Mining and Managing
(Eco) Anxiety
Over the past decades our culture has gone apocalyptic
with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias,
perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety …60
~david wallace-wells
To this point, I have generally encouraged embracing all our emotions, save for in certain cases of mental illness, unhelpful fear, and when we are too overwhelmed. Anxiety is an emotion we want to acknowledge and investigate but not always feed or wholly heed and believe. In this chapter, we will learn what anxiety is as well as how to maximize anxiety’s boons and let go its banes.
Climate anxiety is synonymous with eco-anxiety. In tandem with eco-grief, climate anxiety is arguably the most distressing emotion we encounter in the face of climate breakdown. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) has not yet identified climate anxiety as a specific condition, a 2017 American Psychological Association (APA) report discusses eco-anxiety and defines it as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” 61 While climate disruption elicits all our difficult emotions, anxiety can be the most debilitating. British ecopsychologist Jayne Rust reflects: “I think it is a massive thing to live with the suspicion that (as some of my younger clients have said), ‘We’re completely screwed.’ I suspect it might be part of the reason for binge-drinking epidemics, and other addictions, for example (Resource 2: Moss, “The Extraordinary Science”). There is a general feeling that the future is so uncertain and it’s extremely hard to live with.” 62
Eco-anxiety, if managed, is adaptive in the face of ever greater, looming climate catastrophe. An anxious response to this real threat is not pathological.63 Anxiety, however, is not a black-and-white phenomenon. It can feed on itself unless we notice, intervene, and lessen it. We can respond to helpful anxiety and mitigate unhelpful anxiety so it is no worse than it needs to be. If we don’t, needless suffering results.
A fear of eco-anxiety is one reason some choose to deny how severe climate change is. Disavowing climate crisis allows us to continue business as usual and shields us from distressing emotions, including eco-anxiety. Yet, this strategy is lethal. It’s akin to ignoring cancer; do that for long enough and you die. Our planet, and humanity, is in stage IV climate cancer. We’ve ignored its progression to the edge of extinction. Even if we try to ignore climate crisis, a background anxiety surrounds us, as we know and sense to varying degrees the predicament we are in.64 This is helpful, adaptive anxiety; embracing it helps mobilize us to ward off catastrophe.
Fear or Anxiety?
Anxiety and fear are related but different. Fear in its pure state relates to an immediate, in-the-moment threat, such as jumping away from a snake on the road. Anxiety relates to what has not yet occurred and may only be vaguely identifiable. For the purposes of discussion, in this chapter I sometimes use the terms interchangeably. Professor Shaharam Heshmat, PhD, points out that anxiety is driven by “what if” thinking.65 Much eco-anxiety is preoccupation with future, catastrophic events: What if the glaciers melt and sea levels rise hundreds of feet? What if the Amazon rainforest dies? What if we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels? For these kinds of anxious wonderings, we can heed what astrophysicist-turned-climate scientist, Peter Kalmus, says, “I’ve trained my brain to not torture myself about things that are outside my control.” 66
Anxiety triggers the “alarm system” in our brains and can cause us to perceive situations as more dire than they are. Severe anxiety may cause us to feel something horrible is always around the corner, or that we are going to die. Anxiety is both cognitive (disturbing or stressful thoughts) and somatic (visceral bodily sensations). Some of anxiety’s mental indicators are black-and-white thinking, catastrophic thinking, disoriented thoughts, uncontrollable and intrusive thoughts, and the inability to “think straight.” Physical symptoms include palpitations, irritability, an inability to relax, a burning sensation, nausea, dizziness, or disorientation. Due to anxiety’s mind-body nature, employing both cognitive and somatic techniques is usually most helpful to reduce anxiety’s severity.
Anxiety is distinct from worry, which is less acute than anxiety. I tend to feel worry in my forehead and in the front of my head, while anxiety often surges up the back of my neck or pounds my heart hard and fast. Relative to fear, anxiety is heady, ethereal, thin, and dispersed. Fear feels thicker and deeper, in my gut. That’s why we say “free-floating anxiety” but not “free-floating fear.”
Joseph LeDoux, a pioneering neuroscientist who has performed groundbreaking research on fear, says, “The human being is an anxiety machine … anxiety is the price we pay for that ability to imagine the future.” 67 He adds, “That’s what anxiety is, an imagination of a future that hasn’t happened yet, but that you are concerned with, worried about, dreading, and so on.” 68
Much of Dr. LeDoux’s work revolves around the amygdala, the same area of our brains, mentioned in Chapter 4, that mediates fear as well as anxiety. Stressful events, especially looming uncertainty, danger, and the threat of loss or death, trigger the alarm response of our amygdala. Our amygdalar alarm response was eminently functional during our cave-dwelling past and days on the open savannah, but hasn’t evolved for modern times. It still reacts as if we are going to be maimed at every turn. Anxiety’s overreaction is key to why we must learn to intervene and work skillfully with anxiety to reduce unnecessary stress.
Anxiety incommensurate with a threat is an overreaction of our nervous and endocrine systems that’s similar to the exaggerated immune response of an allergic reaction. Lousy allergy symptoms are due to our body’s overreaction, not the actual harm posed by the allergen itself. The disorientation and tension of anxiety is our nervous system’s overshoot. Each of us experiences this maladaptive evolutionary inheritance to different degrees. After all, this anxiety is part of what makes us human. While there may be lurking danger, and there always is to a degree, an excessively anxious reaction distorts our perception of reality, making it seem worse than it is. In some cases, as with some anxiety disorders such as PTSD, no current external threat exists at all.
Understanding Climate Anxiety
At its root, anxiety triggers our fear of dying. Coming to terms with our eventual death can help us mitigate some degree of climate anxiety. In my own anxiety over the future, I notice I unconsciously conflate some of my climate anxiety with my general fear of dying. This awareness allows me to untangle some of my fear of a premature death and the great suffering it might entail from the fear of death inherent in being human. For this reason, I think it’s important to confront our fear of death to help ease some climate anxiety.
Of course, we are all going to die, and some fear of death is hardwired in all humans. Yet, climate crisis throws an extra dose of fear into the mix. We can differentiate two fears (technically anxiety) of death: the first is of death by ordinary causes, which for the sake of naming, we can call “natural death anxiety.” The second is a fear of a premature and more gnarly demise due to climate crisis, which we can call “climate death anxiety.” Climate death anxiety exponentially amps up our fear of natural death and greatly exacerbates our generalized anxiety surrounding death.
While we may not be able to make a big dent in our fear of death from either cause, it’s important to separate our fear of climate death from our fear of natural death. Lumping these together can potentiate our anxiety around natural death and also lead to perceiving climate breakdown with excessive emotional reasoning, a psychological term meaning to arrive at (usually false) conclusions based on the intensity of emotion, rather than the veracity of facts. Saying to ourselves and one another, “We’re all going to die anyway” reminds us that death is scary even without climate crisis. Working with our fear of natural death to alleviate unnecessary suffering in anticipation of, or during the acute process of dying, can help modulate our fear of climate death.
Death Café (Resource 5: “Death Café”) is a community forum that can help us process fears about and come to terms with death and dying. Death Café is therefore helpful for coping with climate anxiety. I’ve attended several cafés in my town, and facilitated one. I find them personally invaluable and especially relevant for coping with climate fear. Coming to terms with death—or becoming less afraid of it to any degree—helps reduce climate anxiety and our fear of loss and dying from it … or from anything else.
Climate crisis is the perfect arena for anxiety to run rampant, yielding both bane and benefit. Climate anxiety is our reaction to what hasn’t happened, what could happen, and to what degree it might all come down at any point in the future. Climate distress confounds us because it creates reasonable fear and both helpful and unhelpful anxiety. Again, it is part “snake” and part “rope.” We are in danger from it right now, even if we’re not actively fleeing a storm surge or heat wave. When we’re not faced with such an urgent manifestation, the climate crisis still presents a chronic background fear—or more accurately, anxiety—that causes us to pay attention, wake up, and be ready for action. This is why our adrenal glands secrete adrenaline in response to anxiety, and the adrenaline then contributes to our lived experience of this emotion.
