We’ve all been there. The state of the world can be a heavy burden to carry. So, what do we do when climate change starts to give us too much anxiety? Let’s chat.

A note: I am not a medical professional. This information is not meant to diagnose or cure anyone of anything. If you are in distress, please seek out professional medical help.

What is climate anxiety?

Yale Psychologist, Sarah Lowe, says it best:

“Climate anxiety is fundamentally distress about climate change and its impacts on the landscape and human existence. That can manifest as intrusive thoughts or feelings of distress about future disasters or the long-term future of human existence and the world, including one’s own descendants. There is a physiological component that would include heart racing and shortness of breath, and a behavioral component: when climate anxiety gets in the way of one’s social relationships or functioning at work or school.”

Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Anthony Leiserowitz, adds to the conversation:

“One thing to point out is that worry is not the same thing as anxiety. Worry as an emotion is a motivator; if you worry about something, you are motivated to figure out what you can do about it. We actually need more people to be worried about climate change. Where worry becomes a problem is when it becomes overwhelming and debilitating, when it keeps you from living your life. That’s when it’s a serious diagnosis.”

So, perhaps clinically speaking, you are less anxious about the climate and more worried. Regardless of your diagnosis or level of fear for the planet, this post will still be valuable for you.

How do we cope?

Whether climate change keeps you up at night or just nags at the back of your mind, there are many things we can do to cope with these feelings. None of these is a cure. A cure is halting climate change. Until we can achieve that as a society, let’s work on easing this worry and anxiety and using these feelings to motivate us to help solve this problem.

Seek medical help

It’s okay to seek medical help for any reason, but especially climate anxiety. It is okay to have anxiety over your future and the future of the planet. But that doesn’t mean you have to fight that battle on your own. Maybe you need anxiety medication, or perhaps you need to find a therapist who specializes in climate anxiety. Whatever you feel is best for you, seek that out. This may not be for everyone, but it could still be a help.

Have a community to talk to

If your anxiety is severe or mild, it can still be a benefit to talk to folks who feel the same as you do. Maybe this is an online community, a group chat, or an in-person group, such as folks you volunteer with or an Eco Book Club (join mine here). It’s so validating to hear others with the same worries as I have about the planet and our politics. It makes me feel less alone and less crazy.

I also urge you to avoid climate deniers if they trigger anxious feelings in you. It can be discouraging to see Big Oil’s propaganda campaign hard at work convincing people that climate science is wrong and illegitimate.

How do you join a community? It may look like joining a chat room, a subreddit, a Facebook Group, or getting involved locally via a local political party, an activist organization, or a group of like-minded friends. Here are my tips for building community.

get your feelings out

Maybe you don’t have a community (yet), but you can still get your feelings out. Write in a journal, talk to a camera (and post it online if you want to start building your own community, or meditate on your thoughts. You can still process your feelings without a community.

Get educated

Something else that leaves me empowered is education. No, you don’t have to go to school; you can simply get a library card and learn for free! Get free print books, audiobooks, e-books, programs, and so much more, and start learning. Learn about the facts, learn about climate wins from around the world, and perhaps you can use this as a place to build and find community, too.

Here are some of my favorite climate-related books:

Generation Dread (highly recommend for climate HOPE)
The End of Reality
Cobalt Red
Anything by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dark Laboratory
The Day the World Stops Shopping
Not the End of the World (highly recommend for climate HOPE)
Here is my full list of recommendations

Get to work!

Use your worry to fuel you to make change! But remember that the weight of the world is not on your shoulders alone. You do not have 100% of the burden to save the planet and stop climate change, so don’t put that on yourself. I’m just saying that your small eco actions truly do matter, so turn your worry into action.

This may look like picking up trash around your neighborhood, starting a compost bin, learning to garden, volunteering, trying out new eco swaps, and things of that nature. If you have no idea where to start, I highly recommend my Zero Waste in a Year Guide that will give you guidance to transform your life from wasteful to eco in just one year. You can start any day of the year, too! Learn more in this video or shop the guide here.

Look at the good news, too

Bad news gets the most air time. It can be easy to see terrible headline after terrible headline and think that the world is ending. But good news happens every day in politics, for the planet, and everything in between! It may mean that you have to purposefully seek it out and find that good news manually, but trust me, it exists. I highly recommend you follow Alaina, The Garbage Queen, for regular good news.

