What to do About Eco-Anxiety | Jay Michaelson
Meditation teacher, rabbi, lawyer, activist, and journalist Jay Michaelson discusses eco-anxiety and climate change. He challenges the notion of individual habit change, emphasizing systemic political action, and details how meditation can build resilience for effective engagement.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
Jay Michaelson's Longstanding Engagement with Climate Change
Understanding Eco-Anxiety and the Need for Systemic Action
Debunking the Delusion of Individual Habit Change for Climate
The Negligible Impact of Individual Actions on Global Climate
Five Ways Meditation Enhances Climate Political Engagement
Addressing Aversion to Politics in Contemplative Circles
Tactical Meditation for Working with Climate Anxiety
Box Breathing: An Antidote for Calming Anxiety
Future Climate Projections and the 'Death Spiral'
Jay Michaelson's Personal Approach to Climate Anxiety
Effective Communication Strategies for Climate Change
Lessons from Activism: Responding to Offensive Comments Mindfully
The Value of Individual Actions Beyond Climate Impact
5 Key Concepts
Eco-Anxiety
A new term in the mental health community referring to the underlying dread and concern about the climate crisis and the future world we are leaving for our children. It can lead to feelings of being freaked out, withdrawal, or immobilization by fear.
Individual vs. Systemic Action
This concept highlights that individual behavioral changes, such as reducing one's carbon footprint, have a negligible impact on global climate change. Instead, meaningful change requires large-scale systemic and collective political action to shift energy production, agriculture, and other major contributors.
Drawdown Project
A consortium of scientists and other experts dedicated to identifying and analyzing the most effective solutions for reducing greenhouse gases and addressing climate change. Their research indicates that individual actions are not effective in making a global difference.
Pendulation (Trauma)
A concept, often discussed in relation to trauma, where one moves towards difficult experiences or emotions and then pulls back when it becomes too overwhelming. In the context of climate engagement, it means knowing when to engage with the difficult realities and when to step back to recharge.
Equanimity
A state of peaceful settledness or acceptance with what is, even when facing challenging or difficult truths like climate change. It involves letting go of resistance to pain, which is often the source of suffering, allowing one to be with reality without being controlled by it.
8 Questions Answered
Eco-anxiety is a new term in the mental health community describing the underlying dread and concern people feel about the climate crisis and the future world, often leading to immobilization or denial.
No, according to scientists and projects like Drawdown, individual behavioral changes have a negligible impact on global climate change; systemic and collective action is required to move the needle.
Meditation can help by enabling individuals to tame eco-anxiety and rage, endure more political work, act more effectively, discern when to pull back, and find joy and purpose in their activism by aligning with what the world needs, what they're good at, and what brings them joy.
Some meditators view meditation as 'me time' or relaxation, and politics can be seen as a 'bummer' that brings in challenging emotions. There's also a bias that solutions to all problems must lie within individual transformation, which may not apply to systemic issues like climate change.
Box breathing is a technique to calm anxiety by regulating the breath into four equal parts: inhale for four seconds, hold breath (full) for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and hold breath (empty) for four seconds before the next inhale.
While not an apocalypse movie, scientists suggest 2035 as a 'threshold year' when warming could enter a 'death spiral,' leading to a steady creep of increasingly severe and normalized events like unprecedented hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts, with each year potentially worse than the last.
The most effective strategy is to ask them about changes they've noticed in their local environment, listen to their personal experiences and doubts without shaming, and then discuss systemic solutions that don't necessarily impact individual lifestyle choices.
Individual actions are valuable because they reflect personal ethical values, communicate beliefs to others, and help build a sense of community around the issue, even if they don't directly reduce global carbon emissions.
12 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Systemic Climate Action
Understand that individual behavioral changes (e.g., reducing personal carbon footprint) have a negligible impact on global climate change. Instead, focus energy on collective and political actions that address systemic issues like shifting energy grids to renewables or changing agricultural practices.
2. Meditation for Effective Activism
Employ meditation to manage difficult emotions like eco-anxiety and rage, preventing immobilization or unskillful action. This practice builds resilience, enabling individuals to endure challenging political work and act more effectively in discerning where to best apply their energy.
3. Find Joyful, Sustainable Activism
Use mindfulness to identify activism that aligns with ‘what the world needs,’ ‘what you are good at,’ and ‘what brings you joy.’ This discernment helps ensure long-term engagement and effectiveness, avoiding burnout from joyless or unsustainable efforts.
