Five Myths About Climate Grief That Keep You Paralyzed
What actually helps when living with the crushing weight of ecological awareness
The woman sitting across from me in during a recent discussion in my role as university chaplain for nature-based spiritualities is accomplished, thoughtful, and seemingly doing all the right things.
She composts. She volunteers. She’s read every climate book. She even donates to environmental charities. Yet she’s also drowning in grief she can’t name, shame she can’t shake, and the persistent belief that if she were doing this right, she wouldn’t still feel this way.
“I don’t understand,” she tells me.
“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do.” That phrase, supposed to do, is where the trouble lives. It’s where the myths take root.
Through similar conversations, I’ve identified five persistent myths as I am starting to understand what is happening.
As a University Chaplain and ordained Wild Guide who’s walked over 500 miles along pilgrim paths with climate aware seekers, I’ve identified five persistent myths that keep good people stuck. These aren’t just unhelpful ideas. These are active barriers between you and the capacity to actually live with what you know about the world.
Let’s explore and then dismantle them.
Myth #1: If You’re Doing It Right, The Grief Should Ease
This is the myth I hear most often.
People come to me expecting that once they’ve processed enough, meditated enough, taken enough action, the heaviness will lift. When it doesn’t, they assume they’re failing at climate grief. They think something must be wrong with their practice, their commitment, their spiritual development.
However, the truth is that grief is appropriate.
What you’re feeling matches the magnitude of what’s happening. Your nervous system is accurately perceiving mass extinction, ecosystem collapse, futures being foreclosed. The goal isn’t to make the grief go away.
The goal is to build your capacity to hold it.
Think of it like building muscle. The weight doesn’t decrease. You get stronger. Your nervous system learns to carry what’s true without collapsing under it.
This happens through practice, through ritual, through repeatedly meeting the threshold between overwhelm and presence.
Stop trying to fix your grief response.
Start asking: what helps me hold this today? What ritual marks this transition? What practice builds my capacity instead of trying to eliminate what I’m feeling?
Myth #2: More Information Will Help You Cope
Remember my recent post about your pile of unread climate articles?
This myth is why that pile exists. We keep thinking that if we just read one more study, understand one more tipping point, grasp one more feedback loop, we’ll finally know enough to feel okay. Your nervous system is trying to tell you something different.
It’s saying: I’m already overwhelmed.
More input isn’t helping. Studies in climate psychology seem to confirm this as well. When your system is in chronic activation from awareness of ongoing loss, additional information doesn’t provide relief.
It compounds the load.
Your unread article pile isn’t procrastination. It’s your body’s wisdom saying enough data, we need processing capacity. It’s your nervous system protecting itself from information overload when what you actually need is space to metabolize what you already know.
What actually helps: information fasts.
Selective engagement. Trusting what you already know instead of searching for the one piece of information that will make this feel manageable. It won’t. Because the situation isn’t manageable in the way we want it to be. There are no magic solutions out there, and that is ok.
Your nervous system knows it.
Myth #3: You Should Be Able to Stay Positive
This is spiritual bypassing dressed up as resilience.
The cultural message is clear: focus on solutions, celebrate wins, don’t dwell in the negative. As if appropriate sadness about species extinction is the same as clinical depression. It’s not.
Climate psychologists distinguish between eco anxiety (distress about environmental crisis) and anxiety disorders.
One is a proportional response to real threat. The other is dysregulated fear. When you’re grieving what we’re actually losing (forests, species, stability, futures) that’s not pessimism.
That’s reality.
The truth is that grief and engagement coexist. You don’t have to choose between feeling the loss and working toward what’s possible. Both exist. Both matter.
The pilgrims, whether secular, religious, spiritual, or some combination, I’ve walked with understand this.
You can carry sorrow while still putting one foot in front of the other. The walking doesn’t eliminate the difficulty. It teaches you to move with it, to let grief and forward motion walk together.
Stop trying to stay positive.
Start learning to stay present with what’s actually true, including the difficult parts, without abandoning engagement or collapsing into despair.
Myth #4: Taking Action Will Make the Feelings Go Away
This one’s subtle.
We’re told that action is the antidote to despair, which sounds right until you notice people using activism as a way to bypass actually feeling what they feel. The doing becomes a defense mechanism. The constant motion keeps them from sitting still with the grief.
I see this in students constantly.
They join every climate group, attend every protest, work themselves into exhaustion. Then they come to my office confused about why they still feel terrible. “I’m doing so much,” they say. “Why doesn’t it help?”
Because action doesn’t cancel grief.
