Climate Anxiety: My Weathered Take

How energetic healing frameworks like the tissue states can help us navigate climate collapse.

Apr 29, 2025

Yellow coltsfoot flowers spring through fallen brown leaves and branches in a forest in Muskoka, ON. — Welcoming sunny coltsfoot (*Tussilago farfara*), the first spring flowers I’ve seen here, emerging through branches that fell during the recent ice storm.

Anxiety entered the mental health chat around the early 2000s and has arguably become the most normalised ‘mental illness’ of our time. Case in point: the way Doechii's song resonates with the masses — “Baby, I'm trippin', my feelings been fryin' me, uh / I blame it all on anxiety.”

Almost everyone I know has been fried, battered or skewed by their feelings at some point. Like there are too many cooks in the kitchen of one’s own mind, rattling pans, and occasionally crashing into each other. Order gives way to chaos, especially under pressure.

Yet anxiety makes sense in a pressure-cooker world. When you consider what’s going on, there are lots of reasons to bubble over, from fascism and economic volatility to climate collapse. In a 2023 survey of Canadian youth, 78% reported that climate change impacts their mental health, and 73% felt scared of the future because of it. Some of us are all too aware that climate change keeps us up at night, whereas others may feel ‘anxious for no reason’ or not realise how it’s layering with existing anxiety.

This is because climate anxiety is more than just psychological — it is embodied and energetic. As climate change irritates, inflames and depletes the land, it can also sink into and rupture the dynamics of our internal landscapes.

Many traditional healing systems assess bodyminds through energetic or constitutional frameworks. In what has become the nationalised discipline of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Eight Principles describe patterns of yin/yang, internal/external, hot/cold, and excess/deficiency, with each of us embodying a unique combo of these at any given moment.

Another constitutional model is the Six Tissue States (1900), which builds on the Greek humoral system (think bile, blood, and phlegm) and was adapted by Dr. Joseph Thurston of the Physiomedicalist tradition. I also presume he was heavily influenced by Indigenous healing knowledge, especially related to the elements, heat as vitality and harmonising with the greater ecosystem. The model uses fancy terms like ‘vasoconstriction’ to refer to qualities of hot/cold, damp/dry, and tense/lax. Many ‘contemporarily trained herbalists’ base their assessments on it today, including myself. When we ask questions during consults about whether you like to pull the covers up or kick them off at night, we’re probably trying to figure out your energetics. ;)

Herbs have their own constitutions, too. For example, you can probably intuit that ginger (warming/drying) acts differently in our systems than marshmallow (cooling/moistening), if you’ve tried both. We herbalists sort of play matchmakers between the energetics of plants and people. This is one reason why I take a person-centred approach: because everyone’s terrain and situation are unique, rendering a ‘this herb for that symptom’ approach redundant.

So if we stretch these concepts out, why not consider the Earth’s energetic patterns too?

Thanks to lovely humans, our Pale Blue Dot is presenting with signs of systemic heat, dryness and tension. Simply put, our soil is becoming hotter and drier, losing its ability to hold water and store nutrients. This fuels a spiral of more drying, overheating, and instability, resulting in extreme weather like droughts and flooding. This is of course an overgeneralisation, but these basic patterns are felt to varying degrees (bad pun) across much of the world by now.

The Earth is literally inflamed…And we’re metabolising its changing tissue states, consciously or not. As Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel write in their related book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice:

“‘The body is itself a kind of place—not a solid object but a terrain through which things pass, and in which they sometimes settle and sediment.’ To wonder why some things settle in some bodies and not in others is to begin to ask questions about power, injustice, and inequity, questions that are bound in modern medicine with questions of colonialism.”

These patterns show up inequitably in our bodyminds, especially for folks who are canaries in the coal mine due to heightened sensitivity, location, or transgenerational experiences of systemic injustice. The sediment of climate change is creating physiological conditions for anxiety that can be hard to ‘manage’ with therapy, herbs/meds, relaxation techniques or lifestyle changes alone. Responding to the somatics of anxiety therefore requires some level of sociopolitical action — protest, mutual aid, care webs, whatever is accessible for you — to effect the systems that are keeping the planet, and our tissues, inflamed.

I know climate change can be anxiety-inducing — just see my poem below. I’m writing about climate anxiety through an energetic lens in hopes that it can lend us more agency, while connecting the dots with what the broader ecosystem might be ‘feeling’.

I use ‘feeling’ with care, because I do not want to anthropomorphise the Earth, but rather decentre humans as the apex of sentience, and return our attention to where that sentience evolved from. Sentience is our collective superpower, even and especially when it is hypersensitive.

Have you noticed a relationship between the Earth’s climatic patterns and how your bodymind is responding — with anxiety or something else? Which practices can help you move with and through the energy of climate change inhabiting your skin, muscles, sinews, bones or centrefold?

An eastern hemlock branch is coated in thick ice from a massive ice storm in the Muskoka, ON. — An eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) coated in ice from the March-April ice storm in the Muskoka region around Lake Ahmic.

In early April, a massive ice storm hit the Great Lakes region, leaving behind broken trees and prolonged power outages in areas like ours. The following poem is part of me processing the experience, including the climate anxiety that arose…