Reckoning With Climate Anxiety in the Wake of the US Election

Many people across the U.S. who understand that climate change is an ever-present threat are still reeling in the wake of Tuesday’s election, when voters chose Donald Trump as the country’s 47th president. 

Trump has not been shy about sharing his views on the climate crisis—or what he calls a climate “hoax.” As global temperatures rise and disasters worsen, he has pledged to ramp up domestic oil production, pull government funding from the green transition and weaken protections for endangered species. 

While his words galvanized his supporters, they elicited widespread concern and despair in the environmental community. 

“With respect to climate in particular, there is very big reason to feel much more worried about the way the United States will or will not participate in the global effort to reduce carbon emissions, and what effect he will have on the rest of the world,” Rebecca Weston, a New York-based psychotherapist, told me. 

Now that the election is over, how people channel that climate anxiety could be crucial to safeguarding their mental health—and the planet, mental health professionals say. 

Emotional Fallout: Anna Graybeal, a Texas-based psychologist, went to bed on Tuesday evening without following the real-time election results broadcasting on televisions across the world. The next morning, she woke up to texts from each of her two daughters asking her to call immediately. 

“They were devastated, and they needed to talk” about the election’s outcome, she told me on Wednesday. Throughout the day, Graybeal received similar laments from friends, family and all of her therapy clients. 

“I can’t think of a single one that wasn’t devastated,” she said. One of those clients specifically sought therapy to address climate anxiety, particularly in the leadup to the election. 

The election’s results came as a surprise to many. For weeks, polls showed that the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump was a relative toss-up. But by early Wednesday morning, vote-tracking maps were painted red. Harris formally conceded the election that afternoon.

Republicans also gained a majority in the Senate. The partisan fate of the House of Representatives is still up in the air as states count ballots. The results could either bolster the Trump agenda during his upcoming term or “serve as a check on a president who revived an old ‘drill baby drill’ slogan,” as my colleague James Bruggers wrote on Wednesday. 

In any case, the president-elect’s proposed policies are likely to deal a devastating blow to climate policies in the U.S., experts say. Trump has promised to withdraw or redirect billions of dollars of spending Congress committed to clean energy. He plans to again pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords, which could have sweeping impacts across the global community, my colleague Marianne Lavelle reports. 

Climate change did not come up often in either candidate’s campaign, a shift that “requires us to rethink how we’re going to get it back on the national consciousness,” said Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor of environmental studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, who wrote the book “​​A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.” 

“The word ‘climate’ is coming up less and less. But, I do not think that means climate anxiety is lessening,” Ray told me over email. “I think it’s taking new forms, and we need to be able to anticipate and get ahead of that.” 

Several of the mental health experts I spoke with this week shared a similar—and strikingly straightforward—piece of advice for how to start coping with post-election emotions that pop up in the short term: Feel your way through them, while taking care of basic needs like sleeping and eating. 

“Today, you don’t have to focus on what you’re going to do,” Graybeal said. “Today is a day to just feel what you’re feeling and express it.” 

In other words, if you feel like crying, go ahead and cry. However, all the experts I talked with emphasized that individuals should try not to sit with these feelings alone. 

“The most important thing is to not isolate with oneself,” Weston said. “That can ultimately keep those initial kind of traumatized reactions somewhat stuck.” She added that people should seek support systems that will try to understand their emotions—whether those are family members or political organizations.

Ray spent the entirety of Wednesday trying to connect with her students and hold space for them to process, a role she was unable to fulfill after Trump was first elected president in 2016. 

Back then, “I was shattered and couldn’t even face my students,” she said. “Because of my inability to show up for my students in 2016, I had been trying to recover from that election—and thereby preparing for this result in the 2024 election—for a long time. I knew this time I wanted to be ready to be in community with people, so I had a plan for that.” 

Anxiety to Action: Even before the election, climate anxiety had skyrocketed across the United States in recent years. Between July and November 2023, scientists surveyed 16,000 young Americans from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., about their climate-related emotions and thoughts. They found that the majority—including many Republicans—are either very or extremely worried about climate change, according to a study published in October, which journalist Nina Dietz wrote about for Inside Climate News. 

As this feeling proliferates, mental health professionals are increasingly coming together to help their clients process and channel it. Weston is the co-director of the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which was created in 2019 to help support climate-aware therapists across the continent. 

Patients can now find therapists who specialize in climate anxiety through groups like Climate Psychiatry Alliance. Informal support groups known as “climate cafes” are popping up as extreme weather events such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods take a toll on peoples’ physical and mental well-being. However, many experts note that climate anxiety itself may be a luxury because many communities around the world have been struggling against climate impacts for decades, Grist reports. 

Participating in environmental activism can also act as a balm for climate anxiety, according to a 2022 study. By surveying more than 280 individuals ages 18 through 35, researchers found that climate anxiety is closely linked with symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, but they can be partially alleviated through collective action. 

“Engaging in collective action has the benefit of increasing feelings of agency as well as individual and collective efficacy—it can help combat feelings of isolation and also foster a sense of hope that change is possible,” study co-author McKenna Parnes told me over email. She’s a licensed psychologist and acting assistant professor at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Research Institute. 

“In these ways, climate activism can help mitigate climate anxiety and help people find meaning and purpose in an otherwise uncertain time,” she said. 

In the wake of the election, mental health professionals are also reflecting on their own anxiety—and reckoning with how best to guide patients through their feelings around the climate crisis as Trump takes office. For Weston, that means giving it to them straight. 

“We can’t sugarcoat this. We can’t gloss over and say that there’s going to be easy silver linings to find. We’re going to have to create those silver linings,” Weston said. “The connective tissue between people is going to be really, really important, because it’s in those lived relationships that people break down all sorts of biases, all sorts of fears, and they can experience with themselves the importance of collaboration and solidarity, as opposed to what … Trump was thriving on, which was fear.” 

More Top Climate News 

In case you missed it, at least five of six ballot measures across the U.S. related to climate change resulted in what most environmentalists consider wins. My colleagues reported on these ballot measures around the country—from California to Louisiana—if you’d like to learn more. Voters in South Dakota, for instance, rejected a rule that would have eased the construction of carbon dioxide pipelines. 

Meanwhile, EV company Tesla’s stock surged by nearly 15 percent following the election, Jack Ewing reports for The New York Times. The company’s owner, Elon Musk, is an avid and outspoken supporter of Trump, donating more than $118 million to his campaign. In September, Trump said that if elected, he would establish a government efficiency commission and tap Musk to lead it, though it’s unclear whether that will pan out. 

Cuba is without power for the second time in two weeks after Hurricane Rafael whipped through the island, BBC News reports. The storm brought gale-force winds that tore through farms and damaged homes. More than 70,000 people evacuated ahead of the storm.