“Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt.”

 Joshua Oppenheimer

With so much attention focused on the gap between the reality of climate change and our actions, are we missing the profound impact it’s already having on our well-being and ability to take charge of our lives?

Every change in the world allows us to learn about our mindset. However, the more significant that change, particularly when the outcomes are worse for us, the easier it can be to feel powerless and allow ourselves to be passive, move into denial, or become stuck mourning loss.  There is no more significant change taking place than climate change. More systemic and fundamental than AI and recent geopolitics, climate change affects our primary relationship with the world.  We evolved in nature, not in climate-regulated environments sealed off from nature.

Unsurprisingly, our ‘progress’ in the world has also taken us further from what allows us to be optimal – a deep connection to nature. Over the last decade, we have almost silenced this feedback loop, making it increasingly hard to tell when we’re depleted, defensive, and disconnected from our deepest needs.        

In recent years, we’ve begun to understand that our mind and body model the environment. What happens when this model does not match reality, and what does the model-reality gap do to us? We’ve spent the last decades describing what climate change is doing to the planet, perhaps now is the time to consider what it is doing to us.

The principal focus on mindset and climate change has been on climate denial. This very human reaction to difficulty is far from reaching acceptance despite certain progress. For example, we might imagine that most teenagers consider the climate crisis a given. However, a recent study by The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found nearly a third of UK respondents aged 13 to 17 agreed with the statement, “Climate change and its effects are being purposefully exaggerated”.  This rose to 37% amongst those who used social media more than four hours daily. This research also looked at how denial beliefs are changing. Beliefs that global warming is not happening or that if it is, it’s not the result of human activity are now considered ‘old denial’. ‘New denial’, concerningly, is that climate science and movements are unreliable, that solutions won’t work, or that the effects of global warming are beneficial or harmless. It appears very little has changed across our generations.

Is there another way then to engage everyone in the challenge we face and change our collective mindset towards climate change for good? With attention focused on the gap between the reality of climate change and our actions, are we missing the profound impact it’s already having on our well-being and ability to take charge of our lives?

One of the most arresting books I’ve read in recent years is The Weight of Nature by Clayton Page Aldern. In it, the former neuroscientist turned journalist meets individuals and communities across the world who are all affected by climate change and, in doing so, brings to life the largely unseen story of the human consequences of a hotter world. It is deeply affecting and beautifully written. He starts with a message that I, too, have been on a mission to communicate: Our mindset isn’t a purely rational process. As Clayton puts it, “Cognition is literally embodied”.  There is no mind-body duality. It is one thing; when we deny that, wellbeing and judgment go askew.  Here’s a typically confronting passage:

“Here’s how it is: We are lying to ourselves. Our core lie is that people won’t actually feel the strain of a couple of extra degrees of warming; that the only thing acting on human behaviour is the behaviour of other humans”. He expands, quoting climate change economist Solomon Hsiang: “In economics, people aren’t trained to think about the physical world – they’re trained to think about decision-making and the mind and incentives. There’s this belief that if we get the incentives right, anything is possible.”  Countering this individualistic worldview means recognising what he calls our ‘porousness’ to the world. The second lie, he suggests, is the belief that we’re infinitely adaptable.  We’ve spent centuries gaining dominion over and isolating ourselves from nature. Now, we need to row back and let it into our consciousness.

How is Climate Change Affecting our Minds and Bodies?

 “As the environment changes, you should expect to change too. It is the job of your brain to model the world as it is. And the world is mutating.”

 Clayton Page Aldern

 Let’s return to the costs of the model-reality gap. Our mindset—how we feel, think, and see—allows us to update our model to reflect changes in the world. The gap opens when our mindset is fixed in the face of change. Counterintuitively, accepting reality is the most empowered first move to close the gap. We can’t adapt positively to something we don’t fully accept. So, let’s take a moment to consider some of the lesser publicised realities of climate change and be honest, how open are you really to this reality?

 Our bodies and our brains are getting hotter

Climate grief, eco-anxiety, environmental melancholia, solastalgia and pre-traumatic stress disorder are among the growing lexicon describing the emotional and psychological turmoil those affected by climate change and environment loss are experiencing.  However, more fundamental physiological changes are happening as our bodies try to cope in a hotter world.

 “In the 1950s, climatologically speaking, summer in the Northern Hemisphere was fewer than 80 days long. The thing we call summer has lengthened by about four days every ten years you’ve been alive. Without significantly curbing emissions, climate scientists estimate it will last almost half the year by 2100. Winter will run less than two months.”