Climate anxiety is adaptive because it’s highly probable that increasingly dire manifestations of climate crisis will befall us in the future. It’s healthy to worry enough to heed the very credible reality of future harm. It’s possible, but less likely, that worse (or the worst) may never come to pass. We don’t want our angst to grow to the point we suffer panic attacks, freeze with inaction, or go into wholesale denial as a result of overwhelm. So, working with both climate fear and anxiety is a tricky balance which requires careful cognitive and somatic awareness, as well as skillfulness, self-care, and interpersonal support.
Understanding the dynamics of anxiety, and in particular the unremitting threat that drives climate anxiety, gives us the critical thinking edge to be skillful in our response to anxiety. Remember, we can’t avoid feeling anxiety, but we can prevent it from overwhelming us. Therefore, when anxiety surfaces, don’t try to repress it; employ strategies to regulate it, such as the Twenty-Two Anxiety Tips at the end of this chapter.
Sometimes our reaction to climate change is bona fide fear, as when we are in the midst of immediate danger. When the fire came to Ojai and the lava began barreling down the mountain in Hawaii, I fled in fear. When our lives are in immediate danger, this fear is invaluable. We want to heed our fight-or-flight response, which includes options to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn (also sometimes called “flop”). Because I could not fight the fire or lava, and I didn’t even consider freezing or playing possum, I fled! In contrast, if a mountain lion charges you, the advice is to stand your ground and fight, not flee. Different threats require unique, and sometimes counterintuitive, responses. Knowledge is critical not only for coping with anxiety, but for saving our lives.
When we experience anxiety about a possible future event, and there’s no immediate danger of dying, we don’t have to panic in the moment. Nor do we want to go into denial and never prepare or act. Mitigating and regulating our anxiety reaction so it becomes a measured response as opposed to a knee-jerk reaction is paramount. I therefore recommend this anti-denial prescription for climate anxiety mitigation: Welcome enough anxiety to alert, learn, and mobilize; then follow up with needed, measured, swift action. Notice, this prescription includes both critical thinking and emotional regulation.
When Anxiety Strikes
To harvest good from anxiety’s haranguing assault, we must hold a dynamic tension of opposites. This Yin-Yang dynamic of interfacing with anxiety informs how to best work with it. It comprises a three-pronged strategy, or “Three-Step Anxiety Strategy,” which is adaptable to each unique situation.
Three-Step Anxiety Strategy
1. Selective Listening: Tolerate anxiety’s discomfort and seek to harvest valuable information from its warning. It’s “selective” because we choose to heed what’s true and helpful.
2. Regulation: Practice mitigating anxiety’s physiological responses and let go of unhelpful, obsessive thoughts (via the “Seven Body-Centered, Self-Care Tips for Acute Anxiety” just a few pages ahead, and the Twenty-Two Anxiety Tips at the end of this chapter).
3. Measured Action: Take appropriate action, which includes verifying if the stimulus is a true threat (a “rope” or “snake”).
• Exercise •
Three-Step Anxiety Practice
Describe three issues that cause you anxiety. To whatever degree you are comfortable, feel them in your body as you describe them. Then, for each anxiety, proceed through the Three-Step Anxiety Strategy above to practice learning from and reducing your anxiety reactions.
Reviewing climate science is remarkably valuable for the third step, Measured Action, because it shows us why to concern ourselves, what to address, and how best to proceed. Please be aware that sometimes anxiety can be too intense in the moment to practice step one to glean any valuable information. In this case, we can practice step two, Regulation, and when ready, return to Selective Listening.
Let’s look at how we might apply this strategy to a specific climate example. Say I learn that climate change is predicted to cause the sea-level community where I live to be inundated with water within two to three years. Since there is no immediate threat, I might begin by verifying the information. Then, I might choose to take some long, deep breaths. Next, I might engage in soothing self-talk, take a walk, or share my worry with a good friend. I might say to myself, “Jack, your community is in danger and it’s probably a good idea to plan to relocate. Our climate is out of whack and this likely means there are also other dangers.” Next, I can notice which unhelpful thoughts or images continue to plague me and practice letting them go. This is a technique called “thought diffusion,” to be discussed shortly. Working to let these thoughts go, I might say to myself: “Just breathe, we don’t know when this will happen, if it will happen, and it’s not happening right now. Just chill for now.” Since the prediction is a couple years out, I can then plan any actions, such as researching where to move and/or meeting with a realtor. I might also check the integrity of my home’s foundation and talk to my neighbors.
The Problem with Panic
Unless we check and moderate our alarm response, our anxiety can worsen into panic, an extreme form of anxiety. Panic is helpful when our lives are in immediate, grave danger, if it causes us to respond immediately and decisively. Otherwise, a panicked reaction is not helpful, and can even be harmful in the face of immediate danger. For example, when evacuating a building during an emergency, it’s paramount to exit in organized fashion, and not push or trample others. We must be mindful to pause and evaluate knee-jerk responses and enact counterintuitive responses when necessary to ensure our own and others’ safety.
Since global climate change is vast in scope compared to a building evacuation emergency—but arguably less urgent in this very moment—panic is not needed or helpful. Being aware, regulating our physiology, and acting wisely are. Again, step two, Regulation, can help avert panic, making it easier to glean any valuable information from the anxiety. “Chilling down” like this is appropriate when there is a solution at hand and/or the threat is not impinging upon us at this very moment in a life-or-death way. Channeling helpful anxiety into proactive climate activism makes the best use of eco-anxiety and integrates all three steps of the Three-Step Anxiety Strategy.
If we aren’t able to reduce our anxiety and it elevates to panic, one possible outcome is a panic (anxiety) attack. Panic attacks are scary but pose no immediate health danger. (A caveat: because panic attacks and heart attacks can have similar symptoms, when in doubt, seek immediate medical attention.) Soothing a panic attack—as with unwinding anxiety generally—begins with recognizing we are having a panic attack. Next, soothing self-talk and deeper, slower breathing to calm down, sorting out fact from fiction, calming herbs, supplements, or prescription medication, and the support of others are among the methods available to ease attacks. Tincture of time is also helpful; panic attacks usually last about ten to thirty minutes and almost always less than an hour. Remembering the sensations are temporary can be enormously helpful for getting through an attack without aggravating its symptoms. Consulting a mental health professional is advisable, as is seeking medical care if symptoms do not improve, or if they feel notably different from typical panic attack symptoms.
Catastrophic Thinking
Anxiously believing the worst when there’s no confirming evidence is called catastrophizing. Catastrophizing, or catastrophic thinking, is a form of distorted, anxious thinking. In the New York Times column titled “Time to Panic,” 69 author David Wallace-Wells says catastrophic thinking about climate change is now reasonable and appropriate. In the article, he references a United Nations climate change report and the permission he perceives it gave scientists. He writes, “The thing that was new was the message: It is O.K., finally, to freak out. Even reasonable…This, to me, is progress. Panic might seem counterproductive, but we’re at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable, for several reasons.”
It might be helpful to freak out momentarily, but it’s not helpful to do so enduringly and without modulation. This latter view is echoed by Debbie Chang, a climate change emotional support group leader: “… panic is not a good emotion to act from … If it’s [the climate movement] driven by the panic, we won’t be able to do much.” 70
While Wallace-Wells is right to sound the alarm bell, he might not have considered that catastrophic thinking is, by definition, irrational. It’s a cognitive distortion. According to Dr. John Grohol, catastrophic thinking is “an irrational thought a lot of us have in believing that something is far worse than it actually is.” 71 Even if Wallace-Wells is colloquially advocating panic as a call to action, it’s still a bad idea. It’s far more helpful, once panic or anxiety arises, to engage the Three-Step Anxiety Strategy. It’s a good idea to be realistic and alarmed about, and take to heart the likelihood of, worsening future damage, and also to take action. But thinking catastrophically is not reasonable or a healthy strategy, nor is protracted panic. This leads to psychological paralysis, panic disorders, and nervous breakdowns.
