Learning to deal with climate anxiety

If recent tragic incidents across mountain slopes in various parts of the country are any indication, losing sleep at night over uncertain mornings may not be unusual for those who have been dwelling on such mountain slopes, which are now considered vulnerable. Dreadful videos of people and property falling victim to such unprecedented natural catastrophes are nightmarish. People dread physical emergencies like forest fires, landslides and unpredicted floods, but climatic exigencies are no less dreadful with anxiety taking its toll. 

The cause of the imminent change may garner academic interest, be it caused by climate-change or man-made factors, but the climate anxiety induced in the pursuit may make people suffer in many horrible ways. How to think, how to feel, and how to manage stress will depend on what is referred to as ‘individual problems with climate change’ (IPCC). Even then the current crisis to more complicated, tragic, and unjust than we think. 

Dr. Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist and mental health therapist, offers a unique perspective about climate change and how should one relate to it, and guides the reader to keep himself equipped with the tools needed for navigation through climatic exigencies. A father and widower, Doherty uses his own life experience, tools, and client stories to help the reader navigate his/her own feelings about climate change and how to take action in a world that is consequentially suffering climate change’s effects.

Another aspect about the book is that it discusses social justice, environmental justice, eco-advocacy, marginalized groups and environmental racism. These are no less important issues, and the intersectionality between all of them is essential to discuss climate change through all levels of advocacy. Doherty also left us with an important reminder that advocacy is needed at all levels—whether front lines or behind the scenes—and our role is so important. 

It is a five-part process, starting with small coping skills, to skills drawn from therapy, to reclaiming happiness, and to taking action. In this book, Doherty promises to help reframe climate anxiety to work for us, rather than against us. It is written with the rare combination of scientific clarity and deep psychological compassion. Rather than pathologizing climate distress, he normalizes it as a sign of moral attunement—a natural response to an unnatural situation. Simple, calm down may not work when anxiety is embedded deep.

Doherty doesn’t think if ‘calm down’ or ‘think positive’ will work in such anxieties. Instead, he thinks to metabolize fear, guilt, grief, and outrage into something usable - into care, connection, and action. In fact, the climate disaster cycle is upon all of us right now; either amid a disaster, recovering from one or anticipating the next. In the words of William Gibson, the harsh reality is that climate-change-fueled disasters are a fact of life now. 

The climatic anxiety in no less prevalent with tragic human stories from different regions piling up. Sita and her family faced storms and wildfires; Jesse and her family were witness to their destroyed homes; there are any number who withstood coastal flooding. Once isolated, such stories are now common for generating sympathetic analysis. Doherty argues that retelling such stories is a way to unburden ourselves from the weights of the environmental transgression people seem to be burden with. 

This book may seem to have been written ahead of its time. But climate change anxiety is one of the biggest mental health threats afflicting growing population, irrespective of its economic and social status. From the geologist haunted by images of melting glaciers to the young couple agonizing over their own survival, Surviving Climate Anxiety provides the tools to cope, heal, and flourish even in such challenging times. This book is different as it is about coping and possibly thriving in the face of climatic change from a psychological perspective.

Ultimately hopeful and profoundly empathetic, Surviving Climate Anxiety is a comprehensive and comforting manual, and Doherty, a competent and benevolent guide. There are moments when the book acts like a gentle reminder to remain both awake and vigilant. If you care deeply about the world and are finding it harder to hold that caring without breaking, this book belongs on your nightstand. .

Surviving Climate Anxiety  
by Dr Thomas Doherty
Hachette, New Delhi. 
Extent: 407, Price: Rs. 799.

First published in the HinduBusiness Line on Jan 3, 2026. 

Getting past inbox of anxiety and distress

If email anxiety is consuming you, follow Newport for possible resolutions.

Until it popped up on my computer screen recently I couldn't have ever sensed if something as useful as an email was making us miserable. Curated by Washington University Professor Cal Newport, the message suggests that sending and receiving messages come for a price that we hadn't bargained for. Newport backs himself with survey data and clinical studies to prove that cheaper mode of incessant communication guarantees our misery. Do emails stacked in my inbox generate anxious moments? it does by effecting both our productivity and our mental health. If nothing, it undervalues the concentration of mind to produce valuable output. 

Nearly three decades into emailing in the country may have cost the postal services a great deal but not without letting email users like you and me remain in perpetual low-grade anxiety, and that too unknowingly. Could it be the intangible cost of relying on instant communication that we don't mind skipping a meal but rarely let checking the mailbox elude us. One may shrug it aside as an incidental side effect of a compulsive in-box habit but in reality it may be much more serious than that. And, facts tend to prove it so.

