Daphne Chouliaraki Milner

You’ve been working at the intersection of psychology and environmental action for years. Why did you feel now was the moment to write and publish Surviving Climate Anxiety?

Thomas Doherty

Climate change, social justice, the economy: These are issues we swim in our whole lives. It takes time to get a sense of the world and our place in it. There’s never a bad time to try to make the world better, but the time you do it is when you’re positioned to. So the answer is multifactorial.

I had the idea to collate decades’ worth of work into one place, and I am fortunate to have supporters behind the scenes, like an agent, to help navigate publishing. I was also at a stage in my career where I was harvesting ideas and concepts. And there was this urgency to get the message out. I’ve been working with people navigating these difficulties and seeing success stories for years. Meanwhile, most media is 97% doom and gloom on climate. That won’t change—that’s how the market and our nervous systems work. No one’s in charge of keeping us mentally healthy. It was partly that realization, but also this moment, being at a place in my life where I had the time to pull all these ideas together.

My book is about showing that there are other possibilities. Stories of people like you who might inspire you. I try to be as transparent as possible because I don’t expect readers to do anything I haven’t done. And my message isn’t perfect, but I hope it empowers people to find what makes them the best they can be.

Daphne

In the book, you describe climate anxiety as one of the biggest mental health threats of our time: a global mental health crisis. What makes it different from other forms of anxiety or depression?

Thomas

Maybe we should start with how it’s similar. Anxiety is a normal, healthy emotion that helps us to move through the world and keeps us safe. The ability for any species to become anxious is very adaptive in an evolutionary sense. 

So, it’s important not to let go of anxiety or scapegoat it as a bad feeling. But the goal with a healthy emotional life is to have a range of feelings, and to balance anxiety alongside curiosity, hope, humor, anger. In the era of climate change, I call this having “360 emotions.” Notice and claim them all, rather than getting stuck in a narrow range.

Acknowledging the spectrum of human emotion is also helpful for us to try to be humble and to realize we’re not really dealing with something that other humans haven’t dealt with in other times. Humans have always faced moral struggles. In my classes, I bring a chair to the front and call it a time machine. I ask my students to pick any perfect moment in history without moral struggles, without powers of good and bad clashing. It’s impossible. There isn’t one.

What’s unique about eco-anxiety is its pervasiveness. We evolved to deal with local threats in our community and our tribe and our home and our land that we can see. But carrying eco-anxiety means carrying global events in your mind in real time. The Earthrise photo in 1970 made us think of ourselves as planetary beings, which is a beautiful thing but also brings incredible weight. With today’s technology, our nervous systems are flooded daily with threats we can’t control.

Knowledge of global dangers is greater than ever—from forever chemicals in cookware to climate tipping points. And planetary consciousness comes with the realization that no one is “in charge.” That can feel like a cold slap in the face.

When I’m doing this work, I think of it in stages: waking up, taking in overwhelming information, sticking with it. You move through doors: doors of awareness, doors of epiphany, doors of consciousness. You don’t need it all figured out. It is overwhelming, yes, but people have navigated existential challenges throughout history. You can, too.

Daphne

You’ve spoken to hundreds of people who are struggling with that sense of overwhelm. From your research, what are the most common ways climate anxiety shows up day to day?

Thomas

It shows up as this kind of moral choice paralysis where we feel like we don’t have the right answer, we’re out of our comfort zone, and we get stuck. I think back to the 1990s when I was younger and working for Greenpeace. Suddenly, everyday things—disposable coffee cups, paper receipts, what kind of milk in your coffee—became loaded. All the people I knew switched to soy milk as a signal. But it’s still fraught. The decisions we make every day are fraught with questions around animal rights and ecological well-being. That’s the paralysis. So, most of us just close our eyes and make a choice to get through the day. And then multiply that by a thousand.

Daphne

Amidst all the fraught decisions we’re making every single day, the book is about building an empowered life in the middle of crisis. What role does hope play in managing climate stress? And how do you cultivate hope without slipping into false optimism?

