Anxiety

Big, complex problems bring up complicated and often contradictory feelings: from sadness and despair, or anger and rage, to helplessness, numbness, anxiety and even panic. Many people feel guilty or ashamed that we’re not doing more about the problems we see. We may feel like tuning everything out. We may feel paralyzed, knowing we can do more but unsure what or how. Or perhaps we don’t even know how we feel, because it’s all so overwhelming to even contemplate.

Understanding anxiety, and how it impacts our capacities to engage with these complex issues, is fundamental to being a changemaker in our world. This is because anxiety has a direct, profound, and complex impact on how we think, feel, process information, and relate with each other.

When anxiety is triggered—by news about the systemic loss of biodiversity on the planet, threat of wildfires, even the prospect of not having access to our favorite coffee or chocolate—our amygdala activates, hijacking our thought processes and impairing our ability to access our prefrontal cortex. Our prefrontal cortex (PFC) is where we have access to strategy, foresight, empathy, and nuanced thinking. Arguably many of the exact attributes we need access to right now.

Anxieties can be triggered by anticipatory threats—what a warmer future holds for our world, our children, their children, our beloved plants and animals. There are complex ways in which marginalized and vulnerable communities and populations are unevenly impacted. But when confronting anxiety there are some similarities that impact how well we can attune, reveal, convene, equip, and sustain our engagement on these long-haul issues because anxiety has a profound impact on how we process information, engage with threats, connect with others, and center ourselves with resilience or not.

For climate and environmental threats, countless psychologists studying anxiety have helped us see how anxiety can trigger all forms of defense mechanisms that may make us avoid, distance, rationalize, minimize, discount, numb, deny, disavow, dissociate, and project our way out of feeling our anxiety. Threats that arise from the prospect of being helpless and at the mercy of others are particular triggers: threats of losing a loved one, of losing another’s love, or of being attacked, threats of losing our autonomy and agency in the world. Climate and sustainability issues can bring these up in abundance, even when what is being presented are positive solutions.

While we may have moved beyond Freud and his early understandings of anxiety, his early work still has relevance. As the Freud Museum has noted, it is “now possible to think of the very contours of the mind itself, with its defenses and symptoms, as above all a means of avoiding anxiety.” Facing climate change and environmental threats, contemplating a warming planet, looking at our consumption practices, looking at the carbon impact of our industrialized ways of life—all of these can evoke tremendous anxieties. The most powerful thing we can do is to start with attuning to the variety of anxieties these topics bring up. We need to meet them and engage with them skillfully and compassionately.