How to manage climate anxiety as a parent – my story

I became a parent for the first time in August of 2023 after two years studying climate change and water resource management in graduate school. My graduate studies started off on a bleak note. Every class I took reinforced the idea, through data, graphs, first hand accounts, and academic articles, that we inhabitants of planet earth are pretty screwed. Nothing about the future looked good. No numbers confirmed any good news or were even reassuring that we were on the right track. The only hopeful news came in the form of non-profit organizations doing valuable community based work to try to make a difference on the ground. But I quickly realized that this formula – read about the climate crisis, study the climate crisis, write and complete projects about the climate crisis, then move on with your day – was really a recipe for a panic attack or a bone chilling numbnesses to everyone and everything around me.

I remember speaking to my fellow classmates that first week of school. “How are we supposed to do this reading and write this paper as if this information is affecting someone else? How are we just supposed to turn in our assignments and act like everything is okay.” The more informed I became, the more frustrated I became by the lack of mental health resources and considerations for how this information might be impacting us as students. I wanted to be informed, of course that’s why I went to grad school, but this pattern was leaving me feeling more helpless and resigned, and as a result, I was becoming more checked out.

I was desperate to feel like I could dig my hands into the soil of climate action and that, like the vegetables I so love to grow every summer, I would be able to see the fruits of my labor in a tangible and nearly immediate way.

A week after my son was born in August in Durham, North Carolina, we experienced a storm that came out of the clear blue sky and knocked down hundreds of trees throughout the city, knocking out the power for several days. It was a swelteringly hot week, and newly postpartum with my infant baby in my arms, I felt helpless to know what course to take. I could leave home and take refuge in a hotel nearby, an expensive move due to the hiked up demand at hotels throughout the area. I could wait it out and worry. We were fortunate to have our power come back on after only 24 hours, so I only suffered one sweaty night in bed, but that experience awoke the climate anxiety monster in me that had been lying dormant as I had focused on the end of my pregnancy and preparing for the baby’s arrival.

Now the climate crisis was real and in my face in a way that I couldn’t numb out to and ignore. It was affecting not only me, but this new precious life I had brought into the world and would do anything to protect. I spent several nights after that power outage awakening at 3 in the morning drenched in sweat (hello, postpartum) and incredibly anxious about the unpredictable future that my son would face. While I had been surrounded by people in my graduate program who vowed to forego having kids because of the environmental impact and uncertain future for the next generation, I knew that I wanted to be a mother in a deep way that I couldn’t ignore. I knew that of all of my dreams for my life, being a parent was my most central and important dream. I made the choice to have a child with my eyes fully open to the climate crisis, but it wasn’t until those 3am anxious night sweats that I really felt what that meant in my body. I was terrified.

After those early newborn days began to fade into a more predictable routine as my son grew, I felt the burning need to figure out how I was going to parent my son to be resilient to climate change. I am nothing if not driven by organized, tangible actions that I can see in front of me, and so I spent my son’s nap times reading, researching, and formulating plans for our future as a family and how we would prepare for the increasing calamities caused by climate change.

I broke my research down into different categories, taking a permaculture approach and beginning with addressing the most inner zone and working my way outwards.

1. Myself as a parent and as a person
2. Our family’s emotional and physical resilience to climate change
3. Our home – the physical infrastructure and behavioral patterns that form our home and how we can improve our home’s resilience.
4. Our community – we are all in this together and as we grow in our personal resilience, we can lift those around us towards increased resilience too.

This article focuses on that first inner zone – ourselves as parents and people and how we can increase our personal resilience to climate change. This is the first and most important zone to bring our attention to because without ensuring our own wellbeing, we can’t support anyone else’s resilience. Just like that overused metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask on the plane before helping others, if we attempt to solve family, home, or community problems before we feel solid ourselves, we end up creating more vulnerabilities and problems by acting without deep understanding, acting unreliably, or simply burning out before we’ve made an impact.

This focus on the self may seem narcissistic and self absorbed but I believe that it’s key to continuing to fight the good fight. What’s another classic saying? You can’t pour from an empty cup. I’ve broken down a system that has helped me manage my climate anxiety and grief as a parent in a way that gives me sustained energy for moving the needle towards what I want for our collective future.

1. Grieve
2. Cultivate joy
3. Build community
4. Imagine better
5. Take action

Grieve: This step is number one because whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re probably feeling a lot of feelings, and if you’re anything like me, it’s often easier to push them aside in favor of scrolling, binge watching, eating, or basically doing anything else other than feeling those deep and raw feelings of grief. Grieving and processing the barrage of information we’re exposed to daily can feel like a monumental task – like we’ll be stuck doing this forever if we open the flood gates and start to explore what is there. But I promise that this catharsis is needed to get through the emotional blocks that stop us from looking climate change square in the eye and numbness is the antithesis of action. Try writing, making art, moving your body, having a long cry, or a blood curdling scream – whatever your preferred method of processing. Set a timer for a period of time that feels manageable – even 10 minutes can be a wonderful opening into these feelings – and just give yourself in to whatever arises. Don’t try to sugarcoat. Don’t try to avoid or numb or ignore. I’m sure you’ve heard some piece of news at some point that registered as terrifying or tragic – now is the time to unshelf that story or that feeling and really give it air time. Give it as much as it needs for as long as you can stand it, and I promise there will be a light at the end of the tunnel of grief.

