Understanding Climate Anxiety

This page reflects our understanding of mental health topics as of 2026. If you are reading this at a later date, some details may no longer be current, so please verify anything important against up to date sources. If you notice anything that needs updating, we would welcome you letting us know.

Climate anxiety, sometimes called eco-anxiety, is worry, fear, or distress related to climate change and its effects on the planet, communities, and future generations. It is not a mental health diagnosis. In many ways it is an understandable response to a real and serious problem. For some people it motivates action and connection. For others it becomes overwhelming, affecting sleep, mood, and daily life. Understanding climate anxiety helps people hold their concern in a way that supports both wellbeing and meaningful action.

What Climate Anxiety Looks Like

Climate anxiety can include worry about the future, grief for lost landscapes and species, anger at inaction, guilt about personal choices, and a sense of helplessness. In British Columbia, wildfire smoke, heat domes, floods, and drought can make these feelings immediate and personal. Common experiences include:

• Frequent worry about climate news, sometimes with difficulty stopping.
• Feeling hopeless about the future.
• Uncertainty about major life decisions, such as having children.
• Grief for places or ways of life that are changing.
• Anger or frustration with governments, companies, or other people.
• Guilt about travel, consumption, or other personal choices.
• Avoiding news entirely because it feels unbearable.

At home, climate anxiety might show up as tension with family members who see things differently. At work, it may affect people in environmental fields who face these issues daily. Young people report particularly high levels of climate distress.

Why It Happens

Climate anxiety arises because climate change is a genuine, large-scale threat with uncertain outcomes that individuals cannot control alone. Constant news coverage, direct experience of extreme weather, and concern for future generations all contribute. People who care deeply about nature or social justice, and those with a tendency toward worry, may feel it more intensely. The mismatch between the scale of the problem and what one person can do can create a sense of powerlessness, which fuels anxiety.

What It Is Not

Climate anxiety is not a disorder, and feeling concerned about climate change is not irrational. It becomes a mental health concern when distress is persistent and interferes with functioning. It can also overlap with or be mistaken for:

• Generalized anxiety. If worry spans many topics and is hard to control, climate may be one focus of a broader anxiety pattern, such as feeling like something bad is about to happen.
• Depression. Persistent hopelessness, low mood, and loss of interest may indicate depression, which deserves treatment.
• Trauma. People who have lived through wildfires, floods, or evacuations may experience trauma responses, such as intrusive memories or feeling unsafe even when nothing is wrong.
• Grief. Ecological grief, sadness over environmental loss, is a natural response that can exist without anxiety.

How It Is Assessed and Supported

A clinician can help determine whether climate distress is part of an anxiety disorder, depression, or trauma response, or whether it is an understandable reaction that needs support rather than treatment. Helpful approaches often include limiting news exposure to set times, taking values-based action with others, connecting with community groups, spending time in nature, and practising acceptance of uncertainty. Therapy approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy can help people manage distress while staying engaged with what matters to them.

Getting Support at Pacific Maple Psych Centre

If worry about climate change is affecting your sleep, mood, or daily life, therapy can help you hold your concern in a more sustainable way and find balance between caring deeply and looking after yourself.