Climate Anxiety Resources
Dedicating our professional lives to mitigation and adaptation can help ease the anxiety of the climate crisis, but it’s not a panacea. While the seriousness and immediacy of the crisis is the water we swim in as climate professionals, if an image or headline catches us off-guard, we may find ourselves drowning. We may become overwhelmed with anxiety, grief, fear, guilt, or anger. We may lash out, doubt ourselves, question our life choices, or wonder whether any of our work matters at all.
If left unchecked, these feelings can lead to apathy, inaction, and helplessness. And if the people leading the charge against the climate crisis are feeling unmotivated and ineffective, we’re all screwed.
That’s why I spent most of 2022 focused on easing eco-anxiety in my clients. My website, marketing, and free resources were all geared to address the emotional toll of climate change for anyone and everyone. I did so by taking the coaching toolbox created for our biggest personal problems and customizing it to address the fallout from our biggest collective problem. I call the self-coaching tools I taught “internal activism”, equally as important as the external activism we take with our professional, personal, and political actions.
I am now focused on helping make self-confidence sustainable for women in climate, as reflected in my website, marketing, and free resources. Building self-confidence and self-worth through coaching was a game-changer for me personally and professionally, and I am stoked to teach these same tools to my fellow women in climate. We need as many climate leaders as we can get, and women make excellent leaders, even more so when they are feeling confident, empowered, and motivated.
That doesn’t mean the “Eco-anxiety Antidote” is out of my coaching toolbox; clients can bring eco-anxiety and almost anything else to work on during a coaching session. And processing our complex roles and responsibilities in the climate crisis will always be a part of my group webinar offerings to help teams turn eco-anxiety into empowerment.
Because offering coaching tools to everyone, regardless of ability to pay, is a part of my ethos, it is important that the resources I once showcased on my Eco-Anxiety Antidote website remain accessible to all. While many links offer paid programming, they also offer low or no cost resources.
While far from comprehensive, the links below can help you process and understand your eco-anxiety, whether you work in the climate and sustainability field or not. If you have a eco-anxiety resource you’d like to add here, please contact me.
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A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Jaquette Ray is the essential guidebook for the climate generation, combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities.
Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis by Britt Wray seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world.
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it, and an impassioned call to action.
EcoRate: Find Eco-Friendly Cafes & Refill Stores
Atmos is an exploration of climate and culture, a nonprofit biannual magazine and digital platform curated by a global ecosystem of artists, activists, and writers devoted to ecological and social justice, creative storytelling, and re-enchantment with the natural world.
If you find that your eco-anxiety is preventing you from function on a day-to-day level, please consider seeking the help of a mental health professional. The Climate Aware Therapist Directory is a good place to start. For more information on climate-aware therapy, visit The Climate Psychology Alliance. My post on the difference between coaching and therapy is also a good resource on finding what is right for you.
I also want to plug fellow Women And Climate (WAC) members Maia Kiley, who offers climate-aware therapy, ecotherapy, and group programs; Nicole Kelner, who does climate art workshops, and eco-anxiety coaches Katie Vason and Katharina Hellmann.