Eco-Anxiety: What is it & How Can We Manage it?

By Iman Ebsaim, Hollie Ryan & Jenny Douglas

The Problem: 

"Climate change, global warming, deforestation, forest fires, melting ice caps, plastic oceans, global extinction."

These are words we are hearing more and more often, and as a result of continuously being bombarded by such dooming facts, anxiety can arise as a result. Eco-anxiety is a newly formed term which deserves attention and intervention to understand it further and coin ways to help deal with it. 

The feeling of helplessness is one of the main triggers of eco-anxiety, as we are bombarded with more news of the environmental risks that we are facing. Through information proliferation, we as humans have heightened sensitivity to negative information, weighing disadvantages over advantages (Tversky & Kahneman cited in Hills, 2018:3). Seeing destruction being caused by changing climate and effects of human behaviour (e.g., plastic use) makes people feel small and ineffective in the fight for saving the environment. 

Defining Eco-Anxiety: 

This term is used to describe the emotions that arise from the environment (Pihkala, 2018). The majority of people affected by this condition are those not directly affected by Climate Change, but rather they experience its effects through being exposed to its negative consequences globally (Weber & Stern, 2011; Pihkala, 2018). Currently, there is little research on the effects of Climate Change on mental and emotional health (Pihkala, 2018). Research has found people have suffered from feelings of helplessness, loss and frustration when confronted with the issues of Climate Change (Moser, 2013).

In 2017, the APA has described eco-anxiety as the "chronic fear of environmental doom" (Hulzen, 2019), although the definition has been coined; as it is still not listed among the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), it means that medical practitioners do not recognise it as a diagnosable condition. This does not mean that research and interventions to cope with eco-anxiety should not be undertaken. On the contrary, as it is not diagnosable yet under the system, it is more important that projects like ours are undertaken to ensure that anyone who may be affected by it will have the resources and knowledge to be able to overcome it. 

Who is affected, how and why?

Overwhelming media coverage of environmental damage, in addition to extravagant headlines such as ‘12 years to save the planet’ (Watts, 2018) can fuel imminent anxiety and fear (Hulzen, 2019). Fear is also instilled as people feel overwhelmed that they are helpless within this situation with no way out, or that their actions can have no positive effect. Some people may experience eco-anxiety more intensely than others, whereas some may not at all. This could be linked to the fact that environmental damage does not affect people equally. 

It is also important to note that eco-anxiety might not be an ongoing condition, as we have discussed with the participants in our workshop, that some would not categorise themselves as dealing with eco-anxiety, however, do experience it at times when they pay attention to environmental news or hear conversations surrounding the topic. 

In a survey conducted by the Yale Programme on Climate Communication (Leiserowitz et al, 2018), it concluded that 69% of Americans claimed to be ‘somewhat worried’ about global warming. 72% said that the issue of global warming is either ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important to them, highlighting the importance of the topic amongst people. As this intrinsically links to eco-anxiety, this emphasises the need for interventions to prevent eco-anxiety and provisions to deal with it when it does arise. 

More people could become affected by eco-anxiety if they were to view themselves as too small to make a difference. In an article by the BBC, the author explains that people become  ‘overwhelmed by the magnitude of the issue and mindful of their position as just one person on a planet of billions, they feel powerless’ (Fawbert, 2019). 

Target audience and scope of our project: 

According to the recent YouGov poll, almost two-thirds (70%) of young people in the UK (aged 18-24) suffer from eco-anxiety (Friends of the Earth, 2020). We thought it was important to tailor our project to attract this demographic, therefore we chose to create a workshop on campus at the University of Warwick, focused on how to understand and manage eco-anxiety. 

We targeted the student population by advertising our workshop as an event on Facebook to a group with 10,000 University of Warwick students. By hosting the workshop on a Wednesday afternoon, which is set aside for extracurricular activities, our goal was to make this workshop as accessible as possible for all students.

