Season 5, Episode 3: The Pathway from Eco-Anxiety to Thriving
image credit | Jessica Harper
Season 5, Episode 3: The Pathway from Eco-Anxiety to Thriving
Thomas and Panu discussed Thomas's new book, Surviving Climate Anxiety and its messages about coping with climate change by focusing on happiness and thriving. Thomas offered an inside view of the book and how it would benefit readers. He shared insights from his psychology background and emphasized the importance of understanding our emotions and identities. Panu and Thomas also talked about using storytelling to connect with readers and how personal stories can help us understand and tackle climate-related challenges. Join us for a thoughtful conversation about finding hope in difficult times.
Links
Book Excerpt on Oprah Daily: 3 Surprisingly Effective Ways to Combat Climate Anxiety
Daphne Chouliaraki Milner How to Live With Climate Change Without Burning Out. Atmos
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala
Doherty: Well hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.
Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast, a show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other world issues and environmental issues and social issues and political issues and our personal lives. We asked this kind of provocative question about, what would it mean to be happy in the modern world?
Pihkala: Yes, and today we are starting a conversation on Thomas's new book. We have been mentioning that several times in the podcast episodes, but now it's actually coming out in October 2025 with the title Surviving Climate Anxiety, a Guide to Coping, Healing and Thriving.
I'm happy to have a paper copy of the galley, sort of the pre-version in my hands here in Finland and I got the electronic version slightly before. So in the cover, at least of this version, there's a green mountain and a human being on top of it raising their arms and hands to the air as I made it. So does that resonate with some of your feelings after the long arduous work of finishing the book?
Doherty: Thanks, Panu. I really appreciate that. You know, I hadn't thought about that interpretation of the cover, so I'm looking at it right now. And yes, that's that is that is that that's a true that's a good example of a feeling of a climate feeling that I inhabit a little bit, making it making it to the top.
It really, you know, it's also a we made it to the top because someone designed or created that image and suggested that image. So I am aware that behind the scenes, there was like a conversation even about the cover itself and the colors and the and the design, you know. But I do love the cover of the book.
And it was part of the mission of the book to be accessible and to bring some energy of calmness and lightness to these heavy topics. And so I think the art design of the cover is very successful in that regard. We could talk more if you like, you know, I've talked to different people about the cover and their interpretations of it, but it works well as a multi-level sort of stimulus, know, people look at it from different directions.
Pihkala: Yeah, thanks for the reflections and the text is also easy to pick out if you see this in a bookstore or at an internet bookshop. Having worked with publishing houses myself, I know that it's a collaborative effort and for some of you dear listeners it may come as a surprise that authors might not have a final say in relation to the title for example and I know that there was a discussion you had about that also and now climate anxiety and surviving that features heavily in the cover but of course this book is even more widely about living in the midst of the climate crisis so lots of synergies with this podcast and on the pages. There's also references to what we have been talking about here. How would you formulate it, Thomas, if someone asks you what's the sort of mission of this book or what would you especially like to bring to the world via this book?
Doherty: Yeah, I think the mission is, you know, the subtitle speaks to the mission, you know, a guide to coping, healing and thriving. because, the climate anxiety, just like we have talked about many times in the podcast, that that's sort of like is the stimulus. That's what brings you into the space sometimes, that natural sense of anxiety or fear or concern.
That's just the beginning of the journey. We talked about, could we call the book climate change and happiness or, you know, personal sustainability or, you know, so it was really important. I think what's most what's most there's two things that are unique about this book, I think one, the biggest thing is that I talk about being happy and I talk about thriving, which is often not talked about. Much of the discourse on climate change is still sort of stuck in the early stages of we're in a crisis and people are trying to raise the alarm and that is still needed for some for some parts of the population but for much of the world we've been alarmed for years and years and years so the need is for how do we recognize our our moments of happiness while we're while we're struggling.
I think that have that being risky and brave enough to talk about what does it mean to be happy? Just like again, with this podcast is really what's unique about the book. And then also the, you know, there's the sequencing of the book where it's coping. Yes. But then we, know, a lot of it is about identity, you know, and that's the missing factor for most people in their coping is that they haven't been able to clarify their identity about nature, their environmental identity, all their values and their personal history and their childhood experiences and all the things that form them are kind of still unprocessed. They're just in there. So it's a consciousness raising about, you have an environmental identity. So identity is so important. And that even among environmentalists and long-term activists, they haven't really had a chance to do that work. So I think that identity piece is really a key and I think once people have it, then they can use it and grow it on their own.
