environment

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

Must-Read Resources for Eco-Friendly Business Ownership

The climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues facing the world today. Many who would like to make their mark in the business world worry about how to start a business that factors the environment in from the start. After all, it’s easy for even a relatively small business to have a significant carbon footprint. 

Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to make sure your business does more good for the planet than harm. Paleoterran is proud to offer these resources business owners can use to create sustainable, environmentally friendly companies: 

Getting Your Business Started 

Business stability empowers you to make a bigger impact: 

  • Make sure you have enough funding to keep your business going long enough to become profitable. 

  • Consider working with a Colorado registered agent LLC formation service to give yourself legal protections and, in some areas, tax advantages. 

  • Work with a financial advisor to ensure you’re using your money in the best ways possible. 

Reducing Negative Global Impact 

Some simple steps can limit environmental damage: 

Being an Agent of Change 

Businesses can have a powerful voice; here’s how to use yours: 

Business owners can make a serious impact in a community. This means that your entrepreneurial journey can empower you to push real, measurable change in the fight against the climate crisis. We hope this article gives you the tools you need to create a business that helps protect the planet we share. 

Photo Credit: Pexels

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.”

"Climate change affects military readiness"

“Climate change affects military readiness, strains base resilience, creates missions in new regions of the world and increases the likelihood that our armed forces will be deployed for humanitarian missions. In many cases it also threatens our infrastructure and affects our economy. And our continued reliance on the fossil fuels whose consumption leads to climate change ties our nation’s hands on the world stage and tethers us to nations that do not always have our best interests at heart.”
— Rear Adm. David Titley (Ret.)

Damnation: "Nasty questions" about dam removal

"This powerful film odyssey across America explores the sea change in our national attitude from pride in big dams as engineering wonders to the growing awareness that our own future is bound to the life and health of our rivers. Dam removal has moved beyond the fictional Monkey Wrench Gang to go mainstream. Where obsolete dams come down, rivers bound back to life, giving salmon and other wild fish the right of return to primeval spawning grounds, after decades without access. DamNation’s majestic cinematography and unexpected discoveries move through rivers and landscapes altered by dams, but also through a metamorphosis in values, from conquest of the natural world to knowing ourselves as part of nature."

Damnation