How to cope with climate change anxiety
Core emotions like grief and anger can help transform helplessness into acceptance and action
3.5 min read
Doom-and-gloom news stories, unprecedented temperatures, and natural disasters have penetrated our psyches. Climate blogs and online articles have profiled millennials who are opting not to have children due to the ethical dilemmas around raising kids in an uncertain climate. In 2008, Australia even reported the world’s first climate change delusion: a 17-year-old with delusional guilt about drinking water stopped drinking altogether. Yet for those of us trying to heal in the era of climate change--a defining crisis of our time--how do we handle its emotional impacts?
So much climate-related despair is in the air, and it can sometimes feel too overwhelming to deal with. Yet DST therapist Melanie Berkowitz says that much of climate anxiety is actually healthy.
Melanie says, “Our feelings about climate change activate our sympathetic nervous system and let us know that something is not okay so that we can act upon it.” Climate change is not something that’s ‘too big’ to talk about in therapy or simply latent content for more personal issues. The planet is unwell and we must emotionally tend to this reality.
At the same time, many of us find ourselves without adequate emotional support to tolerate the anxiety and despair that climate change brings up. The topic is heavy and scary and can be hard to actually sit with. Many of us block out this grief for fear that getting in touch with the pain of the loss will be too much to handle.
Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe suggests that some of us turn apathetic or nihilistic and convince ourselves that loss itself is meaningless--while others cling to quick technology fixes and workaholic climate activism. Other psychotherapists like Susan Bodnar even believe that unconscious associations between climate change and death make us more susceptible to self-destructive behaviors.
“Many of us find ourselves without adequate emotional support to tolerate the anxiety and despair that climate change brings up.”
Climate Change as the “Work of Mourning.” Ashlee Cunsolo Willox eloquently writes that we must “re[cast] climate change as the work of mourning.” The paradox is that only once we feel the bigness of losing the world as we’ve known it can we then open up to emotional space for hope, reparation and action.
Collective grieving over the climate is vital for our mental health. Grieving can include expressing core feelings like sadness over the loss of landscapes and species--or expressing anger towards those who’ve kept society in denial about climate change for so long.
Engaging in climate grief should be done with others—either one-on-one or in a support group—to provide a container for those overwhelming feelings. Support groups like Carbon Conversations, the Good Grief Network, The Work That Reconnects, and the Climate Psychology Alliance North America are leaders in climate grief work.
A therapeutic conversation about climate change may help one person become aware of how their eco-anxiety connects to anxiety stemming from losses in childhood, while it might support another person to recognize that their general feelings of helplessness prompt self-destructive habits that can be transformed into more adaptive behaviors like activism.
“The paradox is that only once we feel the bigness of losing the world as we’ve known it can we then open up to the emotional space for hope, reparation, and action.”
Addressing our repressed climate grief together means being less alone with these core emotions like grief, rage, and fear. It helps us connect with both the losses and new possibilities of a changing climate. In expressing these feelings safely and together, we can transform our climate numbness, alienation and helplessness and move toward connection, acceptance, and collective action.