For many of us, anxiety and depression stemming from the climate crisis have become nearly ubiquitous with the plight of modern life.
We deliver quippy one-liners about the world being on fire, share memes about how “cooked” we are amid these perilous “end times,” and perhaps most disturbingly, feel completely incapable of doing anything about it.
But while this prevailing theme is unsettling, it also echoes a silver lining: We aren’t alone in these feelings.
“For us, mental health isn’t just about individuals,” Jhonatan Yuditya Pratama, an Indigenous ambassador from Borneo said last year at a conference for Connecting Climate Minds, a global research project that seeks to understand the links between climate change and mental health.
“It’s about the collective well-being of our communities and the land itself,” Pratama added. “When nature suffers, so do we.”
Science backs up these long-held beliefs.
The threat of climate change isn’t the only thing that impacts mental health; climate change itself does, too.
Extreme heat is associated with violence, an increase in self-harm, and general negativity. Wildfires and other extreme weather events can lead to PTSD. Chronic stress looms large for farmers and anyone whose livelihoods are tied to the environment. Water scarcity and air pollution can keep people from school and work, leading to isolation and hopelessness.
So, what’s a mere individual to do?
In the words of Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Anything.
Johnson is a self-proclaimed “climate shrink,” marine biologist, and author of “What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.”
Her book posits that the binary thinking behind the goal of solving or stopping climate change is part of what hinders people from believing that anything can be done. In other words, seeing climate change as simply “fixable” or “unfixable,” keeps people stuck. Hopeless.
“Part of the problem is that we’ve been told that we have to stop or solve climate change,” Johnson said in an interview with Outside Magazine. “And those verbs are clearly delusional because we can’t solve it and we can’t stop it. But we can make things much better than they otherwise would have been if we didn’t try.”
“What If We Get It Right?” also explores the vast array of solutions we already have at our disposal to keep things from getting even more dire — if only we choose to use them.
“I don’t really know what to say about the anxiety that most people are feeling except to say this: You will feel a hell of a lot better if you’re doing something about it,” Johnson said.
Experts often offer sweeping advice to the general public, encouraging people to take in both the good and the bad news about climate (congrats, you're doing that right now!), connecting with real-life communities, talking about your feelings, and taking action to help alleviate the stress of climate anxiety.
Here are some real-life examples of how people all over heed this advice — to inspire you to find your thing, too.
Learn. Then Feel.
According to research from The Lancet, 84% of 16- to 25-year-olds globally currently experience climate anxiety. College campuses are a place where anxiety is alchemizing into action in real-time.
At the University of California, a new course — Climate Resilience: Transforming Climate Distress to Action — teaches students to shift their mindsets with science-backed support.
Pupils hear lectures from climate leaders and work through a series of exercises to better manage their stress and anxiety. It’s been so successful that it will be offered at 10 U.C. campuses in the coming months.
“There's an arc or a process for leading people out of these kind of dark inner worlds, where they feel alone and separate, toward a more illuminated view of reality,” Elissa Epel, a stress researcher at UC San Francisco and co-director of the course, told NPR.
“I have had to find my own path through climate despair and have — rather than reading the headlines, which are only one side of reality, I have found such strength and inspiration from global climate leaders who are showing us changes that are not in the news.”
The class strategically includes finding inspiration in things that are already making a difference, training practices in empathy and compassion, sharing joy and grief with peers, and bringing it all together in a more stabilized vision for oneself — and one’s future.
“It's so easy as an individual to feel deflated, to get burnt out,” Epel added. “But realizing that on a daily basis, we need to work on bolstering our own emotion regulation, so that we can see the world outwardly and connect to other people and feel the inherent interconnection we have to nature, to the planet, to the human and more-than-human world.”
Putting The Feelings Into Words
Rachel Malena-Chan and her friends needed an outlet to work through their own climate anxieties after realizing their feelings were far too big to distill into a social media post or one-liner.
So they created a project — Eco-Anxious Stories — to make it easier to express their climate anxiety and connect with others who feel the same way.
From “Follow the Feeling” worksheets and community zine projects, to blog posts and videos shared by people turning their own climate emotions into action, Eco-Anxious Stories gives these feelings a place to live outside the brain.
