Dealing with Climate Anxiety
I scroll through the news and there it is again. Another wildfire. Another flood. Another glacier that won’t exist by the time my nephew turns thirty. I used to be able to read these stories and move on. Now they stick to me like humidity.
Last Tuesday I stood in the grocery store, holding a plastic container of strawberries from who-knows-where, and I just… froze. Is this the right choice? Should I buy local? But local costs more. And the local farm probably uses pesticides anyway. I put the strawberries back. Then I picked them up again. A woman behind me cleared her throat. I bought the damn strawberries and felt guilty for three days.
This is what my brain does now. Every choice becomes an ethical maze. Every plastic bag is a betrayal. I lie awake thinking about sea turtles and my carbon footprint and whether having children is even fair anymore. My therapist calls it climate anxiety. I call it being awake in a world that’s on fire.
Here’s something I’ve been sitting with lately: humans have always lived in the shadow of forces that could destroy everything. Volcanoes buried cities. Rivers swallowed civilizations. Our ancestors watched forests disappear and skies darken and they had no scientists to explain it, no graphs to prove it was really happening. Just the evidence of their own eyes and the growing knot in their stomachs.
They didn’t have solutions either. What they had was something different—a way of staying present to catastrophe without letting it swallow them whole.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
I’ve been reading old books lately. Not for answers exactly, but for company. Four voices in particular keep finding me when I need them most.
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
Lao Tzu — Chinese philosopher, 6th century BCE
Tao Te Ching
I think about this one when I’m spiraling about how slowly things change. Politicians talk, corporations greenwash, and the ice keeps melting. Lao Tzu watched empires crumble from exactly this kind of forcing—humans pushing harder, faster, more, believing they could outrun nature. He wasn’t telling me to do nothing. He was telling me that meaningful change has its own rhythm, and my job isn’t to speed it up but to become part of it. That’s different from waiting. That’s like… learning to breathe underwater.
“You cannot travel the path until you become the path itself.”
Buddha — Dhammapada
The Buddha sat under a tree while the world burned. I mean that almost literally—wars, famines, the collapse of everything familiar. His students kept asking about the future, about what would happen next. And he kept pointing them back to right here, right now. Not because tomorrow doesn’t matter. But because this moment is the only place my hands can actually reach. I can’t fix 2050 from my couch. I can only decide what I do with the next hour.
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together.”
Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
Marcus Aurelius ran an empire during a pandemic. Real one—the Antonine Plague killed millions. He had every reason to despair and instead he wrote about acceptance. Which sounds passive until you realize what he actually meant: accept what you cannot control so you can pour everything into what you can. I can’t stop the seas from rising. I can love the people I’m in this mess with. I can show up. That’s not giving up. That’s choosing where to spend my limited energy.
Hildegard lived nine hundred years ago and already she was writing about ecological destruction—forests cleared, rivers poisoned, the land exhausted by greed. She called the earth our mother and said injuring her was like injuring ourselves. What gets me is how she responded: not with data or arguments but with gardens. With medicine. With music. She healed people by reconnecting them to the natural world. Maybe that’s where my healing starts too—not in the headlines but in the dirt under my fingernails.
“The earth sustains humanity. It must not be injured. It must not be destroyed.”
Hildegard von Bingen — German abbess, 1098–1179
Causae et Curae
What connects them all
What They All Understood
A Chinese sage, an Indian teacher, a Roman emperor, a German nun. Thousands of years apart, speaking different languages, facing different disasters. But they’re all saying something similar, aren’t they? The way through isn’t denial. And it isn’t despair. It’s this uncomfortable middle place—staying present to the pain without drowning in it.
I’m starting to understand that my anxiety isn’t a sign something is wrong with me. It’s a sign I’m paying attention. It’s a sign I love this world. The question isn’t how to stop caring. It’s how to care without being crushed by it.
Before you go
A Moment for You
Tomorrow the news will have another disaster. I’ll probably read it. I’ll probably feel that familiar weight settling on my chest. But maybe I’ll also step outside. Feel the air. Notice that the tree in my neighbor’s yard is still there, still reaching upward, still doing its quiet work of turning light into life.
If you need a place to breathe—somewhere to set down the weight for a few minutes—InnerCalm+ has guided practices for exactly this. Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is pause long enough to remember why any of this matters.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.
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