Eco-anxiety – what is it?

Do you lie awake at night thinking about food shortages, conflicts over vanishing resources, nature loss and mass migrations?

I was spurred on to create this blog (and accompanying podcast) after receiving a voice message from Kalina, who told me: “I get really anxious about the environment…I just really worry about some of the global implications of climate change. We might have really large global migrations. There might be wars fought over critical resources that support life, like water, food fuel. And it’s just really scary…..“ (remember you can leave your own voice message on this website)

A recently published poll of 10,000 young people around the world, found that over 45% reported their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.  But I’ve been trained to be a sceptical scientist, so my first thought when I heard about eco-anxiety was “Really – is that a thing?” After all, you can imagine if you’re someone who generally worries about life, then climate change would be in there somewhere amongst the things you tend to dwell on. You could argue everyone should be anxious about how things are going in terms of the environment. Creating a word like “eco-anxiety” may get a few more clicks online, but does is this a condition – a disorder – a problem?

Perhaps surprisingly, these are questions that researchers have only just started to ask. The last 4 years accounts for 90% of research findings in this area. As often happens with new scientific ideas, there is even debate about what to call it. When I search up “eco-anxiety” on my favourite research database, that includes only peer-reviewed research …. the first thing I notice is that there’s so many different words used to describe anxiety about environmental issues – we’ve got “climate anxiety” “eco-worry”, “eco-distress”, etc. But research is beginning to shed light on how prevalent it is, what it is, whether it’s a disorder and how it might be addressed, even if researchers are still arguing about what to call it!

I began my journey to understand more about eco-anxiety by approaching Ans Vercammen at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Previously, in work published in 2023, Ans had been looking at climate distress amongst young people in the UK. As with the survey referred to above, Ans’s team found high levels of concern amongst young people about climate. They identified 60% of their 16 to 24 year olds as possessing a moderate or high level of climate distressed. They also found 10% with high climate distress, and I wondered whether these people were suffering something closer to a disorder – but Ans was cautious:

“We know that there is a proportion of young people who experience a greater degree of climate distress that would, could be characterized more as climate anxiety, which has implications on day-to-day functioning. So it may impact on their sleep, it may impact on their relationships, it may impact on their schooling, how they engage with their family, et cetera. We don’t know that that is necessarily the case in that 10%. What we do know is that there is a percentage of people who experience that quite intensely and who may have more clinical level symptoms of anxiety that are related to their concern and their worry around climate change. And that is something that we hear from clinicians who see this in practice.”

Interestingly, Ans’s team came to the conclusion that distress was an almost unavoidable correlate of engagement with climate change, and that was even when its effects were still quite distant to them. To me, that began to sound that eco-anxiety might be considered a normal response to a distressing situation.

“This is a tricky thing. We’ve talked at length about this with colleagues and with clinicians that we don’t, we want people to be concerned about climate change to some extent, because that concern and worry is an adaptive response to what is a real threat. I think what we’re seeing here with climate distress is a proportionate response to a very real existential threat….And we also know that the feelings that come with that concern, which can be frustration and it can be anger, they can fuel behavior like climate activism or private sphere, pro-environmental behavior. So that’s an adaptive response. So that in itself is, I think, a good thing.”

Ans’s team drilled deeply into the data to try to identify who amongst their sample of young people were most likely to be affected. They looked at ethnicity, rural versus urban, and whether younger or older people in that age group were affected – but none of those appeared related to climate distress. Being female, and having a history of mental health conditions were factors, but they also noticed climate distress was correlated with how much young people worried about politics.

“Climate change isn’t an environmental issue, it’s a public health issue. It’s an equity issue. So I think people who are engaged in that sort of civic manner may have a broader interest and because of that interest, perhaps also have a higher level of distress around the issue.

I suggested to Ans that young people who are more political might also be aware that not enough is being done.

“Yeah. I think that’s a very good point indeed. And you know, we see that a lot of our climate activists are very politically aware, and we know that our climate activists are also very concerned, obviously, about climate change and concerned about sort of social justice issues more generally as well. Yeah, I think you’re spot on there.”

It seems understandable and rational to worry more about the environment if you’re younger. It’s estimated being born in 2020 means you’ll have two to seven times more extreme weather in your lifetime than if you’re born in 1960 (Thiery, Lange et al. 2021). So, to understand more about the day-to-day realities of eco-anxiety amongst young people, I contacted Black Mountains College in Wales which specializes in agro-ecological practice. There I spoke to Fenella Lloyd, who is their student support coordinator. Fenella explained that, since Black Mountains College is a climate education focused organization, the experience of climate anxiety amongst staff and students was “pretty universal”, but expressed very differently across student the cohorts.

