Ecosia Podcast Episode 7: How to Stay Sane in the Age of Climate Change

As an advocate for sustainability, I understand all too well just how worrying climate change can be. It feels like whenever I watch the news, or read an article on social media, the media is constantly talking about climate change and how devastating it is for the environment. 

From wildfires and heatwaves to tropical storms and floods, the perceived effects of climate change are all around and at times, I’m not ashamed to say I do find it overwhelming. Years ago, when the media really started to hype up the effects of global warming and climate change, I began to find myself feeling increasingly anxious. I worried about the safety of our planet, our wildlife, my loved ones, and myself. At the time, I thought I was overreacting, but it turns out I wasn’t alone. 

As time passed by, I found more and more people talking about ‘climate anxiety’ and realized it was a very real thing. Knowing I wasn’t alone in how I felt didn’t help me feel any less concerned. In fact, if anything, it made me feel worse. I started listening to podcasts on environmental sustainability and found one called ‘Ecosia’. There was one episode in particular that I found really helpful, and it’s this episode I’ll be reviewing today. 

How to Stay Sane in the Age of Climate Change

Ecosia is a podcast known as the ‘Search Engine That Plants Trees’. They cover a broad range of topics relating to climate change, sustainability, and reforestation. 

Episode 7, titled ‘How to Stay Sane in the Age of Climate Change’ is one that really resonated with me and helped me to deal with my own feelings and concerns regarding the state of our planet. It showed me that I wasn’t alone in how I felt and showed me that climate anxiety is perfectly normal and somewhat warranted. 

Released back in 2019, the episode covered a variety of different topics, largely based upon understanding what climate anxiety is and how to handle it. It goes into great detail about climate anxiety and doesn’t hold back in describing how devastating it is for our planet. They didn’t sugarcoat anything here, which I found helped me. Almost like facing a fear head on, rather than burying my head in the sand and pretending it wasn’t a problem.

How the Ecosia Podcast Helped Me

In the episode, Ecosia look at what climate anxiety is, what causes it, and why it’s valid and necessary. The episode looked at how climate anxiety could manifest itself in different ways and how we can understand the effect it has on our mental health. 

What I liked about this episode was the fact that it helped me to understand how to use my climate concerns productively. Rather than aimlessly worrying and damaging my mental health, it encouraged me, and others like me, to use my concerns productively instead. After listening to the episode, I didn’t just feel relieved, I felt motivated. I started to make more of a conscious effort to be green, sustainable, and environmentally aware. 

Before listening, I was guilty of watching and reading the news, and engaging with negative posts on social media, even though I knew they were damaging my mental health. It seemed like whenever we had a warm summer, the media would report on devastating heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts. In the winter, unusually cold weather was always blamed on climate change and the more I watched, listened, and read, the worse I felt. 

Episode 7 of the Ecosia podcast helped me to deal with my anxiety by taking a break from climate-related news. This helped me enormously. Whenever I got the itch to watch the news, or click on a climate-related blog or article online, I’d stop myself and remind myself that it would likely make me feel worse. 

Instead, as encouraged by the podcast, I found productive ways of advocating for sustainability. I even connected with others online who felt similarly to how I felt, which also really helped me. Instead of constantly worrying about climate change, I was kept busy by looking at ways in which we could tackle it with the aim of solving it instead. 

Anybody out there dealing with climate anxiety, please check out episode 7 of the Ecosia podcast. It helped me, and I’m sure it’ll help you as well.