“Our work is about creating engaging opportunities to explore our messy relationships to social and ecological justice issues — including the climate crisis. We share stories and ideas that help us process our experience of being alive at this moment, this time of uncertainty and possibility,” Malena-Chan writes on her website.
Eco-Anxious Stories has a library of resources to help people create their own narratives, consume and connect to others, and explore companion works to favorite books or podcast episodes about the full spectrum of eco-emotions.
“We believe in welcoming all our feelings to the table, including feelings like anxiety, fear, and hopelessness. These feelings are normal, but they are not the end of the story,” Malena-Chan adds.
“We help people follow their feelings and dig deeper into the love and connection that drives lasting change.”
Connecting With Others Over Complicated Feelings
Good Grief Network is an organization of climate-focused peer support circles that takes inspiration from 12-step programs.
“So many of us don’t have partners or friends or family members or community members that we can talk to,” founder LaUra Schmidt told Inside Climate News, “and so we keep this all bottled up inside, and then we start to feel like we’re crazy.”
What started a decade ago in a small university group in Utah now has a global reach, with participants logging into meetings from Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and across the U.S.
The group sessions are based on the idea that it is easier to work through the emotional response to the climate crisis when you have people to support you.
One participant, who worked for the EPA for 20 years and asked to keep her identity private, said it was through Good Grief Network that she realized that the people who didn’t shy away from the emotional impact of climate change were the ones taking the most drastic action to fight it.
“I think just from a practical perspective for us to be able to save ourselves, we have to face it … and we’re not facing it because it’s difficult emotionally and it’s difficult psychologically,” she told Inside Climate News.
“We have to figure out how to come together as human beings in this time — and live.”
Embrace Uncertainty
A similar approach has come to pass with the help of eco-champlains, who lead group healing circles — both with and without spiritual or religious ties.
Consisting of breathing exercises, guided conversations, and even colorful “climate feelings” wheels, these group sessions adapt the tenets of disaster, spiritual, and hospital chaplains to help people move through unimaginable feelings.
"They are asking how do we deal with regret, with complicity, with lament, with saying goodbye to species," Rev. Alison Cornish told NPR of her colleagues. "They are creating rituals that honor all of those."
Eco-chaplains connect with diverse groups; some who are retired, others who are just beginning careers in climate policy and science.
Julia DaSilva, a 25-year-old climate activist in Canada, has focused on fossil fuel divestment during her college years. After feeling like her efforts were “never enough,” she turned to an eco-chaplain.
Climate activism, the chaplain told DaSilva, is an act of faith itself. Now the mere belief in a better future is what keeps DaSilva afloat.
“We don't have any good reason to think that things are going to get better and yet we do it,” she told NPR.
“The world was a source of anxiety for me and that is always what I expected it to be. But now it has become something more.”
Her realization is similar to one Johnson’s book brings to the forefront: We don’t actually know what the future will look like — and we get to play a role in what we want it to be.
“There is a wide range of possible futures,” Johnson writes. “Peril and possibility coexist.”
Amid uncertainty, fear, and the other millions of intricate and inexplicable feelings that seem to rise with the sea levels, we still know what is true, Johnson explains.
“A few things feel clear about this world we must build together: There can be enough for each of us. There can be a home for each of us. There can be a role for each of us. The imperative is transformation, and the goal is to thrive,” she writes in the prologue of her book.
“Even if that’s all we know for sure, it’s enough to get started.”
5 Tools To Cope With Climate Feelings:
- Take an Active Hope training, which features a seven-part video course that helps participants face their concerns about the world in a way that promotes positive change
- Join an in-person or virtual Climate Cafe to connect with others who care deeply about the planet and are seeking support
- Read the book “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety” by Britt Wray to connect with — not kill — your climate emotions
- Find a “climate-aware” therapist that specializes in the intersections of mental health and climate change
- Fill out Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Climate Action Venn Diagram to find your unique path forward in taking climate action
You may also like: People are having funerals for the world's melting glaciers. Could it mobilize further climate action?
A version of this article was originally published in The 2025 Environment Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image by Markus Spiske
