About a year ago, a friend of mine mentioned to me that she was interested in attending a “climate change bereavement group” in our neighbourhood. I’d never heard of such a thing, but on reflection it really made sense. People are really upset about climate change and don’t know what to do about it. I’m seeing more and more clients show up with these concerns in my office. I’m seeing more and more news and social media stories about it. And I’ve even begun speaking about it in the media myself. The technical term for this upset feeling is “ecoanxiety” and it’s definitely a thing.
How Climate Change is Affecting Mental Health
There’s a diverse set of mental health problems arising as the devastation caused by climate change increases. Superstorms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme climate events have disastrous consequences on people’s lives. Individuals are being killed, injured, or forced to leave their homes, devastating families and communities. Mass migrations are disrupting lives at a larger scale.
Post-Traumatic Stress following extreme climate events is becoming more common, as are spikes in fear, anxiety, depression, and irritability. It is worth noting that climate change events are more likely to affect the lives of the vulnerable, such as the poor, and therefore these populations are more susceptible to the acute impact on mental health.
The Definition of Ecoanxiety
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines ecoanxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” (report). As the definition suggests, ecoanxiety not a response to an acute event, but a state of mind that arises gradually as we watch the slow and frightening consequences of climate change unfold. Ecoanxiety can manifest in intense worry and rumination, generalized anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks, feelings of sadness, loss, guilt, hopelessness, and irritability – in other words, symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The term has not made it into the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (2013), but it will surely be considered in future editions as the magnitude of the problem becomes clear. A 2018 Yale survey estimated that 70% of Americans are “worried” and 29% are “very worried” about climate change, while 51% feel “helpless.” While little data is available, ecoanxiety appears to affect younger generations (e.g. Millennials, Gen Z) more than older (e.g. Gen X, Baby boomers). The mental health community is increasingly engaged with the impacts of climate change: The APA assembled a task force in 2008 and published this 70 page report in 2017 to build awareness and educate professionals.
Fundamentally, ecoanxiety is a form of anxiety like any other. It is a psychophysiological response to a threat to our safety or well-being.
The emergence of the term ecoanxiety has been met with some resistance. Some skeptics roll their eyes at yet another buzzword for navel-gazing complainers. Others object to medicalizing a very real and appropriate feeling. As someone who counsels clients with ecoanxiety, let me tell you that it is real and causing a lot of suffering. I also believe that—whether there is a diagnostic term for it or not—anxiety is a perfectly rational response to a real threat to our way of life on this planet. And labeling the response with a diagnostic term should not invalidate or diminish the scope of the problem nor the person suffering. All of that said, we need to learn how to cope with it and get on with the job of finding solutions.
Fundamentally, ecoanxiety is a form of anxiety like any other. It is a psychophysiological response to a threat to our safety or well-being. While fear involves a specific reaction to an imminent threat, anxiety is a diffuse response to a non-specific or uncertain threat. So if you’re an antelope in Africa and a lion jumps out at you from the bush, you feel fear. If you have health anxiety (aka hypochondriasis), you worry about aches and pains being signs of serious or fatal health problems. In ecoanxiety, the threat is broad and abstract and therefore hard to contain and resolve. It is somewhat similar to the anxiety many people felt in the 60s when they believed the world was on the brink of nuclear war. The content of anxious thoughts may vary, but the underlying mechanisms and emotions are the same. And that’s good news because many of the same coping strategies are helpful.
Three Ways Mindfulness Can Help You Cope with EcoAnxiety
The key to coping with ecoanxiety is to build psychological resilience. That is to say climate change is happening right now and it is affecting people all over the world. We all need to find a way to be with the difficult emotions that arise in consequence and continue to be engaged with the process of finding a solution. Here’s a suggestion for how to get there:
1. Learn how to unhook from a “worry loop”
Because climate change is an abstract threat, whether you experience ecoanxiety or not will depend on how you think about it. Unfortunately, it is also complex, multi-faceted, and highly technical, which means it’s difficult to get your thoughts straight about it. Our brains prefer information that is packaged in simple, concrete narratives and therefore rely on heuristics and shortcuts to cope with complexity. This pragmatic bias can be helpful – necessary even – for surviving and getting things done. But it can also create biases and distortions in our thinking, especially in the face of threat. People fall victim to a number of classic Cognitive Distortions when stuck in an ecoanxiety worry loop, such as catastrophizing, black and white thinking, and emotional reasoning. For example, I worked with a client who became very preoccupied with death following the release of a major climate change report last year. We were able to get him unstuck by unpacking all of the automatic appraisals he made of the danger. It’s not that there isn’t any danger, it just that the danger needs to be appropriately contextualized.
Unfortunately, the news and social media are not necessarily helping in this respect. Our screens are perpetually showing us provocative content about climate change. Sometimes the information is accurate, but often it is distorted – one way or another – by some hidden agenda and designed to hijack our attention. So it’s important to manage your “information diet,” by assuring an intake of high-quality, nourishing content.
Climate change is stressful enough; you don’t need your brain piling on exaggerated or false beliefs about what’s actually going on in the world. So, you need to become an expert at catching and correcting these cognitive errors. If books such as “Mind Over Mood” and “Cognitive Behavior Therapy” aren’t sufficient, a direct plan of action with a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist can help. Once these patterns of negative thoughts become familiar to you, mindfulness can be a useful tool for letting go of the unhelpful ruminations churning in the background of awareness. Mindfulness can also help with cultivating the clarity and focus required to make sense of all the news, social media, and chatter on the topic and then engage actively with what matters most to you. Check out The Mindful Way Through Anxiety or attend a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy workshop near you.