“it’s impossible to avoid. I think that for some students they’re already quite overwhelmed with concerns that are impacting on directly about climate change when they come into the organization. For other students they have an awareness and they want to work in the climate space, but as they develop their knowledge and understanding, I think they become far more attuned and far more sensitive to climate anxiety. The thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s sort of quite universal and hard for people to actually talk about because it feels really big. It feels quite hard for students to know where to start and also to untangle that from their life and their life expectations. And I think life expectations and planning for the future is the area where there is probably the greatest concern.”

Fenella told me that, for some students, it was particularly problematic

“They don’t know how to plan for the future, they don’t know how to move forward. It can act as a massive block. And I also think it’s like a horrible creeping anxiety that impacts, you know, of course the study for how will my personal life be? How will I find work? How will I perhaps, you know, find community, perhaps how will I find a family? And I think that can become really overwhelming. I see quite a lot of students with overwhelm.”

As a new are of research, the resources available in this area to support professionals like Fenella are limited. “I think what I’ve noticed is when we are working with students to identify how to support them, it’s actually really hard to pin down what they feel they need, what they feel would support them best. So there are lots of mechanisms we can use, right? Climate cafes – we can use all sorts of different forms of, you know, potential therapy or counselling, but it’s actually really hard to pin down what will support students and what will support their wellbeing best. And that’s partly because obviously our responses are individual, but I think there is an awareness of the enormity of the challenge really.”

So eco-anxiety does seem like a real and growing problem for many, particularly amongst young people, but there are still so many questions. For example – should we be thinking about this as a new type of anxiety disorder? One way to approach that question is to understand more about what eco-anxiety looks like in the brain. Scientists in Northern Michigan University used neuroimaging to find out how brain differences amongst young adult students related to their level of climate anxiety. They found those with greater climate anxiety had increased connectivity in the salience network – a network that helps you monitor the environment for information that is emotionally significant and help you select an appropriate response. These results suggest climate anxiety is a “thing” – in the sense that it’s associated a more efficiently wired salience network in the brain. This is also one of the differences seen amongst those with an anxiety disorder but it doesn’t label eco-anxiety as a pathology – because this circuit also operates when perfectly healthy individuals get anxious. And, perhaps more importantly, they saw that differences in this circuit predicted pro-environmental behaviour. This study looked at a fairly random sample of young adults, so it can’t tell us too much about the most eco-anxious of our young people – but, generally, these brain differences suggest climate anxiety was driving an adaptive response. In other words,  these climate-anxious brains were working like brains should work. This undermines the idea that we should think about “everyday” climate anxiety as a pathology.

If, generally, eco-anxiety shouldn’t be thought of as a disorder – how should we think about it? One person who has been thinking very carefully about the meaning of eco-anxiety is Panu Pihkala, at the University of Helsinki. His interdisciplinary environmental research focuses eco-anxiety and eco emotions research.

When I met Panu, we discussed first about the many different definitions and terms used in relation to eco-anxiety.

“I have been arguing at places, for example, in this handbook called Climate Change and Youth Mental Health, that people should have the right to use terms which feel suitable for them in relation to their own experiences. So if people prefer to call it worry or fear or even excitement at some points, that’s okay. But then in the academic scholarly world, I think we also need common keywords so that people can find research done by others. And none of those keywords is perfect.“

Panu views eco-anxiety more as a process, and one which individuals experience in different ways:

“I think often people, when they realize something of the severity of the ecological crisis, that causes a long-term process where they are trying to cope with the knowledge and trying to think about ‘what should I do in relation to this kind of world situation?’ If a person experiences a stronger awakening, and then there may be periods of more intense confusion and distress and so on. For some people it’s more like a growing realization over time.”

As people try to cope or adapt, Panu argues that different dimensions can be discerned in their effort.

“And my process model, the heart of it, is really a discussion of three simplified dimensions of action, emotional engagement, and taking care of one’s resources, which might be called self-care, for example.”

I think what I’ve learnt is that eco-anxiety – although it goes by many names – is a very real and growing issue. It may not be a disorder – but it clearly can become problematic – and is something we can’t afford to ignore. And Panu’s idea that eco-anxiety is an active process – something calling you to awaken and respond – that seems like a positive way to approach a phenomenon which we’re only likely to see more of in the future. The next episode of Mind, Brain and Planet will begin to focus on how we might respond to eco-anxiety.