Both exist simultaneously. Acting from presence is different from acting to avoid presence. One is sustainable and grounded. The other burns you out and leaves the grief untouched, just driven underground where it emerges as rage, despair, or sudden collapse.
What actually helps is to do what’s yours to do, from a place of groundedness rather than frantic avoidance.
Let the grief inform your action instead of trying to use action to eliminate your grief. This is what 500 miles of pilgrimage taught me. Movement and sorrow walk together.
Neither cancels the other. In fact, this is one of the reasons I so strongly advocate walking as a spiritual practice.
Myth #5: You’re Supposed to Have This Figured Out
Nobody told you that we’re all learning to live with unprecedented loss in real time.
There is no manual. There are no experts who have this completely figured out. Anyone who tells you they’ve “processed” their climate grief and reached the other side is likely lying or in deep denial.
What we have instead are practices.
Frameworks. Ways of being that help us stay present without fragmenting. We have each other. We have traditions of holding difficult truths that we’re adapting for this moment.
We have our bodies’ wisdom about what helps and what doesn’t.
Your confusion isn’t failure. Your ongoing struggle isn’t evidence you’re doing it wrong. It’s evidence you’re awake to what’s actually happening.
You’re figuring out how to live with that awareness without numbing out or falling apart.
Community over isolation. Shared learning over solo expertise. Both grief and engagement instead of choosing one or the other.
This is one of the reasons I write, so we all know we are not alone.
What Actually Helps
So if these five myths aren’t helping, what does?
Building threshold practices that honor the grief rather than trying to eliminate it. Creating rituals that mark the space between overwhelm and presence, like the morning practice from my recent post. Finding your people (the ones who also wake with the remembering and aren’t trying to fix it away).
Trusting your nervous system’s wisdom about when to engage and when to rest.
Letting grief and action coexist instead of thinking one should cancel the other. Remembering that you’re not supposed to have this figured out because nobody does. None of us have the manual.
We’re all living and learning, writing and supporting it together.
Living with climate awareness isn’t about getting it right, feeling better, or achieving some enlightened state where the grief no longer touches you. It’s about building capacity to stay present with what’s true while remaining engaged with what’s possible.
The myths keep you stuck in shame.
They keep you searching for the right formula that will make this bearable, the perfect practice that will finally fix you, the one piece of information that will help it all make sense. That formula doesn’t exist.
The truth sets you free to actually show up.
Imperfect. Grieving. Engaged anyway.
We’re entering December’s longest nights. The season when Earth herself shows us how to honor darkness without pretending it’s light. There’s wisdom in that.
The grief doesn’t have to go away for us to keep walking.
We just have to learn to walk with it. To let sorrow and engagement move together. To build our capacity to hold what’s true without collapsing.
This is the work of our time.
Which myth have you been believing? Drop the number (1 to 5) in the comments. I’m genuinely curious which one resonates most.
If this helped dismantle something you’ve been carrying, please share it with someone else who’s trying to live with climate awareness.
If you want more practices for staying present with ecological grief, subscribe below. I write about walking, pilgrimage, and Earth kinship most Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings.
The myths are strong. But the truth is stronger.
You’re not walking it alone.
~ Jeffrey
This is such a needed and profound reflection on where many caring and engaged people find themselves.
I have a bit of all of them, I guess.
I deal with what I feel in my art practice, which is my spiritual practice. I draw animals who endangered and ones that are not - well not yet. In doing so I allow my grief to be transformed into art. It's not about avoiding. It's about s deeper kind of connection ot the WIldbeing whose photo reference I am working with. The grief doesn't go away. I don't pretend that drawing will save them. What it does in honour that they have existence and existed in my lifetime.
This is a time to live that I never thought 'in the imagaination of my heart' that I would be living. I know that those in power - plotical, economic, even some in spiritual power - are greedy, self-serving, deluded. All the money, all the prestige will mean nothing when the bees have all died from pestiside poisoning, when all the food we eat is contaminated with the gods know what, when the water is too foul to drink and the air is unbreatheable. I weep for what I see and continue to learn about the climate (whether from the act of humans or the cycles of nature), mega farms, clear cutting of habitats. But I neither ignore the grief nor wallow in it.
Still, this is when I am living an in my understanding, it is a time I chose to be here, for whatever reason. I look in wonder at the smallest flower and the teeniest insect with knees so tiny you can barely see them and rejoice that I have shared a plent with such a creature, as much as with Polar Bears or giant Redwoods. It is that gratitude that keeps me from dissolving in despair. It allows me to still look, and see and feel and connect in wonder and delight.