Wallace-Wells is correct to say that panic may “seem counterproductive”; it usually is—unless we are facing an overwhelming threat and the risk of injury or death in this very moment. In his article, Wallace-Wells mentions four justifications for catastrophic thinking (1) climate change is a crisis because it is a looming catastrophe that demands global response, (2) thinking this way makes it easier to clearly see the threat of climate change, (3) complacency remains a bigger problem than fatalism, and (4) fear can mobilize and even change the world (he cites Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring, which led to the DDT ban, as an example). Yet, all four of these alleged rationales can be addressed by skillfully working with anxiety and fear, without panic or catastrophic thinking. Catastrophic thinking does not make “it easier to clearly see the threat of climate change.” 72 It is self-exacerbating, distorted thinking.
Catastrophic thinking compels us to seek data to justify our extreme emotional responses. It’s important, however, to be rational about likelihood and then determine if our alarm response is commensurate with the probability of the occurrence of the anxiety-inducing event. Let’s say I’m freaking out about wildfires this summer. I might justify the severity of my response with the facts that CO2 levels just hit 415 ppm, we are in severe drought, and fires ravaged nearby areas last year. But this data does not make it advisable to freak out. Sometimes we exaggerate or even call speculations “facts” to justify our reactions. For example, during evacuation from the lava flow in Hawaii, a panicked neighbor told me that Highway 11 to town was cracking because the magma was just beneath the surface, pressing up from below, and these cracks meant the whole road was going to “blow.” This wasn’t factually accurate, and it never happened.
To quote from a Grist article where meteorologist Eric Holthaus interviews David Wallace-Wells: “The question is whether fear is the right emotion to play on to get people to sit up, listen, and take action. According to Holthaus, who’s been writing about climate change for more than a decade, it’s not. To him, it’s best to accept the scientific consensus and inspire our fellow humans to roll up their sleeves and ensure we do whatever it takes to decarbonize the global economy rapidly.” 73
While fear is an important player, it doesn’t have to be a primary motivator. Holthaus’s perspective wisely engages the Three-Step Anxiety Strategy and makes the best use of anxiety by transforming it into action. Holthaus also invokes care in his alternative to Wallace-Wells’s fear. Abiding the wisdom that there is a kernel of value in all emotion most of the time, and leaning toward the “both/and” wisdom of Yin-Yang, I encourage us to welcome both fear/anxiety and care, with an emphasis on care. Managing and channeling our unhelpful fear delivers better quality care and results. To care, we have to love, and to love deeply enough, we must have sufficiently healed our hearts and made friends with our difficult emotions. As discussed previously, possessing enough of this deep, automatic care is the key emotional intelligence aptitude needed to empower significant climate mobilization.
Somatic Anxiety Strategies
Our brains have evolved a pessimistic bias, which ensures survival over that conferred by an optimistic disposition or, unfortunately, even a carefree and realistic one. It takes a lot of cognitive work to overcome the distressing consequences of these ancient hardwired tendencies. For this we use the newest addition to our brains—the neocortex—to utilize self-awareness for subsequent behavior modification. We therefore get to practice being rational and realistic, as well as act counterintuitively, to short-circuit our exaggerating, sometimes catastrophizing neurobiology.
Learning how our brains generate bias can help us notice when our alarm system has tripped and moved us into fight-or-flight mode. While we can’t halt the initial rushes of adrenaline, we can practice not exacerbating our distress. Below are some additional pointers for de-escalating anxiety before it gets the best of us. These “Seven Body-Centered, Self-Care Tips for Acute Anxiety” are adapted from psychotherapist Pete Walker’s “Thirteen Steps for Managing Flashbacks,” 74 and can be integrated into step two of the Three-Step Anxiety Practice discussed previously.
Seven Body-Centered, Self-Care Tips for Acute Anxiety
1. If you are feeling fearful or anxious, name the emotion, saying, “I am feeling anxiety (or fear).”
2. Gently ask your body to relax: feel each of your major muscle groups, and your hands, and softly encourage them to relax. Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain.
3. Try easing back into your body. Fear launches us into “heady” worrying, numbing, and spacing out.
4. Breathe deeply, slowly, and steadily to help come back “into” and anchor yourself in your body. Holding our breath signals danger to our brains.
5. Slow down: rushing and time pressure press our mind’s panic button.
6. Bring your attention back to what you are doing to soothe yourself. Wrap yourself in a blanket (special “weighted blankets” are very helpful to some), listen to favorite music, snuggle with a stuffed animal, hold a friend’s hand, or ask them for the support you need.
7. Feel any anxiety in your body but don’t react to it, even though it signals danger. It’s not the anxiety that hurts us as much as reacting erratically or self-destructively to it.
• Exercise •
Body-Centered Anxiety Practice
Refer to the list of anxieties you created in the Three-Step Anxiety Practice, and/or describe three other anxieties you have been struggling with. To whatever degree you are comfortable, feel them in your body as you describe them. Then, for each concern, proceed through the Seven Body-Centered Tips for Acute Anxiety above as a self-care practice to reduce your anxiety.
Exposure and Habituation
As mentioned in Chapter 1 (item 6 in the list of incentives for learning about climate change on page 18), sometimes we want to purposely elicit our anxiety response. Learning about climate crisis and engaging in some mentation of likely or probable future scenarios can help us habituate to possible future reality. One way to do this is to bite off bits at a time. This is a form of exposure therapy, which helps our brains adjust to anxiety by incrementally exposing ourselves to distressing triggers. The aim is to eventually minimize our fear or anxiety response. We can titrate our emotional responses to learning about climate change by taking smaller bites and assimilating the information before we face more of it. This approach doesn’t deaden us to current news and calls to action; it brings us more sustainably in alignment with them—both intellectually and emotionally.
To avoid overwhelm during habituation, it’s important to proceed at your own pace. Exposing yourself to distressing reality will increase your anxiety. This is the objective. You want your anxiety to be at a level that challenges you but from which you can recover without undue difficulty. To help, you can employ the seven checklist tips just mentioned and the Twenty-Two Anxiety Tips at the end of this chapter. It’s also helpful to have support from others, such as empathic, climate-aware friends, to help “hold” and process the information and its impact. You might also consider working with a psychotherapist.
Anxiety Break
We can do a lot to minimize unhelpful anxiety. Using gentle awareness can help us notice:
1. When we go into fear-anxiety states, which may feel like we want to fight, flight, or freeze.
2. Notice thoughts and conclusions that arise from these feeling-states and whether they are true, reasonable, or helpful; choose not to believe extreme or irrational thoughts (with practice, we become more familiar with the “flavor” of these).
3. Choose to engage self-care activities and mind-body practices to decrease stress and increase long-term resilience.
If, on the other hand, a situation presents solid evidence for alarm, we can believe it and follow our fact-vetted fear response to immediate safety. In the absence of evidence, we can rely on our best sense assessment, which includes heeding reasonable intuitive conclusions. This said, we have to be careful about following intuitive reasoning into anxiety state rabbit holes, because anxiety is very compelling—it easily convinces us to believe worst-case scenarios and to ignore real evidence to the contrary.
This chapter concludes with a list of anxiety coping tips, but first I want to present a critical thinking and emotional intelligence strategy for how to interface with the broad spectrum of predictions about our climate future. Many assumptions about this future result from knowing something, but not enough, about climate change. Limited understanding compels us to fill in the gaps with inaccurate and exaggerated ideas and beliefs, often generated by emotional reasoning. Our unconscious assumptions and unchecked reactions to these beliefs and ideas cause many of us undue anxiety. Wisely assessing our climate trajectory puts into practice many of the anxiety dynamics discussed to this point.
