Feeling Doomed? How to Tackle Climate Anxiety

How to Save a Planet

Gimlet

Science, News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“We’re all doomed.” If you’ve ever thought this to yourself while looking down at the remnants of your paper straw floating in your plastic coffee cup (just me?), you may be experiencing climate anxiety. Climate feelings, like anxiety and grief, are on the rise all over the world. And researcher Britt Wray started feeling them herself when she was newly married and started thinking about having children. So she started to study these feelings to learn more about the roots of her climate anxiety, how common it was, and why learning to cope with it is an important step towards taking climate action. Guest: Britt Wray Calls to Action If you’re looking for climate related mental health treatment, the Climate Psychology Alliance has a directory of climate-aware therapists in North America and the UK If you’re looking to connect with others over climate anxiety, check out some Climate Cafe directories here and here, or search “my city + climate cafe” to find one near you. If you want to host your own Climate Cafe, here’s a discussion guide. The Good Grief Network and Climate Awakening also host virtual ways to connect. If you want to try some of the mindfulness techniques that Britt mentioned as a way of stretching your window of tolerance, check out the Free Mindfulness Project and Headspace If you want to check out Britt’s work on climate anxiety, you can subscribe to her substack Gen Dread or check out her book Generation Dread Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram. This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Anna Ladd. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Daniel Ackerman, Hannah Chinn, and Meg Driscoll. Our supervising producers are Katelyn Bogucki and Matt Shilts. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was Stephanie Abramson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to how to save a planet. I'm Alex Bloomberg. This is the show about what we need
0:06.6	to do to address climate change and how we make those things happen.
0:15.9	Hello, everyone. Before we start the show, I have a quick special request for all of
0:28.8	you. We are hard at work on a special anniversary episode for how to save a planet's second
0:33.3	birthday. That is right. We are turning two years old. My request is if you have ever taken
0:40.5	a call to action, you know, those things that we do at the end of every single show,
0:44.0	if you've ever done one of those, please tell us about it. Send us a voice memo or email to how to
0:51.0	save a planet dot show slash contact. That's how to save a planet dot show slash contact and tell us
0:59.6	what you did and how it went and how it made you feel. All right. Now onto the show. This week on
1:05.3	the show, I am joined by how to save a planet producer and a lad. And I'm here this week to talk
1:11.2	about my personal area of expertise, which is feelings and in particular feelings of anxiety.
1:18.4	Okay. So when I tell people what I do for work, which is make this climate change podcast,
1:24.8	they tend to respond in one of two ways. The first is that they ask me if I'm okay from having
1:30.8	to think about climate change all day. And the second is that they just like start confessing
1:35.5	environmental sins to me, like I am their climate priest and that I can like absolve them of
1:41.9	whatever guilt or anxiety that they've been holding on to. Right. Like when I met my cousins
1:46.7	baby for the first time last summer, like the first thing she did to me was apologize for not
1:50.8	using cloth diapers. And I am a person who's literally never thought about dipering in my life.
1:56.4	Right. Let alone the environmental impacts of dipering.
1:59.9	I don't even know where there was a debate about which kind of diapers to use.
2:04.4	I know that cloth diapers were a thing that existed. Right. I did not know people felt strongly
2:09.7	about it. It just seemed kind of like you have to like put the poop in the washing machine. And I
	...

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