Pihkala: Yeah, totally agreeing on that. I have been reading and glancing a lot of books about eco-anxiety and climate anxiety, as you know, and we have talked about many of them in the podcast and even interviewed several authors of them. But I haven't seen as much emphasis on identity in other books. think it's a theme which is present in some other volumes, but I do think that's a strength here. And of course for a long time you've been a proponent of the importance of environmental identity and that is something we usually always discuss with the podcast guests also and this general idea of flourishing and striving for happiness also in these troubled times. If that would come from a person who is sort of bright-siding I would be quite critical about that. I've seen some texts on climate anxiety, which are more like, well, you know, don't be so anxious. Let's focus on the good instead. And that's part of the thing, but also the troubles need to be taken seriously. But you are taking the problems seriously and you have long life experience and history. So that I also think is one of the strengths of this book. That's even though there is this emphasis on flourishing, there's also understanding of the darker sides of life. So that's not really a question, but if you want to reflect on that, that's one possibility.
Doherty: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of parts in the book that are quite dark really in the sense of really trying to look honestly at problems in the world. You know, whole chapter four is on adapting so it's on doing your own personal climate. You know, your IPCC report, your individual problems with climate change report, which actually requires you to, you know, look at how, where you live in the world, what the threats are to you from weather and and upheavals and so it's actually going even deeper into some of these problems than we would even be comfortable doing typically. And then of course the healing section part three is the hardest in some ways the hardest one of the hard sections because that's what we talk about being a hostage politically to a lot of the political propaganda and corruption in the world and dealing with our anxiety, dealing with despair. Dealing with broken places and nature.
And if we're on a tour of the hard parts of the book, where I really waited to put the really, really hard stuff was in the challenges chapter toward the end. And that's really where we kind of list just the many challenges that people are likely to face when they're trying to make positive change, whether it be political corruption, whether it be ignorance or propaganda or entrenched habits or you know all of those things and that if I only wrote that book no one would want to read it you know if only you know and that's how it is with a lot of books that we get we feel like we need to read them out of duty out of some sort of grim duty.
I remember years and years ago, I saw a video from the thinker Theodore Roszak talking about eco-psychology in the 90s. And even then he was saying, you know, we're trying to find something beyond just grim duty, you know, and that was his term. So this book is trying to get trying to we're doing the duty of being honest and looking at these things for sure. And it can indeed be grim but it's not the only part of the process. There's a lot of place for joy and gratitude and contemplation and reverence and patience and compassion, you all those sorts of soft, softening feelings also.
Panu: Yeah, thanks for spending time on that and I love the wording about grim duty and the importance of being open to that full spectrum, not just the grimness of things. And speaking of the difficulties and the troubling, one interesting dimension here is that you draw from your experience in healthcare also. Well it's been a while I think now since you were working full time there but for example the harm reduction approach I don't think I've seen that linked with climate distress dynamics before so would you like to describe that to the readers?
Doherty: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, the book does draw from a lot of influences that are not traditional because again, working when I was a graduate student, I ended up working a lot at hospitals and health psychology and behavioral medicine. So working with people that were dealing with medical illness, I did my dissertation research on a cardiac rehab unit. So it was people that were had suffered heart attacks or had open heart surgery and were trying to recover.
And anyone who's a who's actually a medical care provider, health care provider knows that many, many cases in the hospital or in the clinic are people that are anxious or depressed or coping. And so you need you need some skills for this. one and one of the big issues is addiction, people that are addicted to tobacco smoking or other behaviors, alcohol where sometimes you can't get them immediately to stop doing the behavior because they're addicted to it and because, you know, all the different structural things involved there.
Harm reduction is sort of like recognizing the harm and shrinking it as much as you can without assuming that it's going to go away entirely. And it's a generally very effective approach across all kinds of health behaviors, whether it be sexual transmitted diseases or alcoholism or drug use or really any problematic behavior. You shrink it. I mean, concretely, if you're smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, that's very terrible for your body and your lungs and will shorten your life. if you can shrink that to smoking one cigarette every six months, you know, at a party, then someone who's addicted to nicotine might be able to do that and still, you know, really be quite healthy.
So it's just flipping it around because often we try to eliminate the problems entirely. And that's a good strategy, but if you can't do that strategy, you need another strategy. That's where harm reduction comes in. And of course, with broadly more accurately with climate change and also metaphorically that the harm reduction model is helpful because we realize, well, I can't, I can't change the state of the world and I can't change the fossil fuel companies immediately or any of these things, but I can certainly do what I can to reduce the harm, shrink the impacts, and then I can also think about that in my personal life. I don't have to be perfect. So it's the opposite of perfectionism.
Pihkala: Yes, sort of restraining from the idea that all problems can be solved in the near future. That reminds me of the work of, for example, Vanessa Andreotti, who I was listening on online at an event in Helsinki last week. They make the very good point that part of the problem are our ways of reacting to problems, our ways of framing problems, including the idea that things can be neatly solved. But anyway, this connects with the idea of living with ambiguity and ambivalence, which we have been discussing a lot in the history of the podcast.
