Beyond Action For Action’s Sake.
It’s time to come together to collectively work through the anxiety, grief and overwhelm so many of us are experiencing.
When the COP29 climate talks open in Azerbaijan next week, we’ll no doubt be told that we’re in an unprecedented and dangerous situation, that there’s little time left, and that we’re not moving in the right direction. The speeches will likely culminate in a general call for urgent action, emphasising the critical importance of maintaining hope. This anticipated opening speech already has a sense of déjà vu.
Hasn’t it been time to act for decades? What makes each new speaker so hopeful that their call to action will be the one to finally be heeded? And exactly what action is called for? When I phoned my local council and asked what concrete help I could offer to mitigate climate change, I was met with stumped confusion about the nature of this “strange” request.
Hope is often hailed as the superpower that elevates the grim climate narrative to a motivational crescendo. Yet, does this rallying cry genuinely leave people feeling optimistic and equipped to engage in meaningful climate action, or is it merely an oratorical technique designed to leave the audience inspired rather than disheartened?
Research on hope as a motivator for climate action reveals a complex and inconsistent picture. While some studies link hope with an intention for positive climate engagement, others find no measurable effect at all, and some found that a sense of climate distress was more motivating than optimism. One study indicates that hope is often not based on a positive sense of agency but on downplaying the climate threat and relying on distorted or unrealistic goals and pathways.
Meanwhile, people are more anxious and fearful over climate change than ever. More than half of the British population feel that climate change has had a negative impact on their mental health, while 75 percent of Generation Z feel that their future is frightening. And Google search queries in English related to “climate anxiety” were 27 times higher during the first 10 months of last year than in the same period in 2017.
Psychological Needs
The reality is that the future that we’re creating is extremely scary. Anxiety is a healthy and logical response to danger. The best “treatment” for it isn’t a mindful breathing technique, but decisive action by governments, the fossil fuel industry, corporations and businesses. The fact that this isn’t happening at scale, puts us all at risk. Our suffering and distress are signs that we’re paying attention.
Of course, we need action on every level, and of course a sense of agency and meaning can have a positive effect on our well-being. But what constitutes positive action at a time when even the most powerful people in the world are unable to follow their own advice?
Just because a sense of action can feel uplifting for a while doesn’t mean that random action for action’s sake is an adequate response to the very real psychological needs that people have in a collective crisis. Conflating action with psychological self-care easily becomes an act of emotional bypassing that can lead to short-lived outcomes, or no real-world impact at all.
Exhorting people to “be positive” may be well-intentioned, but can create cognitive dissonance by widening the gap between what people are told to feel and their actual emotional experience. Attempting to circumvent difficult feelings by offering quick-fix solutions unintentionally gaslights people. Enforced positivity can also make people feel like there’s something wrong with them because they can’t simply choose optimism in the face of an increasingly catastrophic situation. This can lead to confusion, frustration, and emotional fragmentation.
Inner Conflict
On top of this, many people are now experiencing a profound inner conflict — torn between the need to sustain their livelihoods, and the ethical weight of knowing that their company or organisation is part of the climate problem, either directly via the emissions it produces, or indirectly through the role it plays in a fundamentally unsustainable economic system. This struggle often leads to suppressed feelings of helplessness and disillusionment, particularly when we don’t see how we can make a difference.
Consumer decisions, energy conservation, dietary choices, petitions and community actions are undoubtedly much needed positive actions that many of us can take, but even our children know by now that these haven’t made much difference to the trajectory we’re on. This cognitive dissonance causes a tension that’s difficult to bear. Many change agents suffer from burn-out from constant exposure to moral injury. But like machines, people are expected to be able to process the most horrendous information on a daily basis without any negative impact on their emotional well-being. There’s a marked absence of a duty of care, and a lack of effort to implement frameworks that offer emotionally attuned support for nervous system regulation in an unprecedented time of crisis.
