As climate change and its impacts intensify, so does the debate on eco-anxiety – both in public discourse and in psychology. Looking at eco-anxiety through a psychological lens may suggest framing it as a mental health issue, an individual suffering, or a call for professional help. Yet, to delimit “madness” in the face of climate change and the full-scale, unprecedented environmental degradation we are witnessing is problematic. What, indeed, would an “appropriate” emotional response to these realities look like? Isn’t the label “eco-anxiety” just a way to stigmatise as “overreacting” those who take climate change seriously? And how can we relate meaningfully to our own eco-anxious feelings or any other emotions we may experience in relation to the environmental crisis? What political value do these feelings hold?

With these questions in mind, I have been interested in how psychology, as a science, deals with “eco-anxiety” (or “climate anxiety”)¹ – in other words, how scientists construct the concept and produce knowledge about it. This, of course, touches on the more general issue of how psychology makes facts about mental health – and, also, on the limitations of the scientific understanding of our psychic lives. It would be naive to imagine that psychology merely describes what eco-anxiety – or any other mental health phenomenon – is like. Mental health theory and methodology shape their very objects: what environmental psychology says about eco-anxiety is inseparable from its theory and method, which are practices that literally “make” the knowledge about eco-anxiety. Thus, looking at psychological research practices allows us to discern what the science may miss out about eco-anxiety.

Given that popularised psychological notions shape how lay people relate to their mental health and emotions, it is paramount to critically examine the foundations of expert claims, reflect on their downsides, and search for potential alternatives. This does not mean going “against psychology”, but rather responding to the “critical importance of […] pluralistic visions of health, self, and society”. The aim should be to make space for as many perspectives as possible in the debate about eco-anxiety and environmental emotions.

Instead of adopting the psychological framing, we should think of eco-anxiety as a “public feeling”. Such a new framework opens up space for creating a richer, more inclusive, and more complex notion of eco-anxiety. Most importantly, it extracts environmental emotions from the private sphere and politicises them, placing them at the heart of the collective fight for climate action.

We should think of eco-anxiety as a “public feeling”. Such a new framework opens up space for creating a richer, more inclusive, and more complex notion of eco-anxiety.

Psychic experience, standardised

The definition of eco-anxiety developed by environmental psychologists is directly based on how psychology understands anxiety as such. The scientific meaning of “anxiety” is settled in the 5^th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This mental health “bible” provides the complete range of available diagnoses and their symptoms – like plant species in a botany handbook, to quote Lorna A. Rhodes’ ironic analogy. Environmental psychology assumes that eco-anxiety is a new type of the many different anxiety disorders characterised in this document. To gather data about eco-anxiety, environmental psychologists use a standard psychological research method: questionnaires, which are measurement tools that are supposedly a universal and objective means of determining levels of eco-anxiety in individuals and populations.

This mainstream scientific approach assumes that eco-anxiety is experienced in the same way across individuals and localities, manifested with the same set of symptoms, and measurable by the same set of questions. This stems from a tendency among mental health experts to see their work as global and view psychological facts about human beings as universally valid – “found” in nature rather than emerging from scientific and other societal practices. This outlook ignores the fact that experiencing and relating to emotions depends on the cultural and social environment in which we live and that psychological research is necessarily shaped by the specific positions of researchers themselves.²

This logic, based on a standardised definition of eco-anxiety and its quantified symptoms, grants a considerable power of meaning-making to experts. In contrast, people with eco-anxiety are reduced to passive entities subjected to standardised research practices, rather than authorities on their emotional experience. However, qualitative psychological studies of eco-anxiety better reflect the voices of those who are most affected. While this may seem like just a difference in research methods – quantitative versus qualitative – it reflects a deeper question about who has the authority to define eco-anxiety.

And indeed, lay people’s understanding of their mental health is not always in line with psychological and psychiatric expertise: Patients or caretakers sometimes challenge the “mental illness” framework applied to their experience by medical professionals. Alongside the dominant expert conceptions, there may be relevant lay ways of experiencing, accounting for, and relating to eco-anxiety, which standard research practices fail to understand. Listening to these voices enables a notion of eco-anxiety that is more nuanced, inclusive, and truthful. Rather than approaching people with a ready-made definition, we should ask the question of how eco-anxiety actually feels to those who experience it.