Cultivate Joy: Joy seems like an impossible thing to focus on when we’re bombarded with bad news and reasons feel anger and grief from every which way. Especially after airing out our grief, it can feel strange to switch gears and focus on joy. These two emotions are not mutually exclusive, to be sure, and it’s a great practice to really allow ourselves to feel both grief and joy simultaneously as they arise. I struggled with the selfishness and the wrongness feeling of cultivating joy amid global tragedies.

But the truth of the matter is doom and gloom, anger and grief only move the needle of climate action so far. We need joy, we depend on joy, to drive us towards a future we want and a life worth living.

To cultivate joy, we must identify what brings us joy, or if joy seems too strong an emotion, maybe just contentment. I’m someone that finds joy in my garden picking fresh fruits and vegetables, on long hikes in the forest, in chocolate ice cream, in my baby’s laughter, in kneading clay and bread dough, in swimming in lakes and rivers and oceans, in wandering the shelves of tiny independent bookstores, and in the company of my friends. I encourage you to make a list of what brings you joy, peace, or contentment and make a vow to yourself to spend even a little time every day doing one of the things on the list. Leave it somewhere you can look at it often.

Build Community: Nothing eviscerates climate anxiety and the feeling of doom that can creep up at 3 in the morning quite like community. By community, I mean the people you choose to spend time with, care about, or live in proximity to. There’s a certain interdependence that community requires, and this interdependence brings us out of our dizzying isolation and into a healing balm of wholeness and connection with others. When we live with a community mindset, other people’s problems become our problems, but their strength becomes our strength. There is power in community, as we have seen time and time again. Building community is not only a practical way to increase our resilience to climate change, but is crucial for our mental wellbeing. It can be a challenge to get out there and begin investing in these relationships in a more serious way, but studies show that having community may be a key factor in longevity. Dan Buttner studies communities of centenarians all across the globe in locations known as “Blue Zones”. He learned from centenarians in Okinawa, Japan, that people the traditional practice of belonging to a moai, or a community of people who are committed to caring for one another, is a common factor in those that live to 100 and beyond. In a practical sense, this can mean getting out and getting to know your neighbors, hosting resilience boosting events at your home such as pantry stocking parties and clothing swaps, being intentional about checking in often with friends and family, and being generous with your time and resources to those around you. It feels better to know that we’re not in this alone.

Imagine Better: I don’t know about you, but after years studying climate change and being immersed in environmental doom and gloom, even creating a documentary about the dying Jordan River, I’m a little sick of the storyline about our apocalyptic future. It’s scary and it doesn’t inspire me. If anything, it makes me want to crawl back under the covers and stay there. Or take my little family and run away to some mountaintop away from it all – an escapist fantasy that would take us out of community and probably into more climate vulnerability. Alas, the thing that lights a spark of creativity in me these days is imagining a better future for my children and for us all. What if, instead of spending hours stuck in traffic, my sons would grow up taking high speed trains across the country? What if, instead of accumulating more and more disposable belongings, my children will grow up to adulthood with an appreciation for simplicity and will know how to take care of the fewer items they possess? What if, instead of everyone living in isolation with the stress of increasing grocery bills and consumerism, my children grow up in a neighborhood where they knows everyone, and everyone has a garden and we all trade fruits and vegetables and help each other out with childcare and share our tools and make meals for one another? These are certainly my utopian fantasies and yours may look different, but it brings such a different energy and angle to the conversation to imagine the beautiful possibilities for our collective futures rather than just accepting a negative outcome. When I worked as a whitewater rafting guide after college, I learned to steer the boat around rocks and obstacles by looking where I wanted to go, not where I didn’t want to go. The future is being written everyday and it’s up to us to steer ourselves towards where we want to go. Take some time to think or write about a utopian vision for the future. Maybe even invite some friends and community members to join you in a vision making session. Go wild and see what comes up and then move on to the next part:

Take Action: The final key to this recipe for managing our climate anxiety is to channel all this energy towards doing something. Someone once explained to me that anxious energy is just creative energy with nowhere to go, and I really believe this is true. When we use this energy to move forwards towards the better future we’re imagining, we pop the bubble of anxiety and give ourselves a feeling of accomplishment. Maybe you will be inspired to take action on some part of the vision you wrote out. Maybe you’ll feel motivated to become more involved politically by speaking to your representatives or even taking up a leadership position in your local school district, food council, or town government. Perhaps you’re motivated by living more eco consciously in your own home and with your own family. Whatever it is, write out a few action steps that you’d like to accomplish in the next 3 months and then move forward on them. What a future we’re building together if we all decide to take these small steps in tandem.

If you’re struggling with intense climate anxiety, it may be the most compassionate choice to seek professional support with the help of a trained therapist. Therapists are seeing more and more cases of eco-anxiety and there’s even an emerging specialization in the field. Know that you are never alone in these feelings and even if it feels that way sometimes, there are millions of people around the world who understand what you’re going through and experience the same waves of grief, anxiety, and enervation. Together, we can support one another in managing these intense emotions and work towards building a more inspiring daily existence for us all. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email if you’d like to talk more or connect.