4. Tame Eco-Anxiety with Mindfulness
Address eco-anxiety by allowing difficult feelings to be present and investigating them without being controlled. Practice feeling what’s true, acknowledging it (e.g., ‘right now, it’s like this’), and creating mental spaciousness to prevent denial or impulsive reactions.
5. Practice Box Breathing for Calm
When feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, use box breathing: inhale for four seconds, hold for four, exhale for four, and hold out for four. This technique helps to calm the nervous system and reduce immediate distress.
6. Engage Doubtful Individuals Effectively
To persuade those doubtful about climate change, ask them about personal changes they’ve noticed in their local environment and listen to their concerns without shaming or preaching. Focus on shared experiences rather than distant events or forcing solutions.
7. Mindful Crisis Contemplation
Actively bring difficult, challenging subjects like climate crisis headlines or worst-case scenarios into meditation. Monitor physiological and psychological reactions with curiosity in a safe space to build resilience and equanimity, preventing the mind from freaking out when encountering these topics in daily life.
8. Live Personal Ethical Values
Engage in individual actions like lowering consumption, composting, or driving electric cars as an expression of personal ethical commitments. While these actions do not significantly impact global climate change, they are important for living one’s values and communicating beliefs within a community.
9. Engage in Local Politics
Participate in local political processes, such as supporting initiatives to switch to solar grids for local electricity. Collective action at the local level can lead to significant systemic changes when scaled across many communities.
10. Cultivate Equanimity with Truth
Practice being at peace with ‘what is,’ even when confronting painful truths like climate change. Letting go of resistance to difficult realities can lead to a subtle contentment and peaceful settledness, reducing suffering.
11. Integrate Anger into Meditation
Don’t shy away from bringing anger into your meditation practice. Use it as a training ground for the mind to be with difficult feelings, allowing you to confront them more skillfully in daily life without being controlled by them.
12. Contemplate Death to Affirm Life
Engage in practices like memento mori (contemplating death) not to be morbid, but to affirm the finitude of life. This helps cultivate peace, equanimity, and acceptance, highlighting the importance of each moment and relationships.
5 Key Quotes
No amount of individual action, even if all the good people in the world did it, would be enough to make a difference. We need systemic and collective action.
Jay Michaelson
The goal of meditation is not to repress your feelings. It's to feel them, but not be controlled by them.
Jay Michaelson
Pain is mandatory, but suffering is optional.
Sylvia Borstein (quoted by Jay Michaelson)
The solutions are within reach, but it's so far, they're not within our political will.
Jay Michaelson
The work of finding a way to coexist with people with whom we profoundly disagree in order to save life on earth as we know it.
Jay Michaelson
4 Protocols
Five Ways Meditation Helps Climate Action
Jay Michaelson- Use meditation's capacity to tame eco-anxiety and rage, allowing individuals to feel the pain of climate change without being immobilized by fear or denial.
- Develop the ability to endure more political work by being with difficult emotions, which is a 'meditation superpower' for navigating challenging interactions.
- Act more effectively and choose where to put energy, discerning actions that truly matter versus those that only provide a false sense of agency.
- Utilize mindfulness to recognize when one has had too much engagement (pendulation), signaling when to pull back, meditate, and recharge.
- Employ mindfulness for discernment in finding activism that aligns with 'what the world needs,' 'what I might be good at,' and 'what brings me joy' (Venn diagram approach).
Working with Climate Anxiety (Two-Pronged Approach)
Jay Michaelson- **Antidote**: Find ways to calm down immediately, such as using breathing techniques like box breathing, when anxiety is overwhelming.
- **Investigation**: Allow some of the anxiety to be felt and investigate what is present in the body and mind (e.g., during doomscrolling), acknowledging feelings without being controlled by them, and staying with the present moment experience rather than spinning catastrophic stories.
Box Breathing Technique
Jay Michaelson- Inhale for four seconds.
- Hold breath (full) for four seconds.
- Exhale for four full seconds.
- Hold breath (empty) for four seconds before the next inhale.
Effective Climate Communication (for the Doubtful)
Jay Michaelson- Ask individuals if they have seen any changes in their local environment or personal lives (e.g., fishing, hunting, weather patterns).
- Listen deeply to their personal experiences and doubts without shaming or preaching.
- Acknowledge and address their concerns, especially those related to perceived impositions or political correctness.
- Shift the conversation to systemic solutions that do not necessarily impact individual lifestyle choices (e.g., transitioning electricity grids from coal to renewables).
- Share personal stories of how climate change has already impacted lives to foster relatability.