Doherty: Yeah, not all problems can be solved, period. Like life, aging, illness, infirmity. You know, it's challenging to live on the planet as human societies and groups in the best of times. And there are wicked problems and things like that. So it's really about engaging.
You know, part of the section one of the book is very, very basic and concrete. chapter one is how to think. So it's not what you should think, because in my book I'm not telling people what they should think. I'm not advocating for positions per se, but I'm telling them these are, I'm advocating for ways that you could think about things and ways to have, you know, metacognition to think about your thinking and, and be aware of assumptions you're making. So that's where like something like higher reduction comes in because it sort of changes your thinking. It gives you another way to look at problems.
That's a big part of this book is just, you know, getting better at your thinking, getting better at how you're feeling and how you're managing emotions, getting better how you're dealing with your nervous system and stress. So part one is very concrete. It's basic really, even if you're an expert, it's helpful personally to remind yourself to think about your thinking and think about your feelings.
Pihkala: Yeah, and very pragmatic also. So skills of living in a reality like this. And as you know, I'm always happy if people include at least implicitly existentialist themes of living with finitude and those limitations to the human condition. But for listeners, part one in Thomas’s book is called Coping. It has four chapters, Thinking, feeling, calming, adapting. Listeners of this podcast will find many common themes in our episodes also from these sections but also you'll find new information and new ideas and also practical ideas for how to calm oneself down and also how to reframe one's thinking like the upside down pyramid, which we have been discussing with some guests also in this podcast. Thomas, if you think about part one, what are some of the major takeaways? I know that you already mentioned some of them in our talk this far, but what's on your mind when thinking about part one?
Doherty: Yeah, well, you show up, Panu, of course, in the book a fair bit as well. One of the takeaways is the climate emotions wheel and different ways that we think about feeling. So that's an important one. You know, it's the idea of 360 emotions or, know, that we're able to be cosmopolitan in our emotions and really have the capacity to feel intense feelings of all kinds. So whether it be sadness or anger or frustration, you know, to feel what we're feeling as deeply and honestly as we can. That also includes calmness or boredom or reverence or patience. We then get into this idea of emotional regulation and that you can regulate your emotions. So question one is what am I feeling, which is very helpful. And you can spend a lot of time sorting that out with feelings vocabulary. Then the second is what do I want to be feeling, which is more of the aspirational question. Like, well, if I could access some feeling states I'd like to access this kind of feeling or that kind of feeling. So if I'm a parent and I'm spending time with my child on a nice sunny day, I want to access some feelings of joy and gratitude and presence. Or if I'm dealing with a problem, I want to activate my determination and my grit and my creativity. The third question is more of the existential question of what should I be feeling like what is the true feeling that I should inhabit here even if it's uncomfortable or difficult that's where the growth is so that's a good takeaway from the emotions chapter.
Pihkala: Totally agreeing and some of the sentences have lots of beautiful content like this one from its page 43. “As with breathing, we can come into awareness of our emotions by paying attention to them and assigning them words. We can become attuned to their rhythms and even influence their depth and pace”. This is the emotional regulation we discussed above. I like the images of becoming attuned and rhythm and influencing the depth and pace. It's related to this idea you mentioned that we can't fully control our emotions and feelings. It goes back to the surfing metaphor for example, which we sometimes have been discussing here. That as a surfer you can't control all the waves but there's a lot of skills that you can learn how to ride them.
Doherty: Exactly, even the even the master surfers that we marvel at they can't have they have no control over the wave itself at all. But they have control over their angle and approach to you know slipping on top of it. I'll tell you another thing that people have asked me this kind of question and the “how to think: points that I think is really interesting is this idea that we're all familiar with this idea. This is attributed to Albert Einstein that we cannot solve problems at the same level we created them. That's a famous saying from Albert Einstein, which is, you know, really helpful for us. It's sort of if we live in a certain way or had a certain practice that created problems, then often we'll have to create a different way of living or a new practice to not have the problems. Otherwise, we'll just keep recreating them over and over again. So that's a huge insight in itself. But one thing that came to me in the writing of the book was that we also cannot solve problems at the same level we discovered them and that was an insight for myself. you know, because when I discover a problem that I need often to then educate myself more about the issue and build my capacity. So I can then overcome it.
When we discover problems, we're often quite naive and we don't know the whole story. But if you stop there and just start trying to solve right there, you're kind of stuck in the same emotional and thinking system and you're not really growing. So, that I think is really helpful because you know for example as we've talked about many times there's these feelings of grief and loss and fear but that's what happens when we discover yet. That's the feelings of discovery that are happening but the solving requires often different kinds of feelings. So you can't solve problems at the same level of emotional functioning that you discovered them or the same level of intellectual functioning. So that I think is in a nuanced approach that is helpful for people in the book.
