Experiencing Climate Distress on Top of Brain Injury

People with brain injury are not immune to climate distress. Add that to brain injury grief and grief from life losses, and it can crush us into feeling out of control and in despair.

As a writer researching climate change for my latest novel, the third book in The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy about life after death, I had no choice but to plunge into facts about our current level of global warming and modern agriculture's contributions to climate change. The readings left me shocked and depressed.

Yet I had to keep researching in order to theorize various scenarios of eight degrees of warming in a far future world. It’s one hazard of writing: learning things you’d rather not know.

Even without having to research climate change, I cannot dismiss it as if it isn’t real. Superficially, dismissing it may seem like a good way to avoid distress, but avoidance as a coping tactic only works for so long. Climate distress lurks beneath the surface, remains in the subconscious, throwing up sudden anger or sudden depression, creating an emotional minefield. Add in neurophysiological damage to the emotion centre and/or locus of control, and it creates havoc in one’s daily life.

But if you can somehow find a way to gain a sense of some control, to take action, no matter how small, it reduces despair and chips away at anxiety in a healthier manner. You’re less likely to ride the climate distress roller coaster.

For me, that was using every grant and zero percent loan that the government offered to install solar panels and replace my gas-fired furnace and stove with a cold climate heat pump and electric induction stove. The huge savings on my energy budget and the resulting increased comfort provided satisfaction and monetary relief. Bonus: my new stove improved my ability to cook, giving me a sense of agency.

But I had to fight for every available program. Not all with brain injury can persist long enough to capture a share of limited funds. Brain injury fatigue, shot memory, and inability to concentrate hamper one’s efforts to pursue beneficial government programs, including for climate action.

If brain injury impedes action, what can one do?

Lucia Tecuta, an assistant professor at the University of Bologna, Italy, and a cognitive behavioural therapist and clinical psychologist specializing in rational emotive behaviour therapy, ecotherapy, and climate-conscious therapy, has described climate distress symptoms, such as checking temperature forecasts frequently or being filled with a sense of danger. The latter reminds me of emerging symptoms after my brain injury, like my brain not regulating my body temperature. One night, I became so overheated and fluid-filled that I ended up in the ER with perplexed doctors. Similarly, where can one find relief from severe climate distress symptoms?

The unpredictable symptoms of climate change don’t happen to us in a vacuum. They’re on top of the dread of another doctor visit with bad news and the worry of, “How will my traumatized brain threaten my life this month?”

Eco-paralysis is a term applied to a condition where helplessness and hopelessness cause such intense suffering that it deters a person from taking climate action, even small steps like choosing fair trade or organically grown coffee over conventionally grown coffee.

Tecuta writes, “Coming to terms with climate change and its effects while living in constant uncertainty about the world’s future is challenging for any human being.” She goes on to provide practical guidance on building emotional resilience while working with others to effect structural change.

I think her guidance is a tough challenge for someone with a brain injury who’s been isolated by both the effects of the injury and others’ reactions. How can an isolated person work with others to effect structural change? How does one increase emotional resilience with an injured brain that has perhaps shut down affect or produces unstable emotional reactions?

As always, I advocate neurostimulation and neuromodulation treatments to repair neurons, improve function, and stabilize emotions so that one can rebuild. Rebuilding emotional resilience helps with many areas of life, not just climate distress or eco-anxiety.

Tecuta advises working on recognizing emotions as an important first step to managing climate distress.

Accepting them, whatever they are and whether we can identify them or not, is a key part of that step. Yet when we’ve experienced shutdown of our affect and on-again, off-again emotions, how can we identify what we’re feeling?

Tecuta advocates deep breathing and mindful meditation to induce relaxation and calm. But in my experience, although they help, their effects last only while doing them. Audiovisual entrainment and cranioelectrical stimulation relaxation effects last hours, giving me the space to think rationally about what I can do and what I need to let go of and lean on others to band together to effect structural change.

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Another practical piece of advice is to stop doomscrolling. Easier said than done. I left Twitter and Facebook and joined Bluesky because the latter has noticeably less hostility and anxiety-provoking posts in my opinion, plus Bluesky doesn’t curate the algorithm, you do. I can scroll through bread feeds and flower feeds or corgi photos. Intentionally setting up one’s virtual environment to provide calm and share good aspects of life counters the “we’re all doomed so there’s nothing I can do” mindset.

Since people with brain injury are not immune to climate change’s frightening effects, we need health care professionals to add brain-injury-focused climate-conscious therapy to their arsenal. Regardless, joining climate action, whether as small as buying organic coffee or as big as going carbon-free, lets us feel part of society. That can reduce climate distress, too.

Copyright ©2025 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy