Climate Anxiety is For Real

And it's not helping you make things better.

Here’s an unhelpful story meditation teachers tell about anxiety:

There was once a monk who lived in a cave.  As he was sitting down to meditate, he saw a snake coiled up in the corner.  Naturally, his mind and heart began to race.  Is it poisonous? What can I do? Should I stop my meditation?  Devoted to his practice, the monk resolved to sit still and meditate.  All kinds of anxious thoughts and sensations flooded his mind and body.  But then, when his meditation session ended, the monk opened his eyes and saw the “snake” was really just a bit of coiled rope!

I hate this story.

Of course, a lot of what we’re anxious about is, in fact, nothing. We can worry ourselves sick over things we don’t know, can’t be sure of, can’t control, can’t predict.  A lot of them turn out to be coiled rope.

But you know what?  A lot of things turn out to be snakes. And the climate crisis is one of them.

It is entirely reasonable to be, if not anxious, then at least gravely concerned about the primary and secondary effects of imminent (and already present) global climate disruption.  In fact, if you’re not gravely concerned, you are not paying enough attention to the scientists and other experts who have described, in endless detail, the scope of the crisis.

At the same time, climate anxiety (or, as some call it, eco-anxiety) can be profoundly debilitating. For many people, this isn’t like worrying about that upcoming job interview or first date. It is a profound, existential crisis. 75% of youth worldwide say that they are frightened of the future because of climate change. 40% say they are hesitant to have children of their own because of it. Over two-thirds of Gen-Z Americans say that climate change has seriously impacted their mental health.

What can be done about it? Well, solving the climate crisis would be an obvious solution, but that won’t happen anytime soon (or soon enough to avoid many horrible consequences) and, on the contrary, as

Bill McKibben

reports this week, oil companies and the Republican Party are doubling down on climate denial, “Drill Baby Drill” defiance, and an expensive PR campaign to increase (!) fossil fuel use.

So we need to fight two interrelated battles at once: the fight for systemic climate sanity, and the fight for our own sanity.

With that in mind, here are three tools that I, as a journalist who has written about climate change since 1998 and as a longtime meditation teacher, have taught to students, activists, seniors, software developers, business executives and people named Flow at Burning Man.

1.        Short-Term Relief

The first step is to see where you are in a given moment, because that determines whether short-term relief or long-term improvement is the most realistic goal.

If the body-mind system is caught in panic, there’s no point trying to be mindful of your emotions, or work for change, or evaluate what is really a threat and what might be catastrophizing. None of that will work when you’re in acute distress. Instead, reaching for an “antidote” – i.e., something to calm the system – is the appropriate response.

This can be as simple as taking a walk or breathing fresh air.  It can be a moment of simply turning the mind from thoughts of war, climate disruption, violence, and so on and grounding whatever is happening right in front of you: sounds, sights, sensations.  A more focused technique that I like is a breathing technique called “box breathing” that I taught in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when I was personally hit with a ton of anxiety.  You can try that here.  Anxiety is something that happens to the body, not just the mind, and by calming the body, you can often calm the mind with no words or thoughts at all. 

If you can notice that you’re freaked out, that is.

2.        Mindfulness 101

One way to strengthen your brain’s capacity to notice itself is the technique — derived from Buddhist sources but now widely taught in secular, therapeutic contexts — known as mindfulness. Mindfulness is, in its simplest form, the mind being aware of itself: of whatever thoughts, emotions, and perceptions are occurring at any given moment. You can be mindful during meditation, or mindful when you’re washing the dishes: the essence of it is the disposition of the mind, which you can train over time.

But here’s the trick. In twenty years of teaching meditation, I’ve found that the most common mistake folks make about it is that you’re supposed to be relaxed.  And if you can’t stop your thoughts and find your Zen, you’re doing something wrong.

But it’s this misconception that’s wrong, not you.  It’s garbage dharma, akin to “toxic positivity” and the other unrealistic nonsense of what might be termed wellness culture.  Not only does it not work (I have met many excellent meditators; all still have feelings) but it’s dehumanizing.  Human beings feel things, and that’s how it should be, after all – we want to feel love, joy, and generosity, and that means we’ll also feel grief, rage, and loss.

Mindfulness isn’t about feeling a certain way; it’s about noticing what you’re feeling so you don’t necessarily hand that feeling the keys to the car. You can feel fear, concern, anger, and other emotions without being possessed by them. You don’t have to repress or ignore anything.

So, suppose you’ve read an article or watched a video, or you’ve thought of your loved ones or non-human animals around the world, and climate anxiety arises. The “mindfulness move” is to recognize what’s happening, investigate it (often as a bodily phenomenon: shallow breathing, tensed muscles) and make space for it to just be what it is without doing anything about it.