Using time-tracking software, researchers at the University of California found that employees of a large company checked their inboxes an average of 77 times a day, with the heaviest user checking more than 400 times daily. Psychologists contend that such involuntary action induces a heavy cost in terms of mental energy, reducing cognitive performance while creating a sense of exhaustion and reduced efficacy. These dual reactions - admiration of instant communication and detestation due to email burnout - leave many knowledge workers in a state of frustrated resignation. The unfortunate mismatch may seem unavoidable.  

However, it has emerged as a serious concern in recent times. Enacted in France in 2007, a new labor law gives email users in offices the so-called right to disconnect. Companies with fifty or more employees were required to negotiate specific policies about the use of e-mail after work hours, with the goal of reducing the time workers spent in their in-boxes during the evening or over the weekend. One of its kind, the law aims to reduce burnout of employees, which is more relevant now as the shift toward a more frenetic work-from-home makes life miserable. Not sure if it is being noticed elsewhere, though. 

Our compulsive relationship with email needs serious rethinking, Newport incisively argues in his new book A World Without Email. Since we can't get away from it given our evolutionary obsession with social interaction, the need to reduce the tortuous cycle of increased email workload invariably causing frustrating misunderstandings and confused exchanges has never been more compelling. Far from improving human condition, however, this efficient mode of communication is causing uncontrolled distress to most of us. Look around and one will find compelling evidence for renegotiating our engagement with emails.   

Even if one were to disagree, there are numerous studies which prove that the need to be constantly connected is associated with suboptimal health outcomes. Little gets realized that the more one spends time on email,  the higher is one’s stress for that hour. I have reasons to suspect that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, driving us nuts even if we have serious intentions of ignoring an email or a potential connection. Ironically, we have been condemned to ignore the source of discontent that, if properly managed, stands to improve our work output.  .   

The compulsion of communicating instantaneously notwithstanding, we have been reduced to human routers of digitized information. Just because it’s possible for us to send and receive messages incessantly through our waking hours doesn’t mean that it is a sustainable way to exist. Need it be said that the sheer volume of communication generated by modern professional email degrades our traditional social circuits, if it hasn't done so already. Unrestricted reliance on email has eroded the emotional content of human exchanges. Technology is indeed turning us into zombies.      

The trouble is that not many seem to be complaining, but for those who have been at the receiving end of it. An employee was recently devastated after receiving an email from his employer which read, 'We are still not sure how the office will run without you from next week'. If that wasn't less demeaning and distressing, the message carried a smiley with the signature, and was copied to all other employees' of the organisation. So much for speed and convenience at the cost of degenerating human emotions and feelings.  Unless we open our eyes to the emerging new reality, we will get consumed by technology if we aren't already!  

A World Without Email
by Cal Newport
Penguin UK
Extent.296. Price. Rs 699.  

First published in the Hindu BusinessLine on Aug 15, 2021.

The age of insubstantiality

Ironically, we are living in the undefinable present that urges us to give up courage, make cowardice a virtue, and see that both real and virtual war doesn’t end.

There is no denying that we are living in anxious times, not knowing where we are treading from day to day. What prevails is a ubiquitous lack of substance with a deadly insubstantiality, which has left us with a painful sense of inadequacy. Much evolved though it may seem, both the society and the systems have instead invoked Nietzsche’s fateful phrase ‘Nothing is true, everything is allowed’. 

It is the truth that beholds onto us, that revives the echoes of W H Auden’s The Age of Anxiety. In this context, Roberto Calasso’s The Unnamable Present is a brutal but meditative inquiry into the undefinable present that urges us to give up courage, make cowardice a virtue, and see that both real and virtual war doesn’t end.  

Pulling nuggets from literature and philosophy of the recent past, the book examines the ongoing project of dehumanization that has blurred the distinction between the tourists and the terrorists. Aren’t both out there to destroy the creation of nature, he asks? With algorithmic information eating into human consciousness, mythomania has become the new normal. We only need a plug into it to ensure its constant supply. I found compelling reasons to agree with Calasso’s proposition that, much like the world that made a partially successful attempt at annihilating itself during the Second World War, our unnamable present too is hurtling towards a murderous path. When was the last time we were shown such a hexed mirror? 

Discomforting and disquieting, The Unnamable Present leaves a lot unsaid that the discerning reader can find strewn between the lines. One thing is clear that the past continues to haunt us. What may been seemingly been foregone returns in different form. Rightly said, people may have got rid of Hitler and Stalin but not the society that created them. 

Creation of democracy as an antidote to dictatorship has come to reflect a wishful nothing, extending to everyone the privilege of access to things that are no longer there, which lugs within it the seeds of self-destruction. Not an easy read though, but The Unnamable Present should be credited for raising new questions on the obscure process of transformation happening in our society. 

The Unnamable Present
by Roberto Calasso
Allen Lane, New Delhi
Extent: 193, Price: Rs. 799.

First published in the Hindustan Times, issue dated Dec 21, 2019.