6 Tips for Soothing Your Climate-Related Anxiety While Also Combating Climate Change

Are you stressed just thinking about current environmental and climate-related issues? Whether you're an avid gardener or simply a concerned citizen, there are several reasons you may be feeling stressed or anxious about climate change. The good news is that you may be able to relieve that stress while also fighting against climate change. Here are six ways to push back against both stress and negative environmental effects due to climate change.

1. Take Matters Into Your Own Hands by Opening Your Very Own Eco-Friendly Business

If you're feeling frustrated with the current availability of environmentally friendly products in your area, why not take matters into your own hands and start up your own eco-friendly company? This one move could prove not only empowering for you but beneficial for the planet.

In order to increase your odds of success in whatever industry you choose, you'll want to assemble a carefully detailed business plan. This plan includes company descriptions, service descriptions, structural specifications, and other details about how the business will be funded and what kind of financial issues or revenue you will project in the near future. 

2. Prioritize Relieving Your Anxiety and Practicing Soothing Self-Care Regularly

According to one study, being tuned in to the latest news about climate change may be correlated with a higher risk of developing anxiety disorders. If you feel more stressed and anxious when you think about environmental issues, make sure you're practicing self-care often to help relieve that anxiety. For example, try to:

• Take deep breaths and/or meditate

• Practice calming hobbies, such as reading

• Exercise a few times a week

3. Reconsider Your Current Approach to Transportation and Swap to Environmentally Friendly Options

One aspect of your everyday life that could be leaving a significant environmental impact is your method of transportation. If you're concerned that driving your car every day is producing too much pollution, for instance, you could consider switching to other, more eco-friendly alternatives.

For example, your area may offer public transportation, such as buses, trams, and subways. You may also be able to cut back on your footprint by carpooling to work and trying to fly less often.

4. Adjust Your Daily Menu and Make a Difference Through Your Diet

You may not have realized it, but what you put on your plate every day can make a difference in the environment. Clean Eating points out that just a few simple swaps to your usual menu could help reduce your footprint! For instance, you can easily switch to a more eco-friendly diet by:

• Eating locally produced fruits and vegetables

• Avoiding imported foods

• Reducing your overall consumption of meat and dairy, and especially of red meat, such as beef

5. Modify Your Home in a Few Key Ways to Make It More Eco-Friendly

Lastly, you can soothe your anxiety and make a difference simply by upgrading a few key home features to more eco-friendly versions. For example, at home, you could: 

• Switch to lights that automatically turn off when you're not in the room

• Reduce your total home energy use

• Switch to low-flow showerheads

• Install a recycling system in your home instead of throwing everything away

• Planting more trees in your yard 

6. Invest in Solar Panels

Solar panels are becoming increasingly popular as a way to generate renewable energy. In addition to being environmentally friendly, solar panels also have a number of other benefits. For one, they can help to lower your energy bills by offsetting the cost of electricity from the grid. They can also increase the value of your home and provide a hedge against rising energy costs.

If you're planning to install solar panels, the cost is based on the home's usage needs, the type and size of panels, and whether you're on the utility grid. Solar panels typically come with long-term warranties so you don't have to worry about repairs.

In today's world, it's common to feel stressed or even anxious about climate-related issues. Fortunately, there are several ways to soothe your stress while fighting against climate change, whether you're practicing self-care or making eco-friendly changes at home, like installing solar panels. Adopt these six tips as your quick guide to get started. 

Julia Mitchell

Image via Pexels

If you read only one thing on the climate crisis, read this!

“Some climate cascades will unfold at the global level – cascades so large their effect will seem, by the curious legerdemain of environmental change, imperceptible. A warming planet leads to melting Artic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by the planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still. A warming planet will also melt Artic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth’s atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is thirty-four times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on a timescale of two decades, is eighty-six times as powerful. A hotter planet is, on net, bad for plant life, which means what is called “forest dieback” – the decline and retreat of jungle basins as big as countries and woods that spread for so many miles they used to contain whole folklores – which means a dramatic stripping-back of the planet’s natural ability to absorb carbon and turn it into oxygen, which means still hotter temperatures, which means more dieback, and so on. Higher temperatures mean more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still – and so on. A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still – and so on. Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more stay in the air, and contains less oxygen – which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further. And so on. These are the systems climate scientists call “feedbacks”; there are more. Some work in the other direction, moderating climate change. But many more point toward an acceleration of warming, should we trigger these. And just how these complicated, countervailing systems will interact – what effects will be exaggerated and what undermined by feedbacks – is unknown, which pulls a dark cloud of uncertainty over any effort to plan ahead for the climate future. We know what a best-case outcome for climate feedback looks like, however unrealistic, because it quite closely resembles the world as we live on it today. But we have not yet begun to contemplate those cascades that may bring us to the infernal range of the bell curve.” 

David Wallace-Wells
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
2019

Keep up with the climate crisis by following SUSTAIN TERRA on flipboard.com. Better yet, download the FLIPBOARD app on your mobile device and search for SUSTAIN TERRA.

Book: The Sixth Extinction

Just started reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for The New Yorker. (Her previous book was Field Notes from A Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.)

The following few paragraphs from the Prologue give you an idea of the subject matter and her writing style. Here she traces our early history from our spread out of Africa to our modern ability to drill for energy and its Earth changing consequences:

“Although a land animal, our species – ever inventive – crosses the sea. It reaches islands inhabited by evolution’s outliers: birds that lay foot-long eggs, pig-sized hippos, giant skinks. Accustomed to isolation, these creatures are ill equipped to deal with the newcomers or their fellow travelers (mostly rats). Many of them, too, succumb.

The process continues, in fits and starts, for thousands of years, until the species, no longer so new, has spread to practically every corner of the globe. At this point, several things happen more or less at once that allow Homo sapiens, as it has come to call itself, to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. In a single century the population doubles; then it doubles again, and then again. Vast forests area razed. Humans do this deliberately, in order to feed themselves. Less, deliberately, they shift organisms from one continent to another, reassembling the biosphere.

Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves or energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere. This in turn, alters the climates and the chemistry of the oceans. Some plants and animals adjust by moving. They climb mountains and migrate toward the poses. But a great many- at first hundreds, then thousands, and finally perhaps millions – find themselves marooned. Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.”

Global means global, not necessarily what's happening in your backyard

"The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for April 2014 tied with 2010 as the highest on record for the month."

NOAA National Climatic Data Center

Extreme weather images paralyze effective action

New research has shown that images of extreme weather in the media create negative emotional meanings and might lead to disengagement with the issue of climate change. The images symbolised fear, helplessness and vulnerability and, in some cases, guilt and compassion. Appealing to fear of disaster can lead to denial and paralysis rather than positive behaviour change. (emphasis added)

Extreme weather images in the media cause fear and disengagement with climate change