Navigating the Doom and Denial of Climate Crisis
When we look to the future, the unknown stares back, unnerving us. Our brains abhor gaps in knowledge as much as we dislike missing stepping stones between one side of a stream and the other. Just because we don’t like gaps, however, doesn’t mean we should arbitrarily fill them in. We should resist making imaginary assumptions with false, albeit comforting, stories and beliefs.75 Doing so may help us allay our anxiety in the moment but ill serves us in the long run.
Nobody knows the precise design of all future climate scenarios. There are too many potential and unidentified x-factors that even over a short period of time—say one year—could shift the balance significantly toward worsening or improving climate conditions. For example, the super-carbon-sequestering bioengineered “Ideal Plants” that world-renowned botanist Dr. Joanne Chory is working on at the Salk Institute could make a big dent in sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide.76 On the other hand, sudden methane releases from a quickly-disappearing Arctic permafrost, or collapse of the Amazon or Siberian rainforest, could spell disaster. Human extinction is not guaranteed, nor is our escaping this mess alive. The weight of evidence, as the climate science discussion in the Appendix I makes clear, tilts heavily in favor of cataclysm. The less we do to drastically alter our current trajectory, the more this likelihood increases. To collectively alter our current course, each of us can contribute our unique and most passionate gifts to the climate conundrum.
Future climate scenarios encompass a spectrum of shades-of-grey possibilities, though one guarantee is the effects of climate change will get worse. “The world is headed for major upheaval, it’s merely a question of the scale,” reports The Guardian in a discussion with top scientists.77 We are due for worse if only because we are locked into a decade of more warming even if we stopped our emissions today.78 We currently have no means to pull out the excess CO2 we emitted ten years ago, and global emissions have been increasing annually right through 2019.79
Even though carbon dioxide levels are projected to decrease by up to 8 percent by the end of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, according to a United Nations report, levels would need to continue to decrease each year thereafter through 2030 by 7.6 percent over the previous year’s level in order to remain below a relatively catastrophic 1.5 degree celcius temperature rise over preindustrial levels.80 This is a mighty task, and an unlikelihood, when the world is collectively gung ho to reopen and get back to business as usual (Resource 2: Weber, “Lockdown, With Benefits”).
The grey shades, therefore, include the as yet unknown precise nature and extent of future malady: how much nonhuman life will be lost, what the climate refugee situation will bring, what kind of social disorder will ensue, which and how much of food crops will grow, and who and how many among us might perish.
As I mentioned in the first chapter, those of us committed to more deeply investigating climate news and climate change science are few and far between. And those of us sufficiently educated in climate science seem to swing between insistent optimism and staunch pessimism about the future. Those less knowledgeable about climate change details, which is most of the population, are more likely to hang in the greys of the spectrum. I hypothesize this is because once we learn what’s really going on, fear kicks in and pushes us to extremism. We see this happening during the COVID-19 pandemic as well. The most honest stance toward the future is likely one of holding the evidence in dynamic tension without swinging to an as yet unevidenced extreme conclusion. Enough is unknown, in fact, that qualifying and quantifying each future scenario would be not merely laborious and unproductive, but likely impossible. We lack all the data required to be precise enough. Indeed, the devil is in the details.
An example might help. I’ll use numbers after the following statements of degree to indicate their intensity: zero indicates the least extreme and least likely amount of climate damage to occur, and ten is the most likely and extreme amount of damage. The scale represents objective and hypothetical consensus assessments, not personal and subjective ones. We know our predicament is bad (8–10), pretty darn bad (8.8–9.5?), but we don’t truly know just how bad (9.5–10?) or not as bad (7–9?) it is. Words cannot qualify these numerical designations precisely; the numbers are more accurate measurements of degree than more vague references of “bad” and “very bad,” for example. A similar vocabulary problem for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) results in its failure to relay climate science accurately to the public.81 So, our very language limits our ability to communicate precisely the likeliest shade of grey. More lack of precision stems from the uncertainty that what we ascribe numbers to will indeed come to pass.82 The ultimate purpose of this numbering exercise is to train the brain to be specific and not to generalize and thereby polarize. Abiding shades of grey, we minimize emotional reasoning and catastrophic thinking, helping us to moderate doom and denial.
After researching the latest climate science over the last several years, I had an epiphany. While learning some intriguing new neuroscience and watching my own behavior and that of many of my peers, a possibility (6–9 certainty?) occurred to me: the hidden driver swaying our assertion of a particular extreme climate future is less a matter of certainty and veracity of that position than it is a discomfort with persisting in the anxious unknown. An unconscious need for control in “knowing” can also contribute to the polarization. Our general incapacity to hold a tension of opposites prevents us from residing in the most accurate reality: a degree of both certainty and unknowing, and tolerating probabilities. A related tension of opposites is the ability to continue to do good in the world while soberly accepting a dismal future forecast. Cleaving to both is to abide cognitive dissonance; practice makes progress, I have found.
Averting truth due to anxiety or fear is consistent with what I described in Chapter 4 as our fear-mark. Those who know enough about climate change (and each person has a unique threshold for “enough”) tend to gravitate toward extreme optimism or extreme pessimism to avoid the anxiety of not knowing. The optimism might sound like: Oh, there’s nothing to worry about. The pessimism could be: Nothing will stop our extinction and nothing we do matters. Notice, each position contains the extreme and irrevocable “nothing.”
The excessively optimistic position is simply naïve. The pessimistic speciously predicts the precise design of the future without allowing that we might enact a cure and can do a lot, in the name of compassion, to make life easier for ourselves, one another, and other species—our triangle of resilience relationships. Many seem unable to hang out in the 8–9.5 intensity range, and I am regularly practicing this myself. If our anxiety is great, and we have scant tolerance for it, we might even deny climate change altogether.
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In a recent article, “A World Without Clouds,” three leading scientists are asked their opinion about our climate future. Their responses vary from “I’m worried … Are you kidding” to “pretty—fairly—optimistic.” 83 This suggests that others’ opinions—even experts’ opinions—don’t matter as much as we’d like to believe even our own do. This must include my own, so please take my perspective for whatever sense it makes. I propose this recipe for accuracy and honesty: assess the preponderance of scientific evidence (appropriately adjusted for critical thinking, e.g., weighing the conservatism of the IPCC and scientists generally, as discussed in the Appendix I), scrupulously check personal emotional biases and cognitive assumptions, and welcome a dose of the unknown. Again, we could make a game-changing discovery to wholly mitigate climate change at any time. Or, tipping points and exponential changes could tilt the scales into runaway chaos. We just don’t know at this point, though the darker scenario has a more likely probability based on trending evidence.
If we can learn to tolerate more anxiety as well as fear, grief, anger, despair, and even remorse, we can openly face climate reality honestly and courageously. This requires more emotional and cognitive integrity, which we can cultivate with practice and support. Most of us have little experience supporting one another by embracing our shared present and future with such honesty. In sum, this is what we need to do now: soberly face the facts (intellectual honesty); embody and welcome, or at least bear our difficult feelings (emotional honesty); and support one another and work together through the pain and best forward strategies.
To avoid placing their certainty in jeopardy, or risking anxiety and a drop in dopamine-driven pleasure, rosy optimists don’t let in facts that contradict their position. Doomsayers (aka “doomers”) dislike positive news (placing a need to be certain or right above their own survival advantage), also because it compromises their certainty and introduces all the uncomfortable emotions that accompany not knowing. Either polarity serves to avoid dwelling restlessly in the anxiety of not knowing.
I got real-life practice hanging out in the unknown during the lava flow in Hawaii. During one stretch, the lava was erupting almost daily from newly formed fissures, bursting suddenly from the ground in molten geysers. This was unnerving, to say the least, as lava has no mind for neighborhoods, homes, and roads. No one knew where it would erupt next. The fissure sites, as well as the direction of the flow, regularly foiled predictions. Months of this helped me learn how to tolerate my own anxiety (and everyone else’s), as well as to surrender a little more to the possibility of destruction and death—which is what anxiety, in its preeminent expression, helps us avert.
