Climate anxiety: learning to inhabit it

You may call it climate anxiety, distress, overwhelm, or whatever. It keeps getting worse, and faster than expected: it gets me alarmed and unsettled, maybe you too. I’m writing this blog for myself as much as anyone, as part of my long-running search for ways to live with this. There are plenty of good processes out there, and some of us have been using them for a while. However, I keep feeling that it’s like bailing out a sinking boat with a teaspoon: my raw emotions are flooding in much faster than I can cope with them.

Why is this? We’re now in a climate crisis which really is threatening our survival, the stability of our societies and our individual wellbeing. So floods of raw emotion could well be seen as a healthy, functional response to the current facts.

One of the ways I try to meet a challenge is to look for the gift in the problem. Where are the upsides in the current climate crisis? One is that it’s getting very hard to deny that we’re in a climate emergency caused by human activity. So we’re (mostly) all in this together. Another is that it’s affecting lives across the world, and clearly the crisis is here, now, not elsewhere or in the future: this can help us face it fully, and engage those around us too.

Beyond these basics, the picture gets muddier. We can see that many people can’t live with the alarming realities of the climate crisis: even if they don’t take refuge in denial, many will go to despair or apathy, feeling there’s no way out. All too understandable.

So where to turn? I believe the best first step is to face, learn to inhabit, and try to grow through, all the big emotions this crisis stirs up: fear, overwhelm, despair and more. One of the best processes to do this is the Work that Reconnects, created by Joanna Macy: see my overview writeup here. But there’s a catch: the key to this process is having your feelings witnessed and validated by others. Not easy to arrange these days!

So, back to the gift in the problem. The best I’ve come up with so far is these steps:

Self-care: Accept how alarming this situation is, and love the parts of you that feel panicky, that want to hide in a cave or find someone to make it right for them. Give time to support yourself in whatever ways work for you, e.g. time in Nature, prayer, rest, singing, creativity.
Mutual care: Find chances for mutual support wherever you can. Take a risk, look for this in social settings, or with people you don’t know well, as well as close contacts. Recently I was chatting with an acquaintance, who suddenly said, “My wife and I just admitted to each other we’re terrified about the climate crisis.” That helped me hugely.
Soul Resilience: I believe that each of us has a soul or higher self, which chooses the life we are in. So rather than feel unlucky to be born in these times, my belief is that I am here for a positive reason, I just need to figure it out. My website can help you explore why.
Practical steps: Research shows that it helps us when we take action, and support others. You’ll find resources on my Seeding our Future website to help you explore personal resilience and community resilience.
Communing with Nature: Clearly the natural world is in crisis as much as the human one, and seeing them as a unity will help. For deep insights on this, see Thomas Berry. I’m finding a sense of mutual support by meditating outdoors. Just as trees handle storms and drought by deepening their roots, we can do the same: see more on my website: naturalhappiness.net. And if you believe, as I do, that there is some divine power as well as material reality, pray that we’re all guided through this, and that suffering is relieved for all forms of life.
Love amid disruption: Turbulence in daily life is already rising, and the risk of bigger disruptions is rising too. We can’t stop these, so we need to find a better response. I recommend a blog by Jem Bendell, called The Love in Deep Adaptation. It’s a heartfelt call for us to move beyond alarm and self-centredness, to meet others (and ourselves) with love and compassion.

It’s evident that the climate emergency will be getting worse for years to come: we somehow have to learn to inhabit it, and that calls for a quantum step up in our level of inner strength. That is what soul resilience can offer you.