Rather than approaching people with a ready-made definition, we should ask the question of how eco-anxiety actually feels to those who experience it.

A shared experience of contemporary life?

But who should be included in such a discussion? How do we know that somebody “has” eco-anxiety, and how can we recognise it in ourselves? Psychology presents eco-anxiety as something that one either “has” or “does not have”. It equates eco-anxiety with a certain measurable amount of negative states compared to what is seen as the norm (healthy state). This approach is then incorporated into questionnaires that supposedly sort out people with severe, moderate, or no eco-anxiety.

This logic, however, is challenged when we read what psychotherapists working with eco-anxious patients write about their experience. US psychotherapist Jan Edl Stein recounts:

In my consulting room […] I have witnessed a gradual but persistent increase over the last 15 years of generalized anxiety. It is often expressed through focus on an inflamed personal issue. As we (therapist/patient) dig deeper, we can contact that nervous edge – ultimately the bedrock of fear – of climate chaos and ecological collapse. Contacting this bedrock of fear can shift a projection onto immediate and personal dynamics to a much broader existential angst so difficult for the human mind to hold.

In this understanding, eco-anxiety may be an unconscious, unexamined feeling, hidden below other, seemingly more pressing or immediate concerns. The way Stein speaks about it, eco-anxiety may well be merely an indistinct sensation, “nearly below our level of perception, […] an instinctual concern difficult to place in the context of our everyday lives.” We can read Stein’s essay as an invitation to rethink eco-anxiety: Instead of understanding it as a neatly defined psychological construct, manifested with a set of reportable symptoms, we can think of eco-anxiety as a deep existential insecurity experienced by many of us, but not necessarily manifesting itself in any specific form.

Indeed, Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist from the UK with a longstanding focus on eco-anxiety in children, opposes the idea that people with climate anxiety are constantly experiencing what is defined as “anxiety”. Instead, she recounts having seen her patients go through all sorts of strong, climate change-related emotions, which, rather than a somehow steady state of anxiety, may feel more like a confusing “emotional rollercoaster”. Some psychologists even prefer to use the less specific term “eco-distress”.

If we admit that eco-anxiety may be experienced in many different ways, and even by people who would not qualify as eco-anxious when measured by a standard questionnaire, we can start to think of it as a shared, collective feeling that belongs to the very condition in which we find ourselves, i.e., living with climate change. In fact, we could think of eco-anxiety as a “public feeling” in the spirit of Ann Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling.³ Cvetkovich attempts to rethink depression “as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical disease”. Depression, in her account, is part of  “how capitalism feels”; it is the expression of life under neoliberalism “in affective terms”. Viewed in this way, depression becomes “ordinary” – a common, “public” experience.

Thinking similarly about eco-anxiety would allow us to move away from the pathologising and individualising framework of psychology, and to consider it as a collective, “ordinary” experience belonging to life in times of climate change and ecological degradation. Such an outlook encourages us to pay attention not just to dramatic and visible emotional responses to climate-related crises, but also to “moments or experiences that are less remarkable and less distinct”. In other words, we can recognise eco-anxiety as a barely noticeable, matter-of-course part of our everyday life. This de-individualised understanding can radically expand the scope of voices deemed relevant to the discussion about eco-anxiety: As part of the societal “zeitgeist”, eco-anxiety concerns us all.

We can recognise eco-anxiety as a barely noticeable, matter-of-course part of our everyday life.

How eco-anxiety feels: A collective exploration

Understanding eco-anxiety as shared, however, should not lead us to assume that it is the same for everyone. Like climate change itself, Caroline Hickman points out, climate anxiety is a truly unprecedented experience. How it feels in different bodies is not a matter of a single definition, but an open question for a collective inquiry. To borrow from Cvetkovich, asking questions about eco-anxiety as a public feeling might be the “starting point for something that might be a theory but could also be a description, an investigation, or a process”.

