wish there was a support group for this in my region. Reading this helped, thank you.
I rarely find others who share my own personal experience, which is a complex matrix based on 50 years of trying to fight this fight and sound the alarm. (I'm 65 years old.) As I've watched the zeitgeist change over the decades, my optimism has waned. The idealistic, impactful work we did in the 1970s got lost in the me-first mentality of the 80s; then came the jaded and cynical 90s. In the new millennium, as climate change has become increasingly obvious, people's growing fear has turned into straight-up denial. We do all we can to reduce what is now being called our "climate footprint" -- and more critically, we are and have always been willing to follow and enact whatever sacrifices are necessary / legislated to turn things around. But it has never been enough, because the people with the power and the money just won't let go. Over the past ten years or so, when I try to mention to anyone just the changes I can see around our local area -- the more muted colors of green in our evergreen forests; the way the leaves don't turn in the fall (but instead half of them just die and fall off the the tree); the Douglas-fir clad hills around us freckled with red as more and more firs die of drought; the subtle fading of birdsong as species diminish -- people literally turn away, change the subject, don't want to hear it. About 10 years ago, an old high-school friend and fellow environmentalist from the early 70s sat at my kitchen table and we talked over coffee about how things looked to us at that point. "I don't ever tell anyone this," he said, "but you know we're hosed, don't you? There is no way out. Humans aren't capable of changing this." I could only nod my head in agreement. This is what I have spent decades trying to come to terms with. (Sorry to those on this forum who still don't want to hear it.) The only thing I've been able to do to keep myself sane and somehow soothed (but still grounded in reality) is to remind myself that really, in the end, life never about surviving in a certain way for a certain length of time. Any of us could always die at any time, even before climate change got to this dire point. It's about love. Bringing love into the world, cherishing the earth and each other for as long as we are given. "We are stardust, we are golden / And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
I too am 65 and have a very difficult time with dealing with this. You are absolutely right: "Bringing love into the world, cherishing the earth and each other for as long as we are given" is the answer to despair. When we are gone, new life will emerge. It will be hell before that though, and it breaks my heart to even start to imagine.
Your last sentence above is so true, all of it. Thank you for sharing this. It’s so nice to feel a little less alone.
Thank you for all of this, I cried but it’s a relief from the gnawing gut churning anxiety that’s consuming me this week 🙏🏻
I bounce back and forth between significant and severe. Coming out of grad school (biology), I did climate change research for some years and also taught environmental science. I realized that the subject was really frightening for a lot of students, even though I tried to focus on success stories and on what we can do. However, personally I feel like I was trying to put up a good front and as a scientist, I see a lot of reason to fear. The most telling part of the eco-anxiety scale for me was "belief in others' ability to care." When the pandemic started, I thought maybe people would realize that we need to work together against these existential threats, but instead we got more polarized. If we can't even convince people that Covid is real, I don't see a possibility for progress on climate change. I tell my partner all the time that I think we are headed for a massive catastrophic extinction (including our own) but he says I'm catastrophizing. Thank you for your work on helping people build tolerance and resilience.
Yep. I work for a major advocacy group and if I'm being honest, after a few years I detached myself emotionally from what I do as a matter of self-preservation. I couldn't carry the weight of the problem around with me at work AND in my personal life. I still do everything I can in my personal life to lessen my impact, but I also know that individual actions are never going to be enough to save us, and I feel such despair at the problem of polarization which has made any kind of sustained collective action on a large scale virtually impossible, that I don't even want to talk about climate unless I'm at work being paid to do it. (I had the exact same experience of naively thinking, when the pandemic first started, that the shared experience of adversity and the need to work together would be a salve for the polarization problem, and the fact that the polarization hindered our response instead of our response lessening our polarization is deeply depressing.)
You just echoed my thoughts and feelings almost to the letter about others' ability to care. It helps to see I am not alone in thinking this. That said, I just read another article that suggested the future isn't written yet and it talks similarly to this article about processing the emotions, and letting go of and grieving old expectations for the future, before moving on to action. Best wishes.
Yeah, we saw the reactions to Covid by those not getting vaccinated and spreading lies. We will never do what it takes to save each other and the world from climate change. People are too selfish and shortsighted.
I was 'severe' until last year. I think I'm in a lethargic state now due to the aftereffects. I experienced extreme sadness and weight loss because the future is gloomy and society is unlikely to change due to climate change. Reading and studying about climate change science has improved a little, but the hardest thing is the indifferent attitude around me.( I living in Korea. It's a country that doesn't really care about climate change.) I found this site on Twitter and I'm so happy. I'm not optimistic yet, but I think it's important to get your act together amid the threat of climate change.
Wow. I have been somewhere between significant and severe for a long time, suffering in silence, most strongly at 2 am when there is nothing distracting between me and my thoughts, with no real outlet for my angst since talking about eco-destruction is mostly taboo. Strangely liberating to see an article about my grief and terror.
I have felt the dread of ecological disaster since childhood, constantly watching forests disappear to make room for houses. Perhaps an ungenerous attitude, but the globe is ALL our home, so maybe not so selfish either. I am glad to find this site. I appreciate the commentary, and it's good not to feel alone.
Read beyond the spectrum of bullet points. I am glad I did, as I feel differently at different times.
The article normalizes a broad range of emotions, low, high, and in the middle. The distinction is that the lows are lows that I feel and then pull myself out of.
Being able to feel the range of emotions and pull oneself up and out of a low, is Key.
Color me at the "Significant" level...
I think of this a bit differently. For me, action is the antidote to despair, not because it leads to some kind of hope that action will change things but that I feel connected with other people. Seeing other people take action and talking with them about the action we are taking is reassuring, usually. Not always, I think it depends on the depth of connection that I feel. When I feel connected with others while taking action, I feel a sense of peacefulness and ease. I think that piece of connectedness is missing here in the figure above.
Well, you see, there is no "crisis". There is no need for any "eco-anxiety". There is no "anthropogenic global warming". There is no "greenhouse effect". (simply confused with normal thermal inertia)
There is no such thing as a "greenhouse gas". It's the biggest scientific hoax, mistake, scam in history. Here's the truth of the science (mainly my confrontation with Rick)
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/2021/02/science-says-change-the-weather-and-break-the-countrys-heart/
Mack,
Sky Dragon Slayers Chief Public Relations Officer.