Our Intervention: A workshop on how to manage eco-anxiety:

In order to persuade students to attend our workshop, we created an engaging and salient poster, which visualised the issue of information proliferation which leads to eco-anxiety, as discussed earlier (Hills, 2018). By using images of issues which cause eco-anxiety alongside an image of a young student looking stressed, our poster was simple and easy to encode, directly related to personal experience (Dolan et al, 2011). In relation to Dolan et al’s MINDSPACE (2011), we used the incentive of free snacks to encourage students to attend the workshop and advertised this clearly on our posters and Facebook event. As this was an afternoon event, we felt that students were more likely at this time of day to be hungry, therefore the incentive of free food would be highly appealing.

Workshop Advertising:

Psychological Persuasion techniques used: Dolan et al’s MINDSPACE and Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion.

People are more influenced by authority figures in the decisions they make (Cialdini, 2001; Dolan et al, 2011) and the information they believe (Hills, 2018). Therefore, in our workshop introductory video (above), we included prominent news anchors such as the BBC, the renowned environmental scientist David Attenborough and climate activist Greta Thunberg. A section of the video was dedicated to exploring eco-anxiety as a real psychological issue by showing people’s genuine experiences of feeling overwhelmed by environmental degradation. By incorporating credible, knowledge experts and similarity, we aimed to engage students in looking further into this issue.

In the workshop itself, we chose to invite two guest speakers, one of the University’s Sustainability Champions and a staff member of a local Zero Waste shop, to talk about how they manage their daily eco-anxiety. According to Dolan et al’s MINDSPACE framework (2011), people are more likely to be influenced by a messenger who has similar characteristics to them, hence why we chose our guest speakers who were also students at the University. We decided to invite them face-to-face as “there is no technique in the psychological literature with more power to persuade than simply asking”, making it clear specifically when, where and what we wanted them to talk about (Hills, 2014). Both happily accepted our request. 

        

                                

Implementation Intentions:

After participants listened to our guest speakers, influenced by their behaviours to manage their eco-anxiety, we provided them with worksheet templates, in order to create their own individual goals with implementation intentions. Koger et al (2011) recommended that engaging an individual in such coping strategies can help them come to terms with the climate crisis, enabling them to actively set out how they will change their behaviour and lifestyle, giving them a sense of agency over their own actions within the collective system (Hayes et al, 2018). Instead of mere goal setting, we chose to facilitate this with implementation intentions due to their much higher rate of success on goal attainment (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). This is simply the idea of planning specifically when, where and how an individual is going to go about achieving their intended goal (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). As managing eco-anxiety is a long-term goal, implementation intentions are key for ensuring the shielding of ongoing goal pursuits from unwanted influences, such as eating meat, getting an uber or buying fast fashion frequently.  They are also key for creating automated goal-directed responses, such as automatically focusing on the vegetarian options when looking at a restaurant menu, or only buying a new item of clothing if the individual can envisage wearing it more than 30 times. Implementation intentions have been shown to be an effective strategy in reducing anxiety and helping those with mental health issues (Stern et al, 2013; Toli et al, 2015). We used implementation intentions as a form of behavioural therapy, as the changing of behaviour does lead to changes in emotions and cognition (Kaczkurkin & Foa, 2015). Our goal was to ensure that the workshop attendees felt they had the power to manage their anxious feelings and the agency to act upon their given intentions.

Implementation Intention Template

Reflection 

Part of the workshop, to further analyse how effective our intervention was to create behaviour change and create the tool of coping with eco-anxiety (as is the aim of this project), we created a feedback form to be completed by participants at the workshop, and the data collected was analysed in the following ways; 

Statistics:

From our feedback, all attendees agreed and strongly agreed that they had the resources to do this, which affirmed to us that by giving people the tools for behaviour change, they can be empowered to follow through with their actions.

Measurement of behaviour change:

Within this project, the way we measured behaviour change was by monitoring how many people interacted on social media with the event posted about the workshop, the number of video views, and most importantly how many people made the decision to attend the workshop.

We chose those measurements as indicators because they represent the effect of persuasion techniques used. Moreover, the data collected exhibit that those attended were being proactive in realising that eco-anxiety is an issue that should be discussed and were willing to take the step to take on an intervention to learn the skills to deal with it. 

