As a psychologist, I have been researching, writing and speaking about psychological and social responses to climate change for over a decade. It seems that an increasingly common response is extreme concern. The University of Bath recently published the results of its survey on climate action by 2023. Of almost 5,000 respondents, 19 % students and 25 % staff said they were „extremely concerned“ about climate change, while 36 % and 33 % said they were „very concerned“. Climate concerns were higher compared to last year’s survey. In 2021, a global survey of children and young people’s feelings about climate change found similarly high levels of concern. Most of the 10,000 participants reported feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, helplessness, helplessness, and guilt. This phenomenon is called eco-anxiety, and it’s no surprise that so many people suffer from it. Wherever we are, more and more of us are now beginning to feel the effects of the climate crisis in some way, whether it’s drought, food shortages, flooding, or extreme weather. After years on the fringes, calling the climate crisis a crisis has entered the mainstream, now at the forefront of wildlife documentaries, movies, news media, and celebrity culture.

Ecological anxiety cannot be fixed.
Fear or anxiety about the climate and ecological crisis is a reasonable and predictable response to a dangerous situation. We should expect an increase in anxiety and complex emotional responses. This is an important point for me and many other psychologists and psychotherapists who are dealing with the climate crisis as a profound social and psychological challenge. It means that we should be wary of trying to precisely measure distress-related responses, such as ecoanxiety, as individual traits. When we do this, it is all too easy to make the problem the problem of the individual and the solution to fix it. This is often done by helping them adapt to reality through therapy and even medication. But when we frame the problem in this way, we collectively engage in a form of denial. Can we in good conscience offer „advice“ for dealing with ecoanalysis if it is only focused on finding ways to eliminate bad feelings and ignore their source? I think we can. Grief can be overwhelming and exhausting. We need to find ways to cope with it, both individually and collectively, while also recognizing that eco-anxiety is, in many ways, a „healthy“ response. Here are some tips for coping with eco-anxiety whenever despair becomes too much.