Image by Bkrmadtya Karki
In this Article:
- What are the symptoms of climate anxiety?
- How psychology and activism can collaborate to alleviate climate anxiety.
- Effective therapies and practices for managing climate-related stress.
- How psychological and spiritual practices help calm climate anxiety.
Understanding Climate Anxiety and Reclaiming Peace
by Lynne Sedgmore.
Climate anxiety is a mixture of psychological, physiological, emotional and physical effects generated by the direct or perceived impact of climate peril. It is becoming a recognised diagnosis, as it is so prevalent.
If we care about our planet and keep up to date on climate and ecological issues, then some level of anxiety is inevitable. It is a rational, sensible and appropriate response to what we are all facing.
Climate anxiety includes a wide range of feelings and symptoms, including grief, tension, overwhelm, burnout, fear, suspicion, defeat and stuckness generated by having to face the potential disastrous consequences facing us, and the planet.
Anxiety, of any kind, is a state of negative expectation and a response to danger, whether real or imagined. It is characterised by increased arousal and apprehension which turns into distressing states and symptoms.
Dahr Jamail describes poignantly his suffering and climate anxiety in Grieving My Way into Loving the Planet (2020) when he writes:
“My heart was broken open by both the magnificent beauty and power in each place... as well as how quickly it was all being lost. Standing on bare ground in Alaska once covered by two hundred feet of ice from the Byron Glacier where I used to go climbing felt like a gut punch. Snorkeling atop the Great Barrier Reef bleached white and dying from overheated ocean waters, I found my mask filling up with my tears. Each field trip broke my heart open with awe and sadness, time and time again... I was reminded... that a broken heart can hold the entire universe.”
As a survival response to the inevitable dangers of the climate crisis, climate anxiety can arise suddenly and unexpectedly and affect you for short or long periods. An important aspect of anxiety is the anticipation involved, as it is future-focused. We can feel anxiety for things that have not yet happened, and that we anticipate or catastrophise may happen.
Symptoms of Anxiety
When anxious, we wait for the next disaster to happen and may become immobilised and stuck, unable to make decisions in case our choice turns out to be the wrong one. We may also overthink everything, fill our head with worst case scenarios and feel huge immobilising fear.
Other terms are being used to explore the various impacts of climate peril. These include climate environmental trauma, climate distress, eco-distress, anticipatory grief, global dread, ecological anxiety, disaster mental health, apocalypse fatigue, solastalgia and eco-grief.
When we are anxious, our nervous systems are constantly jangled. We may feel mentally and physically unwell, and our energy feels low and unavailable. When our body is constantly on high alert and remains flooded with stress chemicals, we develop problems such as foggy thinking, mood fluctuations, exhaustion, meltdowns, over-reacting, high blood pressure, heart issues, immune illnesses, digestive sensitivity, overeating, headaches, nausea and difficulty sleeping, as well as anxiety.
Stress Overdose
Our bodies are not designed to live in a constant state of anxiety. A high level of stress or anxiety keeps our heart rates elevated, dilates pupils, raises blood pressure and keeps everything in our body on high alert.
Some peoples’ nervous systems are more robust than others. You may have a highly sensitive nervous system that is stimulated and very easily triggered. It is important to identify your triggers so you can avoid or reduce them to lessen the severity of your symptoms.
We all cope differently and while focussing on climate peril may cause overwhelming anxiety for some, others may be able to face it head on. If we only associate climate peril with uncontrollable disaster it will affect our brains and our nervous systems negatively. Too much overwhelm reduces our motivation to act.
If your energy feels drained, your nervous system over stimulated, your emotions pulled in competing directions, then it is important to find a way of anchoring, grounding yourself, amidst all these exhausting demands.
Anxiety as a Positive Thing
Anouchka Grose in her book A Guide to Eco-Anxiety: How to Protect the Planet and Your Mental Health (2020) explores a second meaning of the word anxious, which is “eagerness to do something.”
This definition is more energetic and contains the possibility of being able to act. This definition involves anticipation of wanting to take action and to contribute something useful. Each of us can determine what is right for us to do, both individually and collectively. Doing nothing is also a choice.
You and Climate Anxiety
For many years I was in denial about my own levels of anxiety, especially climate anxiety, keeping it suppressed with overeating and staying busy. I am interested in what climate anxiety means for you, and I offer a few questions for reflection.
What arises for you when you ponder and reflect upon the two words “climate anxiety”? Is it something of which you have direct experience? How much does it overwhelm you, or not? Have you gone deep into the causes? What are you doing to alleviate your climate anxiety? How might you be suppressing your anxiety? What different forms of coping with climate anxiety have you tried? Do your friends and family have climate anxiety? When any anxiety arises in you, how do you dispel or manage it? What experience do you have of presence helping you with your climate anxiety?
Sarah Ray offers useful resources in her book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (2020). She draws on her work as a teacher in the US to offer support to the climate generation through her “effective arc of environmental studies curricula.” She focuses on emotional reactions to climate peril, as she believes it is just as important for her students to learn how to address their feelings as it is for them to learn about environmental disruption and injustice. I totally agree. I recommend her book to complement mine, as she dives deeper into emotional intelligence, something I have already written and taught about in my own book (2021).
The Scale of the Issue
Climate anxiety, experienced by millions of people, is a growing concern among people of all ages. It is a global and systemic issue, as well as an individual experience.
Chronic fear of environmental catastrophe is affecting many young people’s daily lives, with six in ten feeling very worried about the climate crisis, as reported in the Guardian newspaper article by Andrew Gregory, “‘Eco-anxiety’: fear of environmental doom weighs on young people” (2021). He describes the results of a 2021 international survey of climate anxiety in young people aged sixteen to twenty-five, which showed that the psychological burdens of climate crisis were “profoundly affecting huge numbers of these young people around the world.”