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Because climate science indicates a worsening of our situation, doomsayers seem to live closer to reality, despite their general refusal to let in positive news. It’s the rare person who can deeply acknowledge climate reality and not polarize their view. It’s a rarer person who can acknowledge a well-informed 8–9.5 position and not knee-jerk into an unrealistic, fear-driven 9.5–10.
Hope makes optimists feel less anxious and doomsayers more anxious. In response to the doomsayers’s pattern of rejecting hopeful evidence, I coined the term reverse hopium. I define the term hopium as “unrealistic positive hope to make us feel better in the face of bad news; a cognitive opiate to reduce existential angst.” Reverse hopium I define as “unrealistic negative hope that denies realistic hope to make us feel better in the face of distressing good news; a cognitive opiate to reduce existential angst.” This is hopium’s Yin-Yang polarity. Both forms of hopium serve to bolster certainty and allay anxiety from not knowing. Both include aspects of black-and-white thinking and miss the grey zone of what’s more likely to be realistic. Both take Yin or Yang positions instead of an appropriate shade of Yin and Yang commensurate with the evidence. And because new evidence is constantly discovered, we have to stay informed and be flexible to adjust our points of view and beliefs accordingly.
Hopium believes everything is going to be okay; there’s no need for worry. Reverse hopium believes nothing is going to be okay and there’s no hope. Notice the “everything” and “nothing” in the first and second statements, respectively. These extreme positions are fueled by emotional reasoning. Let’s look at a specific, real-life example: The scary news (and it is worse than this, as the climate science section in the Appendix I elucidates) from the IPCC is we have only until 2030 to reduce our carbon footprint by 45 percent before we experience the strong likelihood of significantly more catastrophic climate effects.84 Hopium glosses over the danger and assumes we’ll figure it out somehow. Reverse hopium concludes we’re screwed no matter what and helpful acts don’t matter. Notice, both extremes absolve their adherents of any meaningful action, allowing them to continue business as usual, since there’s no need for concern (optimist), or there’s no hope whatsoever (doomer). Both the optimist and the doomer tend to defend their point of view “to the death.” This “fight” seems to be part of the fight-or-flight response that allays the anxiety invisibly driving the extreme beliefs. Because both polarities are emotionally reasoned, this results in a degree of inaccuracy that is likely defended by an unconscious “fear of death.”
Reverse hopium’s stance can resemble the kind of thinking we experience when, frustrated in an argument, we resort to histrionic pronouncement as a way to unconsciously tie up our jumble of hurt feelings. For example, say you remind me that I forgot to take out the trash and, emotionally triggered, I snap back, “Oh yeah, I’m a total screw-up and can’t do anything right.” This extreme, shut-down reaction distances me from deeply feeling emotion: anxiety, shame, guilt, anger, or grief. Practicing awareness when we are triggered—pausing, deep breathing, and reflecting for accuracy before making such retorts—not only helps our personal relationships but trains our brains to respond more accurately and responsibly to threatening climate crisis news.
In similar emotionally-reasoned and knee-jerk fashion, reverse hopium would react to the distressing timeframe from the IPCC by inaccurately concluding, “Oh yeah, we’re all screwed and there’s no hope for us.” In contrast, emotional resiliency allows us to be with our difficult feelings to allay our distress and decrease the internal pain-pressure driving us to emotionally reason ourselves into unnecessarily perilous conclusions. This is why emotional intelligence is essential for being grounded in reality, in compassion for ourselves and one another, as well as helping us take meaningful action.
Current climate reality offers mostly bad news, some good news, and much that is unknown. With practice, we can modulate and become comfortably uncomfortable with not knowing; learning this skill is an aim of this chapter. It is a courageous spiritual practice to live in accord with what is most likely true. Most of us don’t want to wait for any degree of mastery by growing through what feels bad (psychological rebirth). Nor do we want to make the effort to accord with what’s most likely true, or to put in the work to become emotionally intelligent and resilient. But just as we tolerate the suspense of watching a thrilling movie or sporting event, await the outcome of a medical exam, or try to keep cool during a natural disaster, we can practice these tolerances. And we can do so in preparation for the biggest screen of all: our planet and its tempest climate story. This way, we might avoid depression, panic, denial, and hopium for good or bad news, any of which renders us more unrealistic, unprepared, and unwell.
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Clearly we are in climate trouble (8–9). Big trouble (9.3-ish?). Irreversible, severe, climate change-driven damage has already occurred and will continue, and worsen. There is realistic hope we won’t experience the worst-case climate possibility, but only if this hope is what author and deep ecologist Joanna Macy calls active hope—positivity coupled with commensurate, wise action. Fortunately, the world seems to be waking up and helpful action is rising. What the result will be we don’t get to know.
Whatever the future brings, I propose we practice with our whole hearts to fiercely hold a tension of opposites rather than take polarized stances. Extinction of most life on Earth or our saving most of it may come to pass, but not because of any information we are sure about today. Holding a tension of opposites is what the late Jungian psychoanalyst and elder Marion Woodman said being human is all about. It’s to live with gaps in knowledge and an only partially visible path leading from today to tomorrow.
Throughout our evolution we’ve had to contend with anxiety. Prehistorically, we feared being eaten alive at every turn, and our angst was greater than during current, relatively cushy industrialized times (though the chickens of the Industrial Age are now coming home to roost). The latter have spoiled us for what is more the historical norm. Allow this perspective to help you dig down and better tolerate these harrowing climate times. We have good reason not to panic, and also to be critically concerned about premature demise or extinction.
When my beloved grandmother was ill at ninety-two years old, I remember feeling sure she was about to pass on. Indeed, she seemed to be. Instead, she made several comebacks, felt better for stints, and lived to be just short of 100, against many odds. Scientist and passionate environmentalist David Suzuki similarly discusses the resilience of the natural world in a story about the salmon native to his wilderness—their numbers plummeted one year and he figured them goners. But they returned the next year in record numbers.85 So, if you find yourself dismissing possibilities of renewal in the midst of climate crisis, please reconsider.
For this climate story, we get to actively participate in the outcome of its most epic episode. While we’re inside this unfolding, we can still step outside it for perspective. An overarching view is as important as constant engagement in the details of climate drama. A wider perspective helps us modulate unnecessary anxiety. Because we are left with a good dose of unknowing, and because some degree of unknowing (maybe a 5–7?) seems most honest, learning to manage our anxiety is paramount, for which I hope this chapter helps.
At the end of the day, we are left with the perennial wisdom we glean even in the absence of climate crisis and our unknown fates: carpe diem. This injunction comes with an extra infusion of poignancy in the face of climate breakdown. So, let’s embrace the day and live as effectively and fully as we can for the benefit of everything—with a sober, wary eye to the future and a hearty embrace of the present.
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Doom and Denial Inventory
Write down your doomsday (informed by reverse hopium) or denialist (informed by hopium) views, if you can indeed identify the latter, about our climate future. Using the critical thinking perspectives just shared, how might you modify your views about our climate future? List any previous catastrophic thoughts you now feel differently about and what caused you to shift your mind.
Several years ago, I passed through a period of intense anxiety which lasted for months. My obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an anxiety disorder, had become triggered after decades of dormancy. I was unaware it was occurring because I had never before experienced this particular manifestation of its symptoms, and I didn’t know how to manage it. During this time I often felt like I was dying, which I later learned is how our brains interpret severe anxiety. There were long stretches of time when the only anchor I had was my breath, and while this wasn’t much consolation, I stayed close to it for what seemed like dear life. For days and weeks, I persisted breath-to-breath, fearing every next moment. In hindsight, and in reality, it felt and seemed like all I had was one breath to the next, moment-to-next-moment.
