Identify, Express and Manage Your Emotions

It can be helpful to identify your feelings and take action to address your emotional state.

Identify Emotions

1. Climate Café is a simple, hospitable, empathetic space where you can express fears and uncertainties about our climate and ecological crisis. Search online to see if you can find one near you or go ahead and invite your friends and acquaintances to join your version of the Climate Café. The idea is simple: meet with other people in person or online and take turns expressing how you feel about climate change. Here’s a link to information about how to host a Climate Café.
2. If you’re not a talker, groups dedicated to writing, art and music will welcome you.
3. Ideas about why and how to talk about climate change.
4. How to talk to kids about climate change.
5. The following links, to an in-depth description of somatic therapy developed to address Native American intergenerational trauma, could be helpful for anyone.

Manage Emotions

Thinking about possible future outcomes can be scary. If you find it overwhelming and want help dealing with this difficult truth, checkout these resources:

Psychology

© Maggie Rudy

1. Take a look at resources for resilience.
2. If you need urgent support or are having suicidal thoughts, you are not alone. Call the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources to find more resources.
3.  Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA). The CPA is a developing network of climate psychologists that offers resources and workshops. There are separate sites for practitioners in the UK, Australia, and US/Canada, as well as a budding international site.
4. Here are ideas from NPR about Managing Climate Anxiety – NPR.
5. A New York Times article about Climate Change Anxiety – NYT.
6. Good Grief Network A nonprofit organization that uses a Ten Steps approach inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous to help people recognize, feel, and process eco-anxiety and other heavy emotions triggered by the planetary crisis.
7. Regenerative Cultures A regenerative culture is about treating ourselves, others, and our planet with care, giving more than we take, and unlearning the toxic prejudices of our current system. Find out more in this dedicated website.
8. Climate & Mind A large repository of articles, books, videos, and more, exploring human psychological reactions to the climate and ecological crisis.

Mindfulness

Increasingly, people learn to manage difficult emotions with mindfulness, meditation and by learning how to be in the present rather than yearning for the past or feeling anxious about the future. Popular resources are widely available as books, audio streams, and YouTube videos. Search Climate Change with one of these names to see if these are helpful for you: Eckhart Tolle, Pema Chodran, Tara Brach and many other insightful teachers. Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet is a good example. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Sunryu Suzuki is a good place to start learning about meditation and useful approaches for managing emotions. Another good book for beginners is Shambhala by Chogyam Trungpa (a complicated person whose teachings have helped millions).

Let’s remember to take good care of each other!

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