How to cope with climate anxiety | Psyche Guides

The consequences of catastrophic climate change are daunting, almost too terrifying to contemplate, and denial can help us through it.

Each of us has to walk our own path through the Five Stages of Climate Grief. Mine seemed to demand, first, that I admit that “My name is Andrew and I too am a climate denier,” then bargain with the terror of it finally being “now,” until, cleansed by despair, I can awake to my burdens. Along the way, the strange alchemy of gallows humor, that runt

There’s a lot of alienation; a lot of disaster porn. We need grieving rituals so we can go through our despair together, so we can face the losses we know are coming.

Its relentless trajectory: To bring it on, all we have to do is, um, nothing. Its overwhelming complexity: To fix it, not only do we have to do something, but, as Naomi Klein has said, we pretty much have to “change everything” about how our economy and society operates. Its asymmetries of power: Those of us most historically responsible for causin

climate change is at its core

When I notice I’m feeling anxious about something, I ask myself a basic CBT question: “What’s the worst that can happen, and how would I cope with that?” Or, “If a friend had a similar worry, how would I advise them to handle it?” By putting distance between myself personally and the source of the anxiety, I can think more objectively about positiv