Ignoring or diminishing our real emotions of fear, grief or shame in favour of more comfortable “positive” feelings does not only replicate a mechanistic and utilitarian approach to our rich and diverse emotional ecosystem, but also invalidates people’s healthy sense that something isn’t right. It creates a disconnect between our inner world and external expectations, leaving emotions unprocessed and, therefore, more likely to resurface in distorted ways — such as through chronic stress, burnout, emotional numbness, reactivity, or trusting false solutions, or false leaders. Unprocessed overwhelm can also lead to avoidant behaviour, irrational beliefs, a loss of engagement, and increased vulnerability to manipulation or extremist views. Scared people without the means to process their free floating feelings don’t tend to take good decisions.
It takes enormous energy to suppress strong emotions, and however much we hope to control our feelings, we can’t selectively do so. Suppressing anxiety and grief will also suppress joy, love and curiosity. This leads to a general flattening of vitality which can result in disengagement, emotional numbness, and the need for constant stimulation to keep the show going.
True resilience doesn’t come from ignoring difficult feelings but from an increased capacity to acknowledge and contain them. Dr Dan Siegel’s concept of “name it to tame it” highlights how developing our capacity to name the emotions that trouble us can help regulate the brain’s stress response, allowing us to process fear or anxiety more effectively.
Skills At Scale
Research by climate psychologists Paul Hoggett and Rosemary Randall shows that emotionally attuned and integrated engagement leads to meaningful and sustainable forms of climate action. This approach doesn’t rely on positive outcomes to maintain psychological balance; instead, it equips individuals with the grounding needed to endure setbacks and continue their efforts simply because it’s the right thing to do. The goal is to establish a state of resilience that transcends reliance on hope.
The news about the state of the world that we’re asking people to respond to is simply too much to process, and numbing is a natural defence mechanism. Nevertheless, there is an emotional range within which most people can sustain strong feelings without dissociating and going numb at one end of the spectrum, or going into blind panic at the other. Individual and collective nervous system regulation allows us to avoid collapsing into doomism and inaction, even when things don’t go our way. In a collective crisis, it’s high time to teach these skills at scale.
We need organisations, communities, the media and public health systems to provide people with adequate tools for nervous system regulation. This can happen through training leaders and team members; trauma-informed journalism; public health initiatives; mental health affirmative education systems; psychologically informed leadership; and the creation of frameworks of care in our communities and workplaces.
The most impactful resilience strategies don’t focus on individual mental health, but bring people together in regenerative networks that allow our nervous systems to synchronize, and support us to develop the capacity to be of service to something greater than ourselves. We can learn together how to meet challenging and overwhelming times with the emotional and psychological maturity that will allow us to stay within a “window of tolerance”, where distress doesn’t have to be denied, nor amplified.
Collective trauma needs a collective container for collective healing. We need to know that we’re not alone.
Our capacity for emotional regulation and psychological adaptability is not something we achieve through intellectual insight, but an embodied process that we continuously have to cultivate, perhaps by drawing on the support of the growing number of organisations offering climate-specific support.
The Centre for Climate Psychology and Change, which I founded, offers talks, seminars and training events that nurture collective resilience, nervous system regulation, trauma interventions, and the capacity to lean into grief. The Pocket Project nonprofit offers training in trauma-informed leadership and Global Social Witnessing. The Climate Psychology Alliance offers climate café facilitator training and climate-informed therapeutic outreach. The Good Grief Network supports people to process eco-anxiety and climate grief. And Gen Z can find a myriad of support measures through the Climate Mental Health Network and the Gen Dread newsletter, created by Britt Wray, a climate and mental health researcher at Stanford School of Medicine, to support people to cultivate resilience in the face of the climate crisis.
Transformation happens in connection with others, to beauty, purpose and to a sense of meaning. That’s how our capacity to hold uncertainty grows. This is where trauma, anxiety and distress can be alchemised into a compassionate and connected “response -ability”. When we’re grounded in connection, we can take sustainable action, even when things break down — not because action is the only escape from psychological distress, but because it’s the right thing to do. Maybe that’s the only way to come up with solutions worthy of meeting the magnitude of our times.
Steffi Bednarek will appear at the Climate Consciousness Summit 2024 staged online from November 15 to 21 by the Pocket Project in partnership with DeSmog. Free registration here.
Steffi Bednarek is a climate psychologist who works at the intersection between climate change, complexity thinking and the human psyche. She is founder and director of the Centre for Climate Psychology and Change.