Managing Climate Anxiety
In a nutshell, climate anxiety means feelings of fear, worry, or tension around climate change. Many people experience climate anxiety, and it’s especially common in young people, so if you’re feeling down or helpless, please remember you’re not alone in these feelings. Managing anxiety and staying positive can be difficult but is so important, as it allows us to maintain calm in our daily lives and think about how we can come together and create practical change.
We want to share some ways to cope with climate anxiety and manage stress, especially when hearing negative news about climate change.
- Stay active – It’s so important to exercise. It helps to keep us happy and healthy, as it’s great for both physical and mental health. Biking to work, going on a walk with friends, joining a football club, or just taking time to stretch and move our bodies are all great ways to calm our minds. Cycling to work is also a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.
- Talk to a friend – Sharing worries and talking things through is a good way to offload anxiety. A great way to do this is to meet up with a friend and talk about your worries or even join a local sustainability/climate change group to meet up with like-minded people and discuss climate change, climate anxiety and ways to make a positive difference.
- Spend time with nature and help local wildlife thrive – During extreme weather, bird feeders, bird baths and insect homes are so helpful for local wildlife. Leaving out a container of clean water can help birds and bees cool down, and placing insect homes or bird homes in shady spots can massively help our favourite creatures find somewhere to rest. Another thing that can help preserve shady shelter is to leave our gardens “wild” by letting hedgerows grow, adding rock piles or planting native wildflowers.
- Limit consumption – Social media and news websites mean that we can always access the latest news, which can be helpful but can often leave us feeling overwhelmed, helpless and stuck in a loop. A good way to avoid these feelings is to reduce habits like “doomscrolling”, frequently checking your phone and blocking keywords related to news stories that you might find distressing or triggering when you feel you need a break.
- Look for the positives – Regularly reading about positive change happening in the world is just as important as knowing about the negative things; it helps us maintain a balance and calm our minds. Websites such as Positive.news and The Happy News are great sources to look at if you need a positivity boost and a break from negativity.
Whilst feelings of fear, worry and tension are completely understandable, and to a degree important for encouraging change to be made, it’s also essential that we are able to balance our positive and negative feelings and not let anxiety get the better of us.
