Eco-anxiety: Big Fears and Small Steps
For a long time, climate change was something lingering on the horizon. It was framed as a faraway, intangible phenomenon that may affect our lives. For today’s young people, it has become a shadow cast over their futures – a very real set of consequences that are affecting their life decisions and day-to-day wellbeing.
In a poll of American teenagers released in 2019, 57% said that climate change made them feel scared and 52 per cent said it made them feel angry. In a more recent survey of young people aged 16 to 25 years old in 10 countries, 45% said that worry about climate change is affecting their daily lives and functioning.
This negative impact on daily functioning is a key sign of eco-anxiety. This term refers to feeling worried, fearful, and helpless about climate change on a regular basis. The American Psychiatric Association describes it as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” For many eco-anxious people, fears about climate change are often on their minds and can affect their daily lives.
Think you may be eco-anxious? Here are some things to note:
You’re not overreacting
Many sources of anxiety involve some level of over-exaggeration or irrationality. For example, many people with social anxiety find themselves hyper-aware about others’ perspectives of them, even when there is no indication that they need to read into every little signal. When it comes to eco-anxiety, however, the source of fear is entirely rational. Climate change is real, and the threat it directly poses to our lives is real. The anxiety that you feel about it is not disproportionate to the problem itself.
Rather than wondering whether your anxiety is justified, the more important question to ask yourself is whether it’s disrupting your day-to-day life. If you feel that you’re having trouble coping, please seek help. A climate-informed therapist would be able to provide a non-judgmental space where you can freely process your emotions about the climate crisis, as well as work with you to restructure the thought patterns that may be holding you back. Together, you can put coping strategies in place and cultivate new habits to improve your relationship with the environment while lessening the impact of anxiety and stress on your daily life.
Examine your reactions to news
We get so much information about these issues from so many sources–interviews with experts on the news, news articles, angry tweets, academic papers, conversations with the activist friends or climate change deniers in our lives… and we all react to different kinds of information differently. Watching a documentary about the predicted trajectory of climate change might make one person feel empowered to act, but might make someone else feel completely helpless. For me, learning about a shocking piece of news while leisurely checking a social media platform could send me into a web of accounts and comment sections, keeping me online for longer than intended and leaving me feeling drained.
Pay attention to how you feel the next time you come across information about climate change. Some types of media may affect you more than others. Additionally, already being in a low mood may exacerbate the effects of eco-anxiety. While it’s important to stay updated about these issues, it’s also okay to control how and when you receive it so that you can remain an active participant without compromising on your mental wellbeing.
Your community matters
One thing that makes eco-anxiety unique is the generational gap that it can often highlight in our conversations with our parents, relatives, or older colleagues. In the poll I mentioned earlier, the number of teens in the US feeling scared and angry about climate change was more than the number of adults who felt the same way. Because many teens and young adults today grew up listening to news about environmental issues and learning about global warming, the fear associated with it is very real to many of them, while those from just one generation before us may not understand why they feel that way. This can lead to a sense of isolation or even invalidation of your experience.
This is why finding a community is especially important in coping with these fears. It feels good to be around people who care about the same things as you do, not just because you find the conversations more interesting, but also because their fears validate yours.
Small steps count
There’s a part of this anxiety that is strongly associated with morality and what it means to be a good person. We believe that we can’t possibly be good people if we’re not completely stressed out by climate change. In our minds, good people are devoted to what needs to be done. At the same time, overextending yourself in the long-term or forcing huge changes in habits all at once are behaviours that are unlikely to leave you with an eco-friendly way of life that is sustainable.
Consider that on a spectrum of being eco-anxious to completely ignorant, there is a lot of room in between. In the face of a problem this big, feeling stuck is the greatest risk. While making changes to have a better impact on the environment can feel useless in the grand scheme of things, staying paralyzed only worsens feelings of guilt, fear, and helplessness. Taking steps to improve your relationship with the environment is still worth something, even if these steps can’t reverse climate change on their own. This also means allowing yourself to celebrate the small steps that we take collectively – from new innovations or policy changes, little pieces of good news can be found everywhere when we’re not overwhelmed by anxiety.
References:
https://www.kff.org/other/report/the-kaiser-family-foundation-washington-post-climate-change-survey/