Here are a few recent wins to get our spirits up:

In June 2025, Senator Mike Lee of Utah was trying to sell off our public lands, but our collective efforts worked, and we got this removed from the Big Beautiful Bill!
The International Court of Justice has ruled that a clean, healthy, and sustainable planet is a human right. This is a huge win for the fight for our climate!
More research into solar fields has proven to be beneficial to farmers, biodiversity, and the planet

Get off your phone

Hey, you, stop doomscrolling! I know, it’s ironic, I’m a full-time content creator asking you to consume LESS content, but it’s important to take a break from the never-ending news cycle! I’m not saying you have to delete all your socials and quit using a smartphone, I’m saying that maybe you set intentional phone-free time throughout the day. For me, that looks like reading while I eat my meals vs scrolling social media and no phones while I’m in bed. Set your own rules, but be intentional about your scrolling!

Get outside

Truly one of the best things I do for my physical and mental health is touch grass…literally! Getting into the forest, seeing the ocean, or simply enjoying the sun on my face during a walk around the concrete jungle makes me feel so good and connected to the planet.

I encourage you to take it a step further and get to know the plants and animals around you. We’re fighting for them, too, after all! It’s fun to see plants, but it’s even more fun to see yarrow and honeysuckle and coast redwoods. Birdsong is pretty, but it becomes more melodic when you know you’re hearing a white-crowned sparrow or a chestnut-backed chickadee (I hear one out my window as I type this).

You don’t have to go to a national park to connect with nature. Nature is all around us, and you can connect with it right at your own home or in your city park.

Don’t forget joy!

Joy is resistance. Big Oil, the news, and the government want us sad, down, and hopeless. Don’t give them that satisfaction. Remember that there is hope to be had, and we can still be joyful amidst these messes we find ourselves in. We can hold multiple feelings at once. It is okay to feel worried for the planet but still find joy in a picnic with friends. It is okay to be angry at Big Oil for what they’re doing while enjoying a movie a dinner with your partner.

Don’t let them take your joy. Partake in your hobbies, go on vacation, read a book, go on a walk, make art, hang out with friends, and just simply be joyful.

You are not solely responsible

As I mentioned before, we have to remember that we are not solely responsible for the climate crisis. No, this does not mean we get a hall pass to be as wasteful as we want. We still have SOME responsibility to be good stewards of the planet, even if we don’t have 100% of that responsibility.

Truly, this realization is what got me out of the worst of my climate anxiety in Summer 2021. I was in a bad mental place about the planet 4 years ago. I attribute part of that to feeling like I had the weight of the world (literally and figuratively) on my shoulders and that I could do nothing personally to fix it. It was just eating at me.

But something clicked shortly after I moved to Las Vegas. Perhaps it was the dread of Lake Mead or seeing such a wealthy and wasteful city in action that shifted my mindset and made me realize that, no, I cannot fix the planet on my own, and that’s just fine. No one is asking me to do that, nor are they asking you to do that. That’s honestly the beauty of it. We are supposed to work together to save our home. It is our shared home, so we have a shared responsibility to treat it well and do our best to protect it for those who come after us.

I get asked often how I maintain this mindset, and truly, the answer is practice. While I did have a pretty major mindset shift that summer, it was not an overnight change. I still grappled with personal guilt for a few months, maybe even years. But as I learn more about fossil fuels and fast fashion and the US military and other major polluters, I have learned to not feel so bad about taking my medication in plastic or catching a flight to Ohio to save my family.

Again, this is not an excuse to be as wasteful as possible. It is simply the reason why we need to quit putting all of the blame on ourselves. That is not fair. We were born into this wasteful system, and we have to work with what we’ve got. Instead of feeling guilty for using plastic when it’s your only option, use that energy to help change the system so that we have access to more sustainable items in the future.

Know that hope is not lost

It may feel hopeless at times. I feel that way, too. But the good news is that we have solutions. Scientists have been working on them as long as they have known that climate change is manmade. They just simply need to be implemented. That is why we have to keep the hope alive and continue to encourage people to speak up for climate change. The more that it becomes mainstream to care about climate change, the more popular it will become for companies and governments to enact solutions.

Remember where we started. In the mid-1900s, our air was toxic, our rivers were catching on fire from waste, and the ozone had a massive hole in it. But thanks to science and solutions presented based on facts, the ozone is healing, our air and water have never been cleaner (well, until Trump and his EPA led by Lee Zeldin axed these protections), companies even as big as Amazon are taking steps to be more eco-conscious, bulk stores are on the rise, cities are becoming more walkable and bikeable, and things of that nature.

Progress is happening. Things may be rolling back in the US, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world is doing the same. Cities, states, and other countries are still making huge progress. We know what to do to solve climate change, we just need environmentalism to be so popular that ignoring climate science and climate solutions becomes unpopular instead of remaining the norm.

I hope that this post gives you hope. Once again, if this doesn’t help you, please seek out professional help. This is just anecdotally what worked for me, and you may have different needs.

We can fight this fight together. Thank you for being here. Thank you for caring. Let’s do this!

Remember that your small actions make a big difference in the long run :)

Emma

How to Cope with Climate Anxiety when it Feels Like No One Cares