Digging myself out of that hole—in which I was also plagued with major depression—was the most trying experience of my life. During my recovery, I gained some potent insights and tools to work with anxiety and depression. My in-the-trenches practice with anxiety ended up helping me and others when our community was threatened by lava during the volcanic eruption. That event, while devastating and nerve-racking, was a cakewalk compared to my personal collapse. Thankfully, I was able to use wisdom that I gleaned in working with anxiety during the eruption, and to share it with others in a time of urgent need.
The anxiety tips that follow are a synthesis of my personal practice to manage anxiety. They’re an amalgamation of insights from psychologists, what I offer to patients and friends, and some of what I shared with neighbors during the lava eruption. Notice, I say “practice.” Managing anxiety is an ongoing mind-body practice, and framing these tips as exciting challenges for emotional intelligence encourages us to keep at it. I invite you to refer to this list as frequently as needed. Coping through anxiety depends on our awareness to manage it, for which the support of others can be invaluable, especially those who have had successful personal experience. Remember, practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes progress!
I decided to include the least obvious and the most important tools I’ve learned. These are in addition to strategies already mentioned and more popular self-care practices such as exercise, yoga, tai chi, humor, eating well, not sweating the small stuff, getting out to nature, and taking any doctor-prescribed medications. I believe the tips below are helpful for any kind of anxiety and truly aid us to “be here now.” They are unlikely to eradicate all anxiety and some may not work in all situations. All will become more valuable as climate chaos worsens and brings more uncertainty and angst.
Notice what anxiety feels like. Become familiar with its physical sensations and mental dynamics (or gymnastics!), mentioned toward the beginning of this chapter.
When you notice you are feeling anxious, name it and say to yourself, “This is anxiety” or “I am feeling anxiety.” Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA calls this “affect labeling.” His research shows that labeling or naming emotion decreases activity in our brain’s emotional center, including the amygdala. “This dampening of the emotional brain allows its frontal lobe (reasoning and thinking center) to have greater sway over solving the problem”86 and returning to a regulated state.
Recognizing and naming anxiety connects mind and body. Relating objectively to unhelpful, dysregulated anxiety as an experience that is happening to us, and not as an essential part of “who we are,” creates an I-thou relationship with anxiety. Identifying the issue this way allows us to work with it strategically and effectively. A more balanced and rational, witnessing part of us can manage the distress. In the same way, objectifying diseases like cancer, diabetes, or depression can also be helpful (as explained in Chapter 4).
Anxiety Tip 2: Breathe Deeply and Slowly
This tip is at the top the list because if you glean nothing more from this section, conscious breathing alone will save you lots of suffering. Deep, slow, steady, diaphragmatic breathing is the simplest, most accessible, and quickest way to allay anxiety and stress. It creates a foundation for dealing with all forms of anxiety.
If your breath feels stuck and you can’t breathe down into your abdomen, a few strong attempts (but not so forceful as to hurt yourself) with the emphasis on the inhale can often undo the blockage. I also find vigorous exhaling out my mouth, rather than my nose, works as a kind of exhaust pipe to blow out stress.
In addition to breathing deeply and slowly, another strategy is to consciously breathe ALL the air out before the next inhale. Not being able to “catch your breath” often happens because you haven’t exhaled completely. Pause at the bottom of the exhale and gently allow the next inhale to begin spontaneously. It may be helpful to count to four or six and be mindful to make the inhalations and exhalations even and equal in duration.
Naming and feeling what we are grateful for can ease and calm. No matter how bad things are, we can always find something, no matter how small, to be grateful for. Maybe it’s simply being able to breathe, having one person who supports us, or having food for the day.
Taking action in response to helpful anxiety empowers us to mitigate real, impending danger. Boarding up your windows before a hurricane to prevent damage and looting, or clearing brush around your home to reduce fire risk, are good examples. Climate activism and joining a climate movement has helped many cope with eco-anxiety, including some members of our local Extinction Rebellion group.
Anxiety Tip 5: Get with People
The importance of community resilience cannot be overemphasized. Support from other caring humans is a vital defense against climate anxiety. So, find and get with your people!
The care of others helps us regulate and process our feelings and thoughts, both overtly and by holding attuned attention. If you can’t be in-person with others, getting on the phone or chatting on video are good, too. The company of animals and the natural world is also essential, but feel-good human interaction is paramount.
It can be difficult to find others who prize tightly-knit belonging, so community is not always possible. It’s imperative, therefore, that we do all the inner work we can on our own and with the natural world. Note, Climate Change Café (Resource 5: “Climate Change Café”) meets the need for like-minded community for support around climate crisis issues.
It’s also incumbent upon us to do our best to show up for others. Practicing kindness and compassion toward others is especially important in these distressing and anxious times.
When you notice yourself repeating the same worries inside your head, practice tough love with yourself and stop the compulsive pattern by interrupting it. This gives your mind a break from itself. For me, saying, “Stop thinking about that now” allows me to get out of “looping” thoughts, which can rapidly spiral and worsen anxiety. Use deep breathing (Tip 2), distraction (Tip 15), thought diffusion (Tip 9), as well as any other helpful, healthy means you know, and seek support from others to help interrupt onslaughts of anxious thoughts.
Don’t count your good or bad chicken-ideas before they hatch. Sometimes we have to go hour-to-hour, or minute-to-minute, or even breath-to-breath, not knowing the outcome. Watch out for catastrophizing or coming to conclusions prematurely. Breathe, be in the moment, and take concrete steps to address anything solvable.
Anxiety Tip 8: Black-and-white Thinking
Black-and-white thinking is a modern epidemic. It occurs particularly when we are triggered or catastrophizing. Notice it and find the shade of grey that is more grounded in reality. For example, I recently heard a popular climate collapse advocate say (and I paraphrase) that any attempt to offer a bright vision of the future at this point is an exercise in delusion. Note the binary nature of this statement, which fails to take into account either the x-factors that could positively tilt the scales or the good we can do to make things better, even in the midst of calamity.
Anxiety Tip 9: Thought Diffusion
Thought diffusion is de-emphasizing the importance of thoughts and allowing thoughts to come in and out of awareness (a.k.a. proverbial “clouds” floating by) without attaching to them or letting them spin us out. While some thoughts require attention (I left the bath water running!), most aren’t helpful when we’re feeling anxious, triggered, and/or exhausted. We can remind ourselves, “These are just thoughts.” We can reassess and address any remaining issues when we feel more rested, calm, and supported.
Just like depression, anxiety lies. When we can’t control our anxious thoughts, we can mitigate them. When anxiety abates, we’re able to see how unrealistic and silly many of our anxious thoughts are. We can practice discernment, and come to recognize the “flavor” of our unrealistic, exaggerated, anxious thinking more easily over time. Using thought diffusion, we can then disregard them as best we can.
Not all anxious thoughts are lies. Identifying the flavor of untrue (or unreal) versus trustworthy (true) anxiety helps discernment.
Anxiety Tip 11: Anxiety about Having Anxiety
When we grasp that anxiety takes a toll on us—in the form of forgetfulness, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, undue stress, or just plain feeling bad—we might get anxious (secondary anxiety) when we notice we are becoming anxious (primary anxiety). Primary anxiety is already bad enough. Before we practice not reacting to primary anxiety, we can address any secondary anxiety around the existing anxiety. Noticing when we are anxious about being anxious, we can gently talk ourselves out of the added layer of anxiety, and gradually come to rest in the primary anxiety. And we can employ any of the tips on this list to get us there. Support from a therapist is also helpful for reducing anxiety around anxiety.
I find it most helpful and effective to simply notice when I become anxious about being anxious, and gently let this secondary anxiety go. Getting too action-oriented to escape anxiety can get us more enmeshed in what we’re trying to escape, like wrestling with glue that only gets us more stuck in it the longer we futz with it. Returning to deep breathing and exhaling from the mouth (Tip 2) to release tension are helpful companions for noticing and untangling primary and secondary anxiety.
