May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Because of this important theme, I have decided to dedicate my newsletters for May to this matter, especially since mental health is such an essential piece of our climate justice work!
Struggling with climate anxiety for over fifteen years and having gone from the lost, anxious, and angry activist I was in my early twenties, to the much more grounded person that I am today, I’ve learned something very important. I’ve learned that if we want to heal the world, we must begin by healing ourselves first, and there is no way of sustaining either ourselves or our climate work if we don’t continuously work on staying mentally well and grounded.
How to do so can be challenging, especially when you constantly emerge yourself in negative climate news. Hopefully these next newsletters can prodive some help and insight into how to better take care of yourself while you’re out there taking care of the world!
We get overwhelmed, a lot!
Today I will talk about what I call the route to awareness overwhelm. It’s something I teach in all of my workshops because I find it so important to understand and recognize this pattern.
You may know exactly what I’m talking about. Perhaps you’ve already been there many, many times! I personally feel like I’ve been there about a billion times by now, but by understanding how easy it is to go through this cycle, I am much better equipped at getting myself outta there as fast as I can and bring myself back to the empowered action!
Let me explain the route to awareness overwhelm.
ONE — Awareness is sparked
Some sort of awareness is sparked, either from watching a documentary, reading a book, attending a workshop, or similar. You learn something about the world that doesn’t ring clear to you (for example, the fact that every single sea turtle has plastic in their bellies, or that we through away 40% of all food that we produce) and you feel your world shift from this new information.
You suddenly see the world — and yourself — in a new light. Awareness has been sparked!
TWO — Frustration
Following this new awareness is frustration. You cannot believe this is true and you say to yourself that this is not the world you want to see moving forward!
Ever been there? Ever finished a documentary so fired up that you feel like your entire body is pumping? If so, then you know that this is a pretty powerful feeling to have. You feel ready and eager to take action and you decide to do whatever you can to make a difference. Frustration is high — this can simply not be the world we live in!
THREE — Conversations
The next day, that awareness is still high. Maybe you’ve been pondering what you just learned all night and thinking about what you can do to change things. You can’t wait to tell more people about it so as soon as you get a chance, you start having conversations. The bus driver, your mother, a colleague, a friend — you want to share this new knowledge with the world!
But the more you talk about it, the more you learn, and you soon start to realize that it’s not just about you. It’s also about big corporations, governments, and laws — huge power plays that you have very little control over. Soon enough, you will feel like a tiny fish in a huge ocean with absolutely no power to change anything. Even if you wanted to make a difference, who are you to do something about it?
FOUR — Overwhelm
What happens next is that place of overwhelm. The spark to take action has quickly faded and been replaced with something much more resembling hopelessness and despair. You stop talking about it because each time you do, you feel more and more powerless in your actions and less and less hopeful in being able to make a change.
Recognize this feeling?
I think it is incredibly easy to end up here! With so much negative information in our world and with such easy access to all this information, how will we not feel overwhelmed? We must also recognize that many of these big companies in power want us to feel this way. They would much rather have us feel overwhelmed and powerless so that they can continue doing what they’re doing without anyone paying attention.
But although it’s easy to end up here (and we should give ourselves a break when we do) it’s incredibly important that we don’t stay there for long. Because the truth is that we CAN make a difference. We DO have power to change things and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can come TOGETHER and enact that power we have as a community and as a people.
In other words, we must move out of this place of overwhelm and despair and into empowered action!
Why this route is important to know about
When we feel overwhelmed and sense a lack of power, anxiety grows, and that can soon lead too sleepless nights and even depression. Climte anxiety is rising in numbers and not only is it bad for our mental health, but it also prohibits further action from being taken.
As said by Janet Swim in an article for CNN,
“People who are anxious tend to be avoidant, or they shut down and don't engage. To ease this feeling of anxiety, turn it around. Instead of focusing on the fear, you should instead focus on what you want to do. If you get closer and closer to a solution, you can feel more pride and there is hope."
In a time when we what we need most is for people to wake up, feel inspired, and take action, the opposite is happening — we are feeling more and more overwhelmed! This is why I find it so important to shift the narrative on the stories we tell ourselves about climate change so that we can start acting from a place of courage and excitement, not fear!
In the next issue I’ll give some tips for how to better consume negative climate news so to stay informed, but not overwhelmed. Make sure to subscribe for more!