Like many others, my first experience of activism was watching others do it. But through the sense of empathy and connection we feel for others, this can be a crucial prequel to participation.
Our brains become wired ready for this type of observational learning when we’re infants. As babies in our cots, it starts by us waving our arms and limbs in front of us in response to our feelings. This helps our neural circuits for our intentions, our emotions and our movement to become interconnected. These networks become so intertwined that our brains acquire a Mirror Neuron System. This system helps regions of our brain that normally activate when we move, to also activate when we see others moving their bodies, and also to bring to our minds their potential intentions as if these intentions were our own. Not only this, but neither we as the observer, or the person we are observing, may even know this is happening. This provides the basis for almost an unconscious type of mind reading. And it’s not just for big actions (like waving our arms around) but also for micro expressions – those almost imperceptible muscular contractions that pass briefly across our faces. Neuroimaging research has shown that when we see another person’s face as they experience an emotion, regions of our brain can activate as if we are experiencing that emotion too. This helps explain how, when see others engaged physically and emotionally in a protest, we feel begin to feel engaged in the same way.
Jan Brascamp, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
21-Year-old activist Rosie described how her first encounter with civil disobedience affected her. She describes the sense of empowerment, but also the frustrations and anger that were motivated the activists: “When I came to London I went to a few smaller Just Stop Oil marches and I had my first witness of civil disobedience at one of those marches – where I saw some people my age standing and lying on a bridge….refusing to get up until they were arrested. Seeing people, I found it really, really, really emotional. Watching someone do that, I felt super powerful but also upsetting like: ‘why are you having to do this? To take action and put your body and yourself on the line at risk when everyone seems to be just going past like normal? And also like, we’re right next to parliament and the people who are supposed to be in power aren’t doing anything about it. I felt, yeah, just like emotional …it made me really want to get in the road with them, but I was cautious ’cause I hadn’t experienced this before, but I did definitely feel like an urge to just be like “take me too!”.”
Rosie’s involvement quickly escalated from observing to attending meetings, leafleting and slow marching until, one day, she found herself being arrested:
“So some people in Just Stop Oil sprayed a building in Canary Wharf with orange paint, ‘cause It was a company involved in funding the EACOP line (East African Crude Oil Pipeline). At this point, we were all a crowd, watching. And this big truck with a hose came to wash it off. So we all went and sat in front of it so they couldn’t wash it off. And I actually ended up getting arrested then for the first time unintentionally – like the police kind of swarmed in on us and just arrested everyone. I think it was over 30 students – for sitting in front of this building – (we) were arrested. So yeah, that was my first experience of that.”
Rosie used words like “upsetting”, “super powerful” and “tension” when describing her experiences, words that reflect strong emotions. Researcher and activist Robin Gulliver (University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia) has studied climate activism, including research involving interviews with 29 activists about its effects on them. Their stories resonate with Rosie’s experience:
“So often people start to engage in activism because they’re really, really angry about something,” explains Robyn. “Or they’re concerned about it or their friends are doing it and they see the passion they bring to the cause. So you already have heightened emotions when you start taking part in activism. And then, of course, that moment when you do something for the first time, if you join a protest or you go to a group or even to things like talking to your member of parliament or talking to political representative. It can be really intimidating and scary so you can feel quite heightened emotions.”
Robyn’s research highlighted a range of negative effects. The most common was sleep disruption – reported by almost half – with several juggling different medications to help manage their sleep. Others reported reduced interest and motivation at work – which can be a core sign of burnout or depression beyond sleep. However, the most common problems were with stomachs, weight and diet. I asked Rosie whether she felt that negative emotions ever became difficult for her?
“I guess when I first started really deeply thinking about climate I was in my first and second year of university in London,” Rosie told me. “So I think it was a bit of a different story then because I threw myself in – like feet first – and I didn’t quite know how to deal with that yet. So I was finding all these things out and I was, you know, I had lots of energy, anger, passion, excitement, and wanted to just engross myself in it and you know, like talk about it all the time. I think, yeah, at points there were definitely times, especially when it came to activism, where like the kind of the urgency and the adrenaline and, because you are in this bubble where everyone around you, if you are involved in an activist group or community that’s talking about it, this feels like the only thing in the world right now. Like this feels like there’s this huge, awful thing happening – which it really is, but it’s just that’s all that’s happening for that amount of weeks. And you can really just push yourself and push yourself and not realize and not check in with what’s going on – like how you’re really feeling. It is hard to slow down in those moments.”
The reality with climate change is that an activist is unlikely to see their individual activism change anything very much or very quickly. But Robyn emphasised that activism can still make you feel that something is being achieved. “The great thing about actually engaging in action or activism is that you can then do something.” Robyn explained. “You get the sense of achievement and we know that’s a really, really critical motivator of activism as well. That you feel like you are doing something – no matter how small, but you’re doing something. And then, when you join in a group, you’re doing something together that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, right?…. When you think about women’s rights or, or disability activism, for example, these things – they weren’t solved in a decade. They took hundreds of years sometimes of constant activism by people to actually get to the point where we are now. And I’m sure many activists would’ve completely felt like giving up and that it would never happen. And yet, with their group together, they had enough of a sense of ongoing achievement that it kept those movements going. And we have our civil rights, we have our gender rights and all these things that we enjoy today.”