Pihkala: Hmm, yeah, very interesting and in my mind links with thinking about processes and trajectories which have been close to me as you know. And one very important dynamic in the book is that you include these case examples of people who come to talk to therapists, namely you, and you're able to illustrate many kinds of issues people may have in relation to climate matters and also their personal issues via these case examples. And of course, I know that you have been modifying them so that they are not completely recognizable as people but as combinations. Would you like to say a bit about that part of the book?
Doherty: Yeah, no, that's a great one. Let's let's focus on that for the last part of our conversation because that that's another interesting one because that was one of the case stories was one of the initially one of the hardest parts of the book for me to write and the most challenging at the outset and then became one of the more enjoyable processes of the book as well you know, because I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm really trained to be an academic writer and you know, I didn't go to a creative writing program. I went to a clinical psychology writing program. So, I did have literature and poetry experience in my younger life when I studied literature, but you know, graduate school, as anyone knows who's gone to graduate school, they'll beat all that out of you. All of that creativity will get driven out of you to write articles with footnotes and all this sort of academic scientific writing. And it isn't about telling stories really. It isn't about creating characters like in a novel or in a in a nonfiction narrative book. It's really about all the facts.
So even myself, I'd learned to like dispense with all the case studies when I read a book and just kind of drill down and figure out the facts. What is this writer trying to tell me? And I don't need to hear all these fluffy stories of people. But I had to really flip that around for this book because, rightly so, the publishers made it clear that if you want to speak to the public, Thomas, you need to tell stories. That's how people understand. And so luckily I had help. And then of course I did all the characters that are described in the book have a core of a real person or multiple cores of multiple people that were because what happened is I only have one book to write and I couldn't have it was in like war and peace where I could have 100 characters so I only have about 20 so I had to really condense and so some of the characters had to do double or triple duty you know to illustrate different aspects of the problem so there was no one person that I have met that could that could be the only character because we talked about so many things.
But once these characters started to get created they did you know much like in fiction? They took they take on a life of their own like you start to see “How would brandon the character do this? what would they say ?” I came to really love the love the case studies and you know again really nothing's in there that isn't true to life for people and I've actually had people think that some of the case studies were more real than they were. So I had to say, “well, these are composites”. So literally this person that lived in the world, I there isn't a person just like that. But it's based on several people. And just last night, someone, one of my friends who I've given an advance copy said, I really, they wanted to meet Brandon. They wanted to meet this character. I I'm sorry, well, you can't meet them because they don't exist for real. But they felt a kinship with the character.
Yes, it was our friend Greg Hill's birthday yesterday. Just a Panu it will know this. We interviewed Greg on the podcast. It was his birthday yesterday. So I got to spend some time with him and some other friends. We were talking about the book. So, yeah, he could have been because he could have easily in real life, there could be a character like that that would walk into the room and be known by these people because it was.
So anyway, that the characters are really and I think readers will naturally gravitate to certain characters because they resonate with the story and the character and, It's less shameful for us as readers to identify with someone else having a problem than to just put it only on myself. Like Christina, the character who's the really savvy political operator and climate and environmental advocate who really does well in politics and understands policy and all that really was harboring this secret shame that she wasn't comfortable going in the outdoors herself or hiking on a solo hike and just being competent in what she considered to be the outdoors or the wilderness and so really helping her to build that that confidence so she could go do her pilgrimage trip, you know, in Europe. It was really fun and rewarding to sort of, you know, put those stories together because I do think they'll be inspiring to people.
Pihkala: Yes, thanks for spending time on that and I do agree there's lots of things that people can resonate with and human interest will be generated and in relation to the style of the book this also has the benefit of you having to lecture much less because you can describe dynamics via stories and it's always pleasant when there's less lecturing and not to mention teaching in the boring sense. So that brings a lively character to the book and I think that was a great thing to do. Well, dear listeners, as we said this is the first one of several episodes which will be focusing on Thomas's new book Surviving Climate Anxiety soon available at your virtual bookstore. I hope you have enjoyed the conversation. I surely have. Like usually, I've been speaking from the Helsinki evening before the boys come home and there will be family sauna. Thomas how does the rest of the day look like for you? There might be some book related issues I suppose.
Doherty: Well, know, life goes on. actually have, I still see clients in my practice and I've got to go actually talk to one of my clients. So that's keeping me real, keeping me honest. Yeah. And I've got one of the practitioners. I know a young person is doing an internship here in Portland, so I'll get a chance to meet them. And so I get to support some younger, younger scholars and therapists and take my daughter to the dentist and you know do all the life things that we have to do. So that's my day but thanks Panu I really it's an honor to chat with you about the book and I really appreciate it.
Pihkala: Yes, feeling very glad and honored about that. That's to listeners. You can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com. thanks to everyone who supports us at Patreon. That's an opportunity. And until we meet virtually next time, take care.
Doherty: Thanks, Panu.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
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