None of this is easy and it’s always a practice—a work in progress. But I can personally attest it’s possible to reduce secondary anxiety to primary anxiety and then reduce primary anxiety to common, helpful anxiety.
Release stressful feelings, frustration, and physical anxiety. Let these emotions out, but don’t dump on others unless they accept your venting. I find great ways to vent are by screaming to the ethers, passionately singing, pounding some pillows, and sighing deeply. Some of these can also be performed in the car—a perfect enclosed, private space!
Vent so that you are releasing your stress, but not to the point that you are creating more of it.
Anxiety Tip 13: Boundaries and Breaks
Anxiety often increases with stress and exhaustion. To moderate anxiety, limit how much you take on. If you can’t moderate your stress load, try to moderate your exposure to situations that trigger anxiety.
Create boundaries (limits where you say no) to thinking about distressing topics or ideas. At night before sleep, when hungry, or when excessively stressed, are not good times to try to resolve conflicts and distress. Choose not to engage in anxiety-raising topics or activities at inopportune times.
Communicating our needs and taking space to recharge create important boundaries that mitigate the stress that increases anxiety. Feel free to take a break from triggering situations and people who increase your anxiety. Do this by communicating kindly and clearly to prevent more conflict and distress.
Limiting how much we take on and postponing stressful interactions and tasks when we are already stressed or exhausted help us regulate anxiety. When we can’t reduce our stress load, we can prevent it from getting worse by: controlling our reactivity, not latching onto distressing thoughts and emotions, getting enough rest to recharge, and engaging in self-care to feel more centered and level-headed.
While venting anxiety can help, so can refraining. Consider not sharing your anxiety with certain friends/loved ones. When we’re going through a tough time, most people close to us know about it. I find it helpful to have some friends I don’t vent or discuss my problems with, so I can get a break and enjoy carefree and even superficial distraction time. Alternately, when needed, create boundaries with friends with whom you do usually share to create the same effect. For example, you might decide to not discuss your worries with anyone for a full afternoon.
Our minds—like the climate—can get caught in self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating, destructive positive feedback loops. “Self” is the key word here. We can control this “self” part by breaking the loop and distracting ourselves from worries and concerns. Distractions include seeing a friend, focusing on a creative project, watching a movie, or doing anything that engrosses your attention away from your worries.
When we don’t check our anxiety and break its cycle, it grows, and this can lead to sleep issues, exhaustion, and eventually to dysregulation and anxiety attacks. Distraction is a form of healthy, temporary denial. This is not repressing your issue, but taking time out to refresh, recharge, and give your mind and body a break. After a break, reassess and readdress any helpful anxiety.
Following a daily routine, whether for work, chores, or other pursuits, is another form of healthy distraction. It helps us maintain a rhythm that counters anxiety’s dysrhythmia. Attending to grounded, in-the-moment, hands-on engagement is meditation in action, especially when we’re mindful to avoid ruminating over anxious thoughts and to let them go, if only temporarily, when they arise.
Anxiety Tip 17: Excitement and Angst
Anxiety is just on the other side of excitement. These are two sides of the same coin. You might have noticed that things we are excited about can also make us anxious. Being unable to sleep in anticipation of seeing a good friend or going on a vacation are excitements that bleed into the positive anxiety of anticipation.
While it’s tough to turn fear into excitement, noticing the “activating” energy common to both excitement and anxiety can help us channel our anxious energy into exciting projects and purposes. Sometimes we can tap the excitement in the fear that change brings, or in the new opportunities for change and growth that otherwise cause us to be afraid.
Anxiety Tip 18: Grief and Anxiety
The possibility of impending loss (anticipated grief) can make us anxious. We can be anxious about grief, just as we can become anxious about being anxious. Learning to make friends with the sadness of grief can be an antidote to anxiety, for grief calms and settles us down. For the same reason, anxiety can interfere with experiencing grief.
When we don’t embrace loss, we can become excessively anxious about experiencing sadness. When we are fighting to hold on to what we love, which is normal and healthy, it can be tough to also let go. Again, we can hold a tension of opposites: holding loss in one hand and the fight to hold on in the other, leaning more into either as appropriate.
Anxiety Tip 19: Nighttime and Anxious Insomnia
Nighttime seems to be a time we are more anxious. Perhaps this is because at night we are tired and less resilient in mind and body. Evolutionarily, it also makes sense because long ago (and to a degree even now), we were most vulnerable in the wee hours of the night and had to protect ourselves against invaders and wild animals intent on eating us. It’s altogether possible we still carry this hardwired disposition after the sun sets. Whatever the reasons, nighttime seems to highlight our worries more than daylight hours, especially after midnight.
Psychologist Michael Breus has this to say about nighttime anxiety: “It’s the first time of the day when no one is asking you any questions or you’re trying to complete a task. It’s when you’re first alone with your thoughts, and the entire day’s worth of thoughts come into your mind, which causes a level of anxiety.” 87
Because night is a Yin time of the daily cycle, it cues us to cycle down after the active, Yang phase of activity. Heeding this natural Yin-Yang cycle, in conjunction with nighttime being a more anxious time generally for many, encourages us to exercise appropriate boundaries and limit nighttime engagements to more enjoyable and relaxing activities.
In the same vein, it’s best not to believe random, scary or distressing thoughts that pop into our heads in the wee hours, especially if we can’t fall asleep. Creating and upholding psychic boundaries by not feeding worrisome thoughts or engaging in disputes, as well as connecting enjoyably with others during compromised times, is a powerful tool that was particularly helpful for me when I experienced insomnia with anxiety.
Anxiety Tip 20: Meditation and Mindfulness
I mention this obvious tip to offer a different perspective. First, mindfulness is not synonymous with meditation. Mindfulness is a consciously aware, focused state of mind that can be applied to most forms of meditation or other activities.
Practicing sitting meditation with eyes closed works for some but not others during acute anxiety. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce anxiety and to help heal the brain, but I have found that positive results depend on individual proclivities and the intensity of the anxiety. For milder anxiety, I find sitting meditation invaluable. I also enjoy The Nourish Practice, a somatic, guided meditation and rejuvenation audio practice I developed (Resource 7: “Nourish Practice Series I”). I offer you a taste of the practice here:
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The Nourish Practice (“Breathed by the Breath”)
Gently lie down and close your eyes. Take three deep, full and relaxing breaths. Then allow your breathing to return to normal. Notice the natural rhythm of your breath and when you automatically inhale. Gently slow this inhalation down, bring it into your belly, and then allow it to “breathe you” by receiving it. Say to yourself out loud or silently: “I allow myself to be breathed by the breath,” and allow this to happen, so that you are not willing your breath but letting it “breathe you.” You want to consciously allow yourself to receive the breath, as a nourishing and comforting gift.
Once you are comfortable with this, you can try a variation: In your mind’s eye, imagine the Earth beneath you. Then feel the ground beneath you and allow your body to sink into the Earth. Say to yourself, “I allow myself to be breathed by the Earth” as you experience yourself being breathed and nourished by the Earth.
In the throes of intense anxiety, sitting meditation usually exacerbates my state of mind. It’s too difficult for me to be that intimate with distressing thoughts and somatic agitation, and at these times I often can’t exercise appropriate psychic boundaries. Healthy distraction (Tip 15) has helped me through intense, acute anxiety until I reached a level where sitting felt helpful.
During stints of more intense anxiety, meditating with others is more helpful and relaxing for me than sitting alone with eyes closed. So is walking meditation (Resource 7: “Walking Meditation”).
We can also be mindfully active. This can include any activity: washing the dishes, painting, talking to a friend, gardening, or writing.
Do what works for you. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to be helpful during milder cases of depression and in its prevention, and this might be true for anxiety as well. 88 Whatever the case, mindfulness and/or meditation can help distract us from exacerbating anxious thoughts and bring dysregulated physiology into balance.
