A few years ago, Britt Wray felt overwhelmed by eco-anxiety. Fielding questions from family about whether she and her husband would have children, Wray contemplated the bleak future they might inherit. As a researcher who studies the mental health effects of living through the planetary crisis caused by climate change, Wray couldn’t ignore the projections of species extinction, crop failure, and increasingly disastrous weather events. Stricken by a “profound sense of hopelessness,” Wray found herself openly weeping on a train ride home one evening.
Of course, Wray is not alone. In the U.S., one survey conducted by the American Psychiatric Association found that more than two-thirds of Americans are somewhat or extremely anxious about climate change. Last year, the Lancet polled 10,000 youth between the ages of 16 and 25 from around the world and found that more than half reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. (Wray was a member of the research team that published those findings.)
The trouble with eco-anxiety, a blanket term typically used to describe distress associated with climate change, is that there’s no easy fix. As Wray points out, anguish is a normal responses to the circumstances, and yet that despair can be so debilitating that someone experiencing it might need professional mental health help. If high-quality treatment is even available, it still doesn’t change the reality that the planet continues to tilt toward ecological chaos as politicians and corporations fail to meaningfully act.
In her new book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, Wray attempts to chart a path forward for those who feel uneasy or even stuck when it comes to eco-anxiety. Wray’s approach is holistic, weaving together various strands of thought from psychology and public health to help readers cultivate the resilience and emotional intelligence they’ll need to fight for the planet — and to survive the calamities that might come.
These skills are critical not just for people’s long-term wellbeing but also as a bulwark against forms of extremism like ecofascism, which view the threat of environmental collapse as a problem caused by growing populations of racial and ethnic groups. The shooter who targeted and killed several Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, cited ecofascism in a manifesto.
“People are feeling unsafe and scared, because of what’s going on,” Wray told me in an interview. “While some, because of their environmental values, are deeply oriented toward compassion for other people and other species and wild places, some will interpret this through their own values and beliefs, and will enact violence as a way to make them feel more safe.”
While Wray covers numerous, often overlapping coping strategies in Generation Dread, she spoke with me about three tactics that people might find surprisingly helpful.
Eco-anxiety as “super fuel”
Climate changes prompts people to feel more than just difficult emotions. Existential in nature, it forces people to consider their mortality, the prospect of widespread deprivation and upheaval, and the possibility that many won’t survive. It’s no wonder, then, that some might first try to suppress their anxiety and grief. But Wray proposes a different, counter-intuitive approach.
“If you can have some self-compassion, if you can allow [those feelings] to be there, and then start doing the deep uncomfortable work of confronting the grief related to loss and mortality, or anxiety about how bad this is going to get, it teaches us things,” says Wray. “The torment becomes a way of tapping into existential meaning.”
Instead of a paralyzing burden, eco-anxiety can become “super fuel” that helps people learn how to cope and respond to climate change, perhaps through activism, community building, and making different consumer choices, like driving less and using less energy. But first, Wray says that wrestling with painful emotions related to climate change could, for example, prompt someone to imagine their deathbed and consider what really mattered to them. Would they be happy having spent a lifetime chasing money instead of purpose? Did their everyday actions match their values?
Wray says this “massively clarifying exercise” can help people step into a “climate journey.” What that looks like depends on the person, but Wray describes it as using one’s talents, skills, and passion to respond to the crisis, which in turn helps them remain excited about the work while giving them opportunities to make meaning and live with purpose.
Don’t skip “internal activism”
Some eager to start their climate journey might want to shift all their efforts to activism, but Wray says that can be a mistake without also undertaking “psychological and emotional resiliency training” that helps alleviate despair and burnout. Wray calls this “internal activism,” or the work of being with difficult emotions, without self-judgment, and learning to integrate them into one’s life instead of trying to avoid or bury them. When that is done in tandem with self-care, it can lead to more flexible thinking, which is also critical to responding to the challenges that climate change will bring.
Critics of this approach might call it navel-gazing, or insist there’s no time to do anything but organize politically, but Wray describes such complaints as a “tired binary.”
