Well-being & Health

Eco-Anxiety Is Not Your Enemy

59% of young people describe themselves as extremely worried about the climate — and those who feel this anxiety engage more politically than those who don't. Science is redefining eco-anxiety: not a pathology to cure, but an adaptive signal to transform into collective force.

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Eco-Anxiety Is Not Your Enemy

TL;DR: Eco-anxiety affects 59% of young people aged 16 to 25 and two thirds of adults. But the data show that people who feel this anxiety engage more than those who don’t — provided that engagement is collective, not solitary. Eco-anxiety is not a disease to cure: it’s a rational signal in the face of a real threat, and there are documented methods for transforming it into momentum.

The survey came out in September 2021. Ten countries, 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25, a research team coordinated by Caroline Hickman from the University of Bath: the result is unambiguous. 59% of respondents described themselves as very or extremely worried about the climate. 75% felt that “the future is frightening.” 45% said this anxiety affected their daily functioning.

The instinct is to read these figures as a problem to solve. But the research suggests something else.

An Adaptive Signal, Not a Pathology

The American Psychological Association defines eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental disaster.” Thomas Doherty, researcher and APA Fellow, puts it this way: “It is normal to be anxious about climate change. We experience anxiety or grief because things we value are threatened.”

Joseph Dodds, in a review published in BJPsych Bulletin, goes further. If eco-anxiety is treated as a pathology to be cured, he writes, “the forces of denial will have won.” What we are witnessing, according to the Climate Psychology Alliance, “is not a tsunami of mental illness, but an epidemic of clarity that arrives far too late.”

This framing changes everything. Eco-anxiety is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that your alarm system is functioning correctly in the face of a real threat.

Anxiety and Ecological Grief: Two Distinct Emotions

These two experiences are often conflated — and the distinction matters. Comtesse et al. (2021) spell it out in an international review:

  • Eco-anxiety is future-oriented — it arises in anticipation of ecological losses to come, of threats that are still partially avoidable.
  • Ecological grief is past- or present-oriented — it corresponds to losses already experienced: a forest that has gone, a species extinct, a childhood landscape transformed.

These two emotions call for different responses. Eco-anxiety can be channelled into preventive action. Ecological grief needs to be honoured, recognised, and worked through — before it can transform.

Solastalgia, described as the distress caused by the unwanted transformation of a beloved place, is a concrete form of this: the feeling of displacement at home, when your home region becomes unrecognisable due to climate change.

Naming these nuances is not an academic exercise. It’s a way of validating real experiences that many people don’t yet have words for.

What the Science Says About Action

Here is the finding that should change how we talk about eco-anxiety. A study published in Current Psychology by Sarah Schwartz and her team followed 284 young American adults. The conclusion: collective engagement — not individual action — significantly buffers the link between eco-anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Sorting recycling, buying organic, reducing meat consumption: these gestures do not measurably reduce anxiety. What acts as a psychological buffer is engagement in a collective — an activist group, a local association, a civic movement.

This finding is confirmed by a large-scale study by Anneser et al. (2024), using a representative sample of 1,071 American adults followed over three years. 61% of participants reported eco-stress or eco-anxiety — and those who felt it participated more in civic life (campaigns, voting, local problem-solving) than those who didn’t.

Anxiety, at a constructive dose, is a more powerful civic driver than indifference.

Watercolour illustration of a young woman sitting in a meadow, hands in the earth, moving from worry to calm

The Spiral of Reconnection

Since 1978, a practical framework has been helping thousands of people navigate exactly this journey. The Work That Reconnects, developed by Joanna Macy, philosopher and peace activist, offers a four-stage sequence:

  1. Gratitude — anchoring in what is worth protecting
  2. Honouring the pain — accepting the fear, grief and anger, rather than suppressing it
  3. Seeing with new eyes — recognising interdependence, the living systems of which we are part
  4. Going forth — finding the concrete actions that flow from this recognition

The pivot of the process, Macy explains, is the second moment: “instead of privatising, repressing or pathologising our pain for the world […] we honour it. We learn to reframe it as suffering-with, or compassion.”

The Work That Reconnects Network is still active today, with workshops across many European countries and worldwide.

Four Paths Through Eco-Anxiety

These proposals do not make anxiety disappear — that is not their aim. The tension remains. But it can be lived differently.

1. Join a collective, not a list of individual gestures. The data are clear: the buffering effect comes from the collective. Look for a local group (neighbourhood association, transition network, repair café, civic movement) — not to “feel better” immediately, but so your anxiety finds a shared space and a direction.

2. Name what you feel with precision. Is it eco-anxiety (anticipation of future loss) or ecological grief (loss already experienced)? The distinction helps identify what you need: preventive action or space to move through grief.

3. Distinguish factual hope from denial-hope. Ojala (2012) showed this: “denial hope” — everything will work out, technology will solve it all — is associated with avoidance. “Evidence-based hope” — proven solutions exist, actors are already working — is associated with engagement. Feed yourself on real evidence, without denying what doesn’t work.

4. Seek a containing space for speaking. The Climate Psychology Alliance recommends this explicitly: not aiming to eliminate eco-anxiety, but to “build solid containers that allow the expression and exploration of emotions without collapsing under their weight.” Climate Cafés, Good Grief Network groups, Work That Reconnects workshops: these spaces exist and welcome people.

What This Anxiety Says About You

Kurth and Pihkala, in Frontiers in Psychology (2022), propose the notion of practical eco-anxiety: «a deeply valuable emotional response to threats such as climate change that, when experienced at the right time and in the right measure, not only reflects good moral character but can also contribute to individual and planetary wellbeing.»

The example they cite is Greta Thunberg, whose activism was born of her depression and her need to do something.

Eco-anxiety is not your enemy. It is a sign that you have understood something important. The question is not how to silence it — it’s how to find an outlet worthy of what it signals.

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