Why is this helpful? Several reasons.

First, if you can notice that you’re feeling anger, despair, fear, or whatever, you’re less likely to act impulsively on it. Not always, but some of the time.

Second, a lot of the energy of anxiety is actually the energy of trying to be free from anxiety.  As you’ve probably experienced, the most counterproductive thing to be told when you’re upset or anxious is to calm down.  Trying to resist the fear makes it stronger.

Third, when you get anxious, the mind often obsesses over the gory details of climate disaster, the worst possible prognostications, and so on. This is not helpful. Moreover, thanks to human beings’ inborn “negativity bias,” we tend to exaggerate threats — yes, even in the case of climate change. For example, while the effects of the climate crisis are likely to be quite severe (massive species and habitat loss; at least 250,000 deaths each year from 2030-2050; according to WHO projections, up to a billion climate and food refugees, with attendant conflicts and disasters; increased wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and pandemics), they don’t mean the end of human civilization. Even the IPCC doesn’t predict that.

This isn’t about being in denial — if you’ve reached this point, you are, by definition, not in denial. It’s about distinguishing between stuff you really should know and stuff that is just making you more worried and less effective as an advocate for change. 

It’s unsettling, but also kind of appealing.

So, when you notice the mind spinning in this way, mindfulness can help it come back to the present. Don’t try to relax. Just investigate and “witness” what’s happening: fast heartbeat, fast mind, lots of thinking, whatever. Let it be. At the very least, you’ll get a little break in your internal doomscrolling, but over time, these breaks will become more intuitive.  You notice anxiety, your mind semi-automatically pauses, settles back, and comes to the present moment instead of focusing on the imagined future. 

That is, when it’s working.

3.        Agency Triage

Finally, and this will be a little controversial for some, there’s one last human tendency that’s helpful to recognize: the desire to do something about it.  This is an obvious, natural response to a problem, right?  But it can get us into trouble, because there is no end to the things you could be doing to reduce your carbon footprint or otherwise ameliorate the problem.  Am I doing enough?  What more can I do?  It never ends.

But do you know who invented the term “carbon footprint”?  British Petroleum.  And why did they invent it?  To put the burden on individuals, instead of systems, governments, and corporations.  “Carbon footprint” is a con.

What’s needed to mitigate climate change is coordinated, systemic action, primarily in the areas of energy generation (i.e. shifting the power grid to renewables); transportation (mostly cars and trucks); food, agriculture, and land use; industry; and construction. Without systemic changes, no amount of individual action will make a dent in climate change, first because only virtuous concerned people will do it, and second because the tiny contributions you, I, and other individual greens make are mathematically meaningless when it comes to reducing emissions.

Now, there are still many reasons that individual action is good.  It is personally ethical.  It normalizes caring about the climate crisis and making decisions that, in the aggregate, will be part of the solution.  And it can, sometimes, bring about a sense of agency.  At least you’re doing something.

But don’t be deceived: that something is not the most important thing.  The most important things are voting for imperfect, flawed politicians who will move us toward the systemic changes we need, and then working locally to speed the adoption of clean energy technologies and build the climate-friendly infrastructure we need.

If we focus on the handful of hard, system-scale changes that have to be made, not only will we be working more effectively to make a real difference, but we can also worry less about the million of small steps we can each take that we think will make us feel better, and which maybe sometimes will, but which often will make us feel anxious, guilty and ineffective and which will not actually save the planet. 

When human beings feel anxious, we all want a sense of agency.  I’m recommending agency triage.

There’s more I’d like to say (I haven’t yet talked about the unique challenges of parenting in the shadow of the crisis, which

Anya Kamenetz

writes on every week, for example) but I’ll close with this: these three tools are all about working with human nature.  It is natural, and apparently evolutionarily adaptive, for the body to enter fight-or-flight mode when we perceive a threat, and for the mind to doomscroll possibilities and do anything to get a sense of agency.  Which means you are not messed up for feeling anxious. Millions of years of evolution have wired you, me, and billions of other people to respond in these ways.

But we also have the capacity for freedom.

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Want to learn more about working with climate anxiety and the range of climate emotions? Join me and

Anya Kamenetz

at the New York Insight Meditation Center for a special program on “The Wheel of Climate Emotions” on Tuesday, May 7 — in-person in NYC, and online everywhere else. Details are here.

In other news, here’s me on CNN responding to Donald Trump’s claim that Jews who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.” That was fun.

I know this week’s post was a bit of a change from some recent ones, but I’ve always intended Both/And to live at the intersection of current affairs and contemplative practice, so I hope it lands well with you and that you might share it if so! Thanks for your support.