Anxiety Tip 21: Be Good to Yourself
When unhelpful anxiety is getting the better of you, say, “Be good to yourself____(fill in your name)” and try to let go of your worry and worrying thoughts. You can say this to yourself silently or out loud. Speaking out loud to yourself can be more effective because actually hearing the words creates what your brain perceives to be a sense of otherness, thus simulating the support of another person or guide.
Anxiety Tip 22: Holistic Support
I’ve had good success treating anxiety and insomnia with acupuncture and herbal medicine. While it’s best to see a professional to tailor a personal protocol, I have found some herbs and supplements to be broadly helpful. Western herbs, in order of efficacy, include skullcap, valerian, hops, kava, passionflower, motherwort, oatstraw (oatmeal itself is a gentle nervous system tonic), chamomile, lemon balm, and peppermint. Asian herbs include ashwagandha (especially the KSM-66 extraction), ziziphus seed (suan zao ren), rhodiola, ginkgo biloba, oyster shell (mu li), Jatamansi (Ayurvedic), Chinese date (da zao), and poria fungus (fu shen). Supplements include GABA, NAC (N-acetyl cysteine), CBD oil, and calcium/magnesium. Herbal formulas include “Sleep Formula” by Gaia Herbs, and the Chinese medicine formulas: Gan Mai Da Zao Wan, Tian Wan Bu Xin Wan (“Emperor’s Tonic Pills”), An Mian Pian (“Peaceful Sleep”), and Xiao Yao Wan (“Free and Easy Wanderer”).
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As you try out these twenty-two tips, check in with yourself to gauge how you are doing as you learn to down regulate your nervous system and find more equilibrium. A quick and easy way to do this, especially when you notice anxiety taking control of you, is to gauge your anxiety level on a scale of zero to ten, zero being no anxiety and ten being the most. Try an activity to reduce anxiety, even something like thirty seconds of deep, slow breathing. Then, ask yourself again at what number you rate your anxiety. Note if the number has increased or decreased. Recognizing that going from an eight to a seven or lower, for example, is movement in the right direction. This helpful feedback can itself be calming. Consider keeping a written log or notes on your phone for which tips work best for you and in what circumstances. The following, chapter-end exercises will likely be helpful in this regard.
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The next three sections in the book explore in more depth each of the three facets of our triangle of resilience. I have proposed it is the breakdown of these essential, foundational connections that is largely responsible for our current climate predicament. And most importantly, to bolster and heal these relationships will place us more firmly on the path to climate cure both inwardly and outwardly.
Section III explores our first facet of the triangle of resilience relationship: self-healing via grief work and emotional shadow work. Section IV delves into the second facet of the triangle of resilience relationship: our connection with and honoring of the natural world. Section V, comprising the third facet of our triangle, is about building community and the innumerable benefits of restoring meaningful, intimate connections with fellow human beings.
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Chapter 5 Journaling
Please also refer to the additional in-text exercises for this chapter. Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and enjoy creating responses to the following invitations.
1. On a clean sheet of paper write “List #1” at the top-middle and then make two columns below, to the right and left. At the top of the left column write “personal anxieties” and for the other write “climate anxieties.” Beginning with the strongest, write down personal issues that cause you the most anxiety. Then, in the next column write down which climate crisis issues cause you the most anxiety.
On a second sheet of paper, write “List #2” at the top-middle and again make two columns below. At the top of the left column write “anxiety tools for personal anxieties.” Atop the right column write “anxiety tools for climate anxieties.” For each item in List #1 (from both columns), list any of the “Twenty-Two Anxiety Tips” shared at the end of this chapter that you think would best help you cope, or that have served you previously. This creates an inventory of your anxieties and ways to best cope with them. It’s also a handy guide to refer to when in distress.
2. Now that you have your lists complete, you can practice “coping ahead” (actions to help be better prepared for future distress) for any of these anxieties. You can do this for as many items as you want on List #1. For example, say that one of your items is, “I get anxious when I think about societal collapse and not having shelter or food to eat.” To practice coping ahead, look at List #2 to remind yourself of the anxiety tips you listed to address this anxiety. Let’s say the top Anxiety Tips you listed are 1 through 7.
The next step is to sit down, when not feeling unduly stressed, and imagine the scary future per your description of it. If you feel you need any kind of support other than the tips, please enlist it. To the degree you are comfortable, let yourself feel the anxiety that arises (if it feels too much at any point, take a break and/or enlist support). Then practice your top tips to address it. Here’s a practice run-through; the numbers correspond with the “Twenty-two Anxiety Tips.”
* Exercise awareness to notice you are feeling anxiety and say to yourself, “I am feeling anxious.”
* Begin to breathe deeply, slowly, and steadily.
* Reflect on the ways you are grateful for any order, ease, and food you do have now and let yourself feel this gratitude.
* If it would be helpful to take action by stocking up on food items or building a safe shelter, consider doing so.
* Get with people: talk to a friend about your concerns and ask for any helpful feedback. You might even choose to do this exercise with a friend for support.
* Willfully control yourself from repeatedly thinking about the scary scenarios of not having food or shelter.
* Engage the following thought process regarding “bad chickens” (Anxiety Tip 7): Say to yourself, or write down, “I don’t know with certainty what the future will look like. So, I will notice these scary thoughts, appreciate their possibility, but not excessively dwell on them.”
3. For more practice hacking your anxiety, refer to the “Three-Step Anxiety Strategy” and the “Seven Body-Centered, Self-Care Tips for Acute Anxiety” earlier in this chapter and practice going through their motions for any of the personal and climate anxieties you did not list above.
60. Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, Economic Collapse, a Sun that Cooks Us: What Climate Change Could Wreak—Sooner than you Think.”
61. Whitmore-Williams, et al., “Mental Health and our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance,” 68.
62. Fawbert, ‘Eco-Anxiety’: How to Spot It and What to Do about It.”
63. Lawton, “If We Label Eco-Anxiety as an Illness, Climate Denialists Have Won.”
64. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Facebook, March 31, 2019, https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157792158047908&id=9124187907&ref=m_notif.
65. Heshmat, “Anxiety vs. Fear: What is the Difference?”
66. Corn, “It’s the End of the World as They Know It.”
67. “Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux on Anxiety and Fear,” New York State Writers Institute.”
68. Ibid.
69. Wallace-Wells, “Time to Panic: The Planet Is Getting Warmer in Catastrophic Ways. And Fear may Be the Only Thing that Saves Us.”
70. Arciga, “Climate Anxiety Groups Are the New Self-Care.”
71. Grohol, “What is Catastrophizing?”
72. Wallace-Wells, “Time to Panic.”
73. Grist staff, “To Fear or Not to Fear.”
74. Walker, “13 Steps for Managing Flashbacks.”
75. This is a “God of the Gaps” logical fallacy.
76. Popescu, “This Scientist Thinks She Has the Key to Curb Climate Change: Super Plants.”
77. Ibid.
78. Ricke and Caldeira, “Maximum Warming Occurs about One Decade after a Carbon Dioxide Emission.”
79. Kelly Levin, “New Global CO2 Emissions Numbers Are In. They’re Not Good.”; Plumer, “Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hit a Record in 2019, Even as Coal Fades.”
80. United Nations Environment Programme, “Cut Global Emissions By 7.6 Percent Every Year For Next Decade to Meet 1.5˚C Paris Target - UN Report.”
81. Herrando-Pérez et al., “Statistical Language Backs Conservatism in Climate-Change Assessments.”
82. Note, this grey spectrum of dark to light and its corresponding numerical degrees is accounted for by the shades of grey (degrees of black and white) of Yin-Yang circle described previously.
83. Wolchover, “A World without Clouds.”
84. IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments.”
85. Rae, “Why It’s Time to Think About Human Extinction / Dr. David Suzuki.”
86. Abblett, “Tame Reactive Emotions by Naming Them.”
87. Firman, “Why Does Anxiety Seem to Get Even Worse at Night?”
88. MacMillan, “The Simple Habit That Can Help You Fight Depression.”