How can this program be expanded in the future? 

For future programs, behaviour changes could be measured by following up with workshop attendees. Furthermore, a program could be established similar to that of the Climate Reality Project created by former US President Al Gore. Whereby, people attend a 2-day conference with multiple workshops and speakers, to enable them to communicate effectively what Climate Change is. Another method of enacting change could be the practice of mindfulness. A growing body of research has recommended the use of mindfulness for individually adapting and coping with eco-anxiety, therefore future workshops may benefit from focusing on this type of practice to incite behaviour change (Barrett et al, 2016; Wamsler & Brink, 2018).

References:

Barrett, B., Grabow, M., Middlecamp, C., Mooney, M., Checovich, M.M., Converse, A.K.,  Gillespie, B., & Yates, J. (2016). Mindful Climate Action: Health and Environmental Co-Benefits from Mindfulness-Based Behavioral Training. Sustainability, 8, 1040.

Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: Science and Practice. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Fawbert, D. (2019). 'Eco-anxiety': how to spot it and what to do about it. Retrieved from BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/b2e7ee32-ad28-4ec4-89aa-a8b8c98f95a5

Friends of the Earth. (2020). Over two-thirds of young people experience eco-anxiety as Friends of the Earth launch campaign to turn anxiety into action. [Online] Available from: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/climate-change/over-twothirds-young-people-experience-ecoanxiety-friends-earth-launch-campaign-turn. [Date Accessed: 03 March 2020].

Gollwitzer, P. M and Sheeran, P. 2006. Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Hayes, K., Blashki, G., Wiseman, J., Burke, S. & Reifels, L. (2018). Climate change and mental health: risks, impacts and priority actions. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 12(28), 10.1186/s13033-018-0210-6. 

Hills, T. 2014. If You Want More Out of Life, Just Ask. Psychology Today. [Online]. February 10. [Date Accessed: 03 March 2020]. Available from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/statistical-life/201402/if-you-want-more-out-life-just-ask 

Hills, T. 2018. The Dark Side of Information Proliferation. Perspectives on Psychological Science. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618803647 

Hulzen, J. (2019). What to know about eco-anxiety. Retrieved from MedicalNewsToday: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327354

Kaczkurkin, A. N., & Foa, E. B. (2015). Cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders: an update on the empirical evidence. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 17(3), 337–346.

Koger, S.M., Leslie, K.E., & Hayes, E.D. (2011) Climate change: psychological solutions and strategies for change. Ecopsychology, 3(4), 227–235. Doi: 10.1089/eco.2011.0041.

Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Rosenthal, S., Kotcher, J., Ballew, M., Goldberg, M., & Gustafson, A. (2018). Climate change in the American mind: December 2018. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. 

Moser, S. C. (2013). Navigating the political and emotional terrain of adaptation: community engagement when climate change comes home. Successful adaptation to climate change: linking science and policy in a rapidly changing world. New York: Routledge. Pp. 289–305. 

Pihkala, P. (2018). Eco‐anxiety, tragedy, and hope: psychological and spiritual dimensions of climate change. Zygon, 53(2), 545-569.

Stern, C., Cole, S., Gollwitzer, P. M., Oettingen, G., & Balcetis, E. (2013). Effects of implementation intentions on anxiety, perceived proximity, and motor performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(5), 623–635.

Toli, A., Webb, T.L. and Hardy, G.E. (2015) Does forming implementation intentions help people with mental health problems to achieve goals? A meta-analysis of experimental studies with clinical and analogue samples. British Journal of Clinical Psychology. Doi: 10.1111/bjc.12086

Wamsler, C. & Brink, E. (2018). Mindsets for Sustainability: Exploring the Link Between Mindfulness and Sustainable Climate Adaptation. Ecological Economics, 151, 55-61. Doi: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.04.029

Watts, J. (2018). We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. Retrieved March 09, 2020. The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report

Weber, E.U. & Stern, P.C. (2011). Public understanding of climate change in the United States. American Psychologist, 66(4), 315–328. Doi: 10.1037/a0023253