Clayton Page Aldern

We all know that heat can make us irritable and unable to concentrate.  Sanjay Sisodiya, a neurology researcher at University College London, suggests our brains function optimally between 68 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit (20-26 degrees Celsius).  His team’s research is highlighting the exacerbating impact of increased temperatures on existing neurological and psychiatric diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and schizophrenia. Glimpse the impact seen in France during the 2023 heatwave, with 14 539 excess deaths, of which 3377 were due to heatstroke, hyperthermia, and nervous system diseases.  Exposure to extreme heat in early pregnancy is associated with  an increased risk of children developing neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and anorexia.

Hotter minds increase the propensity of angrier actions and impaired cognition

But our physical health is not the only issue. Research highlights that rising temperatures lead to increased domestic violence, crime, riots, union grievances, customer complaints, and social tensions due to reduced cognitive functioning. Heat primes people’s brains to interpret others' actions and motives as more aggressive, making them more likely to reciprocate.

The courts are less likely to grant asylum applications on hotter days. A study based on a dataset of 1 million New York City students showed that “Without air conditioning, a 1°F hotter school year reduces that year's learning by 1 per cent. Hot school days disproportionately impact minority students, accounting for roughly 5 per cent of the racial achievement gap.”

Stepping back, the influence of higher temperatures has a broader impact on our ability to function. The brain’s critical functions depend on maintaining a very narrow balance of factors, known as homeostasis.  When this is out of kilter, the most recently acquired cognitive abilities (from an evolutionary perspective), are sacrificed first to maintain the primary objective of the brain, namely, to keep us alive. The ability for critical thinking, numeric ability and impulse control ‘evaporate’ first as our mind and body seek to divert resources to achieve the delicate metabolic balancing act.

This is the reality that we all face now and what Aldern powerfully brings to life in his work is the painful reality that goes beyond the figures our guilty brains still too easily rationalise away: “A little bit of heat, a little less serotonin transmission, a little more impulsivity, a little more violence. A 3% spike in violent crime doesn’t sound so bad. Does it?” But then he points to the work of economist Mathew Ranson, suggesting that between 2010-2099 climate change will cause an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 260,000 robberies, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft in the US.

Increased heat will eventually lead to increasingly inhabitable environments.

A hotter northern hemisphere will also bring realities that our ancestors migrated away from and we are ill-prepared for. For example, as lakes and ponds warm up, Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba, has already started to infect swimmers in more northern regions in the US. More worryingly, there is mounting evidence that cyanobacteria blooms in water can become airborne, causing various neurological diseases.

Growing variability in our weather could lead to growing variabilities in our memory and mental health

The weather plays a vital role in memory, which we’re now starting to understand is ‘constructed’ from instances of experience, which the brain curates to make sense of our current physical state. Psychologist Trevor Harley suggests, “Weather can provide a framework for accessing and structuring memory. That is, the weather plays a metacognitive role in organising cognition.” Consider the variation you’ve experienced in weather over the past 3 years, and now consider the impact of that degree of variation and more on the way you organise and draw on past experiences to inform your decisions in the future.

However, perhaps one of the most insidious costs of climate change is the impact on our mental health when our internal model of the world no longer matches reality.

Aldern cites the rising effect of environmental loss in the form of PTSD, clinical depression and a host of related anxiety disorders.  In turn, these develop into a range of societal disorders: substance abuse, crime, failing communities, and domestic violence. 

The Fundamental Shift We All Need To Make?

Start with our Mindset to Face Reality

Is any of the above opening your mind in a new way to this changing reality? If so, consider your body as the next move because, as Aldern suggests, the most profound shift in responding to climate change is not purely an intellectual acceptance of what’s happening but an embodied embrace of nature. Our mind and body respond as one to the world and its changes. 

As one potential place to start, he cites the ‘remedy offered by the forest’ in the form of the Japanese practice of forest bathing, where ‘such connection and understanding might, in turn, empower us to face our anxieties with clarity and purpose.’ Studies show this practice has ‘positive physiological effects, such as blood pressure reduction, improvement of autonomic and immune functions, as well as psychological effects of alleviating depression and improving mental health.’ I am taking myself and my team into the forest this week to follow a guide for this practice and will report back with my findings as one small step that some of us might be able to take as we face the reality of surviving and thriving as humans in a hotter world.

Above all else, Aldern’s work provides us with new small ways to explore how we can reframe any anxiety and guilt we might be feeling around climate change and instead engage in acts that enable us to become more deeply accepting of our new reality.  He closes with hope of our ability to develop a more antifragile mindset – that shocks to our system can make us stronger.

“Chronic stress and climate anxiety while formidable, are not invincible adversaries. But it does take remembering that your body is a body. It is more than your mind.”