The research also offers insights into how young people’s emotions were linked to their feelings of betrayal and abandonment caused by governments and adults. Governments were seen as failing to respond adequately, leaving young people with “no future” and leaving “humanity doomed.”
Another piece of research that evidences how climate anxiety is rapidly growing includes the University of Bath results of its 2023 Climate Action Survey of nearly 5,000 respondents. Their research illustrated that 19% of students and 25% of staff said they were “extremely worried” about climate change, while 36% and 33% stated they were “very worried.” Climate worry was higher in 2023 than in 2022.
In 2021, a global survey in ten countries, “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey,” explored how children and young people felt about climate change. They found high levels of anxiety as the 10,000 participants reported feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness and guilt.
I am particularly concerned about young people. In my conversations with them, they express a general sense of hopelessness from living with climate anxiety, with a constant tension of feeling that everything is ultimately hopeless. They want to be hopeful because giving up and feeling overwhelmed makes their anxiety worse.
Many young people are so immobilised by their anxiety that they are unable to act. Others have become full time climate activists and alleviate their anxiety through action, protests and trying to make a difference. Being well-informed about climate peril and its potential impacts can help some people to reduce their anxiety by providing a sense of empowerment and choice.
Part of climate anxiety can be feeling misunderstood or unacknowledged by society or the people around you—when nobody else seems to notice this urgent issue in the same way as you. Joining a support group or finding people who see things as you do can be of huge benefit.
I also think that inter-generational communication about climate peril is really important. I have learnt to work through, cope with and articulate my climate anxiety so that I can help my grandchildren and hopefully others, especially young people, to cope with their anxiety.
Antidotes to Climate Anxiety
I have undertaken three complementary ways of understanding and reducing my anxiety. The first consists of understanding and deconstructing my personality through therapy and significant shadow work.
Secondly, I have constantly inquired into and reflected on my behaviours, emotional intelligence, motivations and impact on others. I have found the Enneagram the most useful self-awareness tool.
Thirdly, a wide range of spiritual rituals and practices have been crucial in helping me understand my anxiety. I am intrigued by the work of Andrew Newberg and his findings in How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist (2010).
With Mark Walkman, he discovered that if you take out the religious and spiritual aspects of ritual and spiritual practices, including any notion or belief in God, they still have the same effect on our brains. This is because presencing activities and practices strengthen neural functioning in parts of the brain that lower anxiety and buffer us from stress.
A fascinating finding from their work is that “deep yawning” will physiologically relax you in less than a minute and will allow you to move rapidly into a presence state.
Alliances Between Psychology and Activism
New alliances are growing between psychology and activism to help alleviate climate anxiety, as described in a powerful book Holding the Hope: Reviving Psychological and Spiritual Agency in the Face of Climate Change (Linda Ashley et al., 2023). This collection of essays explores how to grapple with anxiety and hope in these challenging times.
It is edited by members of the Climate Psychology Alliance and the Climate and Environmental Emergency Coaching Alliance, two groups who accept and are responding to the psychological and spiritual needs of people deeply suffering due to the climate emergency. It blends psychotherapeutic, spiritual approaches and indigenous wisdom, and discusses radical hope, active, hope, rewilding hope, and different ways of holding hope.
They recommend going deep into “the solid ground, common ground, the ground of connection and cooperation, from which we can find relief and joy.” Their perspective is similar to mine: that finding the ground, presence, enables people to cope with whatever they are facing, especially anxiety.
I encourage you to explore complementary approaches to assist you in calming and reducing your anxiety until you can be sufficiently in presence to dissolve it completely. There are numerous psychotherapeutic approaches including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
Finding a support group might be invaluable. Simple things like getting enough sleep and looking after yourself through exercise, deep breathing, massage, a healthy diet, relaxation, journaling and spending time in nature can help considerably.
When we are consumed with negative projections or pessimism, we are not living in the moment, so remaining in a state of presence, in the now, keeps us calm enough to prevent or dissolve any anxiety symptoms.
Copyright ©2024. All Rights Reserved.
Article Source:
BOOK: Presence Activism
Presence Activism: A Profound Antidote to Climate Anxiety
by Lynne Sedgmore.
In this book, author Lynne Sedgmore integrates presence, climate activism, and the alleviation of climate anxiety in an innovative and unique synthesis and new term - Presence Activism. By offering a profound solution with new perspectives, Presence Activism: A Profound Antidote to Climate Anxiety is steeped in a presence that moves activism beyond metaphors of war, enemies, and destruction, as well as the illusion of separation, into the visceral knowing of presence and interconnection, thereby making presence an important part of the way forward for current and future activism.
This book is a compendium of different perspectives and experiences of presence, as well as a powerful conceptual and thoughtful analysis of the fields of presence, climate anxiety, and climate peril.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Dr. Lynne Sedgmore CBE is an activist, executive coach, non-executive board member, priestess, interfaith minister, published author, poet and former chief executive. She Chairs the Glastonbury Town Deal investment of £25 million. She has been involved in environmental and feminist campaigns and numerous protests since the 1970s. She bridges mainstream organisations and spiritual communities. She coaches individuals and senior teams in charities and organisations that inspire her. She lives in Glastonbury, UK.Article Recap:
Climate anxiety encompasses a range of psychological and emotional symptoms caused by environmental crises. This article outlines how alliances between psychology and activism can offer relief. It delves into various therapeutic approaches and self-care practices that can help mitigate anxiety, emphasizing the importance of presence and community support in coping with climate stress.
