Climate anxiety from the lens of a social scientist

One of the more common ways to see climate anxiety is as a practical anxiety. It’s a set of feelings - namely, stress, fear, dread, overwhelm - that motivate people to care more about the ecological crisis, the injustices in its throws, and the future of our world. In this way it’s seen as something that’s, honestly, good because it leads to problem solving or to someone shifting the way they use plastic or how much they drive their car. From this perspective, it’s worthwhile to process climate anxiety because it helps us as change makers get back to work.

Another way to look at climate anxiety is through the lens of a social or political scientist. I, personally, really like this lens because it invites me to zoom out and view things from a macro perspective. From this bird’s eye view, things like climate anxiety are more evolutionary, and therefore a little less personal.

For the past few centuries, social and political scientists have looked at rises in collective anxiety as signs that shifts are afoot in our social order. The phenomenon that a large group of people are experiencing something like climate anxiety is not only a reflection of changes happening at an individual consciousness level, but that there are also changes happening at the collective consciousness level.

The collective consciousness is a sociological term coined by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the 19th century. It describes the attitudes, ideas, beliefs and morals that are shared by a society and therefore serve as glue to hold that populace together. It’s the consciousness that’s embedded in our social order, and therefore serves as the foundation for how we design laws, enact policies, raise our kids, and educate our future leaders. A part of his work revolved around this question of how a society maintains its integrity and coherence as its institutions and cultural practices change (i.e. in the face of modernity, within his context).

I think it’s really easy to make a case that things are shifting for us at a social-order-level these days. I mean, many of us just feel it, but we also see our political system running in circles, polarization at civil war-like levels, and things like the notion of “truth” bearing no shared semblance across institutions or groups. Some of the fundamental puzzle pieces that make up our society are in flux right now, and many of us don’t know where to go or what to do with it.

Within the context of climate change and the ecological crises that are at our doorstep, I believe this is where the experience of climate anxiety comes into play. Climate anxiety is not only here to keep us motivated to take action and change, but it also holds information for us, deeper information, about how exactly we need to change at more fundamental levels.

The fields of neuroscience and clinical psychology teach us that our emotions serve to inform us about our personal needs and our environment. If we learn to listen to our emotions and be in relationship with them in intentional ways we can be guided on how best to adapt to the circumstances around us, and not only survive but thrive in the face of adversity.

Weaving all of this together, and continuing to view things from a social scientist’s lens, the climate anxiety that many of us feel is not only communicating something to us about changes we need to make to our shopping choices and lifestyle habits, but it’s also communicating something to us about the deeper cultural shifts that are taking place for society right now. Our society’s collective consciousness is something that is inextricably linked to our individual psyches and consciousnesses, and it also lives on by itself as some sort of mystical thing that has an evolutionary path of its own (for instance, if one of us dies the collective consciousness doesn’t die with us). Therefore in this sci-fi type of way, by tapping into our own feelings of climate anxiety, and by opening ourselves up to what it’s saying, we can begin to ascertain tidbits of information about what’s shifting for us as a society right now. We can touch into new norms, pieces of wisdom, or ways of being that are beckoning to come forth.

The next task, then, is to put those new norms into practice. Which, of course, is much more easily said than done. But that’s for another essay; and is what I consider to be a spiritual practice in its own right.

I’ll leave you with this - a humble prayer: May the climate anxiety that swirls and churns within you be of deep service to the consciousness shifts that are taking place. May you know the value that your conscious awareness of your own climate anxiety brings. May you feel empowered in this role and in the seemingly simple, yet challenging, act of presence that is at the heart of this work.

And so it is.

Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