Robyn emphasised how organizing into groups is important not just for practical reasons, but for the sharing of emotions, positive and negative – since these can become an important part of a bond with others that then supports activists. “These emotional connections can be really, really strong. And in some of the research I’ve done with long-term activists, so people who have been engaged in activism for decades, they will often say the one most important thing that keeps them going over time are the friendships and the joy. And sometimes they even say the love that they have for the other activists. They’re actually participating in these things with very, very strong emotional bonds.”
This emphasis on the social aspects of being an activist aligns very much with Rosie’s experience. “Becoming part of a community was a really nice thing,” she tells me. “To feel like you finally had like an outlet of people who see things similarly to you, that was really refreshing. So I felt like a strong urge to keep coming back. Yeah – it was just really nice to be around people who were say, thinking similar things and who I felt I was learning from. That was a really big thing. Like I felt really inspired by lots of the people around me and I was learning lots and lots.”
And this is where we start getting to the good news about being an activist – the positive health impacts, if you like, of climate activism. Indeed, most of Robin’s climate activists reported, like Rosie, enhanced connections and relationships, with motivation and energy increasing rather than lessening. In fact, the number of people reporting negative mental health impacts were as many as those saying that their mental health had improved as a result of becoming an activist.
All this made me wonder whether activism could actually improve our basic brain function in some ways. After all, Rosie has been in situations where she’s been followed, raided, arrested, and detained – all situations that might lead some of us to be less than calm. So I asked if she’d learn to manage her thinking and emotions in new ways? “Yeah, absolutely” Rosie tells me. “….I almost feel activism created a new way of thinking …..a radical consciousness that allowed me to navigate society in a new way and see things in a new way that, to me, felt liberating. Even in small ways, like I can dance in the street and it doesn’t matter people judge me – just stepping outside of those boundaries and unlearning fears and restrictions. But also, yeah, having anxieties build up because you’re exposed to new oppressions and repressions and then having to deconstruct those. So it’s like a journey, like a fluctuating journey for sure, of breaking down your own mental policing and then it building back up and breaking it down. And I think it’s never a journey that’s done. I think it’s a constant ongoing journey, but I think a lot of it is a mental kind of battle.”
Rosie wanted to point out, however, that the mental battle she referred to is easier to fight if you have friends you can talk to. Friends within the activists but also a balance with friends outside it: “I think it’s important to have both. Like you need a bubble of people who are doing this, but you also need people who are not in this kind of like ‘hyper radical head space’ because you need to be like able to get away from it. But at the same time it can also be frustrating being around people who aren’t in that head space ’cause you can feel alienated and you can feel like frustrated ’cause you’re like, wait, I’ve just been doing this crazy thing that feels so big and really powerful and then I step out into real world and actually everyone hasn’t even noticed,” she laughs. “Like it was a mental kind of week or whatever – and then now you’re all just going to the pub and I’m really confused,” she laughs again.
I asked Rosie if she felt more or less mentally resilient from becoming an activist, and on this points she was very clear: “Definitely more, definitely more. I didn’t know I was capable of these things. I didn’t know I was capable of organizing. I actually learned the most I feel I’ve ever learned in a short period of time because I learned how to organize a community and organize activism. And that meant doing things like on social media, doing things on hosting talks, hosting socials, all sorts, like making things. And that was such an informative educational experience for me. Like at points I felt like I was learning more than I was at university. Just like interacting with real people and learning from each other and sharing knowledge – knowing that I can then go through those things. Like (if) someone asked me four years ago ‘oh, would you go to a police cell?’ I would’ve been like, what?! So, like knowing that can happen to me and I can be okay. … And I know that that can be a very different experience for different people. Like I obviously have a lot of privilege and so that was an okay experience for me or so far hasn’t affected me too much. But knowing that I can do those things and be okay has definitely made me my eyes more open to the fact that I can achieve anything. <Laugh>, maybe not anything, but a lot more things seem possible! I kind of always try to explain, I always try and explain it to my friends and I know other people have had different experiences this, but for me, I genuinely think it contributes to my happiness. Like I think it makes me a happier person.”
Before I stepped out with XR to engage with my own little bit of activism, I asked Robyn if she had any advice about how to protect my wellbeing. She told me “It has to be something that you will find fun so you will enjoy it. It’s not a chore, not a job you’re doing that you’re not being paid for. You’re not doing it out of obligation, although of course we are, you have a moral obligation in some sense to do this. But it’s actually something you would do because you find it fun. And when you look at people at different activism events, you’ll often see a whole bunch of people having a lot of fun.”
I can confirm it was a lot of fun – and we drew attention to the cause in the local media too – I’m the hooded one!