Thomas

Well, probably the most important message of my book is that it is possible to be happy in an ethical way. That’s the tragedy of eco-anxiety: People feel like their happiness, or their children’s happiness, has been stolen. And it’s just false. Happiness, like anxiety, is a natural emotion. And there are moments of happiness even in the middle of a disaster event. 

Hope is complicated. Years ago, when I did wilderness therapy, we learned in first aid: Stop, survey the scene, don’t create another victim. That’s how I think about hope. People rush to it, but haven’t really questioned what it actually is. And hope is many things: a way of thinking, a way of feeling, a gut reaction, whom you talk to, the information you take in.

In the book, I describe a horizon of hope. On good days, I can imagine positive outcomes far into the future. On hard days, that horizon shrinks maybe to just the next five minutes in a burning building. So hope is something you have to practice with. Too many people wait for someone else to hand them hope. But real hope is something you create.

There isn’t one answer. Hope is thoughts, feelings, knowledge, habits of mind. The more you educate yourself, the more realistic your sense of hope becomes. You see what actions you can take, and what mindset helps. So hope is a practice; it’s a sort of apprenticeship.

Daphne

As someone who has dedicated your career to educating yourself on this topic, what does meaningful climate action look like today?

Thomas

I’d say meaningful action starts by looking inward. A big part of my book, alongside thriving, is this idea of environmental identity. Before grief or action, we need to ask: Who are you? Where did you grow up? What do you value? We hurt where we care. If you care about the environment, it means you have values, it means you have something that you live and care for. Building that environmental identity—just as we build our gender, cultural, or sexual identity—gives us solidity. From there, environmental actions will flow naturally from values, and not just from what’s in the newspaper. Once you connect your values to your actions, that link is unbreakable.

Whether you “succeed” or not is almost irrelevant because you’re living by your values. Like an athlete, your job is to show up and do your best. Winning or losing isn’t the point. Research on environmental action shows there’s a line between our values, our understanding of threats, and our sense of efficacy; this belief that “I can do something.” That way, if you see a threat that doesn’t align with your values, and you know you have something to offer, you’ll feel motivated to act. If you don’t act, you’ll feel uncomfortable.

And then the direction really depends on the person. It could be private actions, like how you live at home, what you buy, what you eat. It could also be public actions: advocating at work, engaging in journalism, or participating in activism. Most environmental action is invisible. It happens in homes, workplaces, committees, government offices. The missing piece for many people is efficacy. They feel the threat and the impulse to act, but don’t see how to act for themselves. And when you don’t feel capable, you avoid it. So the simple answer is: Look inside. Start with your values—the ones you’ll carry through your life.

Daphne

This book comes out of many years of work. Over that time, both the climate crisis and the political landscape have changed dramatically. What was the biggest challenge or learning as you pulled it all together?

Thomas

One of the biggest challenges was not getting hijacked by politics. The rise of demagogues, fascism, the constant crises we read about every day. It’s easy to let your nervous system be taken over by the news. It feels endless, like nothing you do will matter. It breeds powerlessness.

In fact, the easiest way to make someone feel powerless is to have them watch the news for 30 minutes. The easiest way to make them feel powerful is to have them look around their life for 30 minutes and notice their resources. For me, it was a daily exercise in protecting my consciousness so I could keep creating. 

And of course, not giving up on myself, asking, who am I to write this book? Like I said, every day there was the risk of being hijacked by a new story or idea that would turn me into a consumer instead of a creator. But I had to preserve that little flame of efficacy, like a candle. This is my one life, and I’ll do the best I can. 

Daphne

If there’s one practice or perspective you hope every reader walks away with, what would it be?

Thomas

One would be this: You don’t need to solve climate change in order to cope with it. We often think, if I don’t have an answer, I can’t cope. But most of life is like that—we can’t “solve” our family relationships, aging, injustice, or getting everything we want. But we learn to cope with those existential challenges.

This is especially important for young people because they link their coping with answers and activism. That’s important to a certain extent, but if coping only depends on success, then failure feels like you can’t cope or can’t be happy. The secret is realizing you can cope, and you can have moments of happiness even while struggling for solutions.