Addressing climate change concerns in practice - 0 views
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An APA survey released in February 2020 found that 56% of U.S. adults said that climate change is the most important issue facing the world today
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More than two-thirds (68%) of the adults APA surveyed said they had “at least a little ‘eco-anxiety,’” or anxiety or worry about climate change and its effects.
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Nearly half (48%) of young adults ages 18 to 34 said they felt stress over climate change in their daily lives.
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The Lancet and the University College London Institute for Global Health Commission called climate change the biggest threat to global health—and mental health in particular—of the 21st century (The Lancet, Vol. 373, No. 9676, 2009).
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Humans have evolved to adjust to some environmental stressors, researchers have found, through allostasis, the system by which the body responds to stress.
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The greater the stressors and the longer we are exposed to them, the more likely our response systems are to fail—and those stress responses may remain elevated for the rest of our lives (Crews, D. E., et al., Annals of Human Biology , Vol. 46, No. 1, 2019)
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In 2017, for example, APA and ecoAmerica defined “eco-anxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” (APA and ecoAmerica, 2017).
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It’s not just those directly affected by a disaster who suffer. Often, simply knowing that others are in the path of disaster can trigger anxiety or depression, says Amy Lykins, PhD, an American clinical psychologist and researcher working in Australia and in South Pacific islands such as Fiji
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It is normal for people to be worried about environmental issues—it isn’t a disorder to be stressed by stressors. “We certainly don’t want to pathologize someone’s reasonable distress about climate and environmental threats,” Doherty says. “But we also don’t want to minimize issues that are causing significant impairment to a person’s life.”
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According to the February 2020 APA poll, 4 in 10 people have not changed their behavior in light of climate change, but 7 in 10 say they wish they could do more, while 5 in 10 say they don’t know where to begin
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Other research bears this out: Even when people are concerned about climate change and the environment, they may feel paralyzed or useless when it comes to taking action (Landry, N., et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology , Vol. 55, 2018).