The (non)existence of platforms where such an exercise could be carried out collectively is paramount: As environmental theologian Panu Pihkala highlights, emotions are shaped by social structures; thus, our ability to perceive and communicate our own eco-anxiety is dependent on collective spaces where we can share such sensitivity and vulnerability. We may learn something about our present situation by embracing the feeling of eco-anxiety in a collective, open-ended process.

To enable lay understandings of eco-anxiety, we must be open to improvised theoretical categories and unexpected formsof expression, which cannot be pre-determined but come from (always local and partial) experiences. We should aim for “a maximum number of alternative ways” of experiencing, communicating about, and sharing eco-anxiety. This approach resists oversimplifying eco-anxiety into something fully explainable. Instead, it allows eco-anxiety to become a notion and an experience that is ever more complex, contradictory, elusive, and uncertain.⁴

Can eco-anxiety be empowering?

As the climate crisis intensifies and ecological collapse becomes an increasingly visible daily reality worldwide, there is a growing sense of urgency that radical action is needed to protect the planet. However, the climate movement has slowed down globally following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic slowdown. In recent years, with the growing popularity of far-right parties around the world, many governments have deprioritised and slashed funding for climate action, while green legislation and parties have been blamed for issues ranging from rising prices to farmers’ struggles. At the same time, climate activists are portrayed both by right-wing politicians and in a large part of news and social media as radical or dangerous, and are even accused of eco-terrorism for their at-times disruptive actions. In other words, their eco-anxiety is de-politicised, and their agency and cause are questioned.

But eco-anxiety is an inextricable part of the youth climate movement that has emerged in recent years. Fridays For Future, one of the most successful green movements in history, is a powerful example of the political potential of collectively embracing eco-anxiety. The protests brought together millions of young people from around the world who demanded effective action to stop climate change and guarantee a liveable planet. The result was a global shift in political discourse, with governments facing increased pressure to enact ambitious climate policies, such as the European Green Deal and new emissions targets in countries like Germany and the UK.

The movement’s strong emotional rhetoric lies at the heart of its political action. A sense of pressure, despair, blame or fear pervades the public sphere on marchers’ banners and in social media posts. Viewing eco-anxiety as a shared, public emotion shifts our understanding of its role in the climate movement. Rather than being a private “problem to be solved”, difficult or “unhappy” emotions become the substrate of political action; the politics of the youth climate movement grows within its remarkable emotionality.⁵ Eco-anxiety concerns us all, not as a narrow category of mental health expertise and care, but as a shared affective experience permeating the present – a public feeling born out of a political system that has for too long been out of touch with ecology. Making environmental feelings public can nurture a collective agency. Recognising it as a shared human feeling doesn’t just shift how we think about emotional responses to climate change – it reshapes what kind of climate politics becomes possible. And, if we embrace and share it, our eco-anxiety can make us more resilient.

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1. Eco-anxiety and climate anxiety are very close terms that are sometimes differentiated on the level of definitions, but in scientific practice they overlap. In my analysis I therefore include both “eco-anxiety” and “climate anxiety” and the research about both of them. In this essay, I decided to use the term “eco-anxiety” because it is a broader term and “climate anxiety” can be subsumed into it. I use “climate anxiety” where I refer to scientific work which is namely about climate anxiety. ↩︎
2. For instance, the vast majority of eco-anxiety research is conducted from Western institutions and with Western participants – while the notion of “anxiety” itself is a Western one. ↩︎
3. See also Breeze, M. (2018) Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling. In Taylor, Y. & Lahad, K. Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University. Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures. ‎Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 191–219 ↩︎
4. We shall not be embarrassed by this ever-partial grasp: There is no need to regret the loss of the authority of “psychological facts” if they are made of reductions. John Law says that questioning the traditional image of objective science is “painful” because it “lead[s] to a world of less certainty” – but a world “in which the politics of ontology is no longer practiced by stealth”. Or, as Annemarie Mol put it: “The crucial philosophical question pertaining to reality was: how can we be sure? Now, after the turn to practice we confront another question: how to live with doubt?” ↩︎
5. Which is not to view eco-anxiety simply as a useful motivating instrument for engagement in pro-climate actions – as it is sometimes the case – and nor is it to recommend to people to engage in activism as a way to “cure” their eco-anxiety. ↩︎