A mother in Kansas City, Missouri, was moved to action following a tragedy.
Sami Aaron lost her son Kevin Aaron to suicide in 2003. Kevin was an environmental activist, and Aaron says that his concerns about the climate crisis and other environmental problems contributed to his mental health struggles and feelings of hopelessness.
“I know all about sustainability, but I don’t know how to sustain myself,” Kevin wrote in one of his journals.
Aaron says that back then, few were aware of the mental health impacts of climate change. And there was little support or resources for activists and others immersed in these problems. Even now, she says, many activists suffer from stress, burnout, or anxiety about the state of the climate.
So in 2018, after retiring from her careers as a software developer and yoga and meditation teacher, Aaron founded The Resilient Activist. It’s a nonprofit that provides climate activists and others with tools and resources to help bolster their emotional and mental health, before they’re in crisis. The group hosts speakers, and runs workshops and trainings – both in person and online – where activists can come together to talk about how they’re feeling.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Aaron about why it’s important for activists to prioritize their emotional and mental well-being and some tips for self-care.
Editor’s note: If you are in crisis, you deserve support. You can call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Some crisis lines use police intervention; if that is a concern, additional options are available at this link.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: Introduce me to The Resilient Activist. What do you do?
Sami Aaron: Our main audience is climate activists and environmental justice activists. And our main vision is to build community, provide resources for personal self-care as well as vital ecological health. We work closely with members of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, and the Climate Mental Health Network. We offer speakers’ bureau programs. We’ve got workshops that help activists reevaluate when they are close to overwhelm and burnout. And we have monthly climate cafés to create safe spaces where people share what’s on their hearts and know that nobody’s going to roll their eyes because they’re upset about a certain thing that has to do with the environment.
[Earlier this spring, we were at a big climate conference] and there were a lot of people there who are the sustainability directors, for example, of their cities or their counties. And I heard more than once, phrases like, ‘I’m so glad to be here. Nobody that I work with cares about what I’m trying to do.’ And that sense of isolation is pervasive across the environmental sector, and it’s pervasive within people’s families, within their relationships, within the jobs that they have and the people that they work with. And so being in community is a huge, huge emotional uplift.
We also do a lot of nature-connected events in the greater Kansas City area, because time spent in nature can be very healing. We work with climate activists who work in land use who don’t find joy when they’re out in nature, because all they can see are invasive species and destruction. And so we have ways to help them receive the benefits of time in nature that don’t trigger whatever grief or trauma that they experience in their daily lives.
YCC: How old are the people who typically attend your events?
Aaron: It’s interesting. Up until the last year, most of our audience has been people over the age of 50. A lot of them are people like myself who’ve been activists for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and still feeling this grief and this isolation and frustration. However, in the last year, our board of directors has doubled in size, and we have five new members who are under the age of 35. And so we’re bringing in more and more people from a younger audience to help young people really understand that there is support out there for them, that they’re not alone, and to really spread the message that they must talk about how they’re feeling, and they must find a way to find someone who can help support their mental health while they work on whatever is really calling to their hearts for the environment.
YCC: What do you want people to know about why cultivating these resilience-building practices is so critical?
Aaron: There’s something called a martyr syndrome that is pretty pervasive among environmentalists – thinking that what they need is of little value in relation to what’s happening around them. There’s this sense that, “I don’t need to take time or energy to get help because there’s too much to do.”
[You can think about it this way:] You’ve got a teapot of water and that’s the energy – that’s the work that you do. And you just keep pouring the water out and pouring the water out and pouring the water out. And eventually, you’ve got a teapot that burns. And what we want to stay away from is that overwhelm and burnout and isolation.
YCC: Can you describe some of the different ways that stress or overwhelm or grief can manifest? And what are some of the ways that people can recharge and care for themselves?
Aaron: I’ll go back to my yoga meditation teacher training, and I’ll put that hat on. We talk about mind, body, and spirit.
We start off with the body – for people to notice physically what they feel. So if they’re in a situation where their shoulders are tight, their teeth are clenched, their stomach is clenched, maybe they’re developing ulcers or some sort of chronic tension issue in their body – that’s a great first step to notice.
A lot of people are living in the state of fight, flight, or freeze mode, right? They’re just in that state all the time. And the body’s not prepared for that. The body’s prepared for that in short bursts – like when there’s a tiger coming at you – but not necessarily for every single day.
So there are all kinds of really great practices out there that can help you get your body back into a state of relaxation – breathing practices, yoga, meditation, Tai chi. And taking care of the body, the breath, the food that you eat – it’s all a huge part of that resilience.
Regarding the mind, take a look at how much doom-scrolling you’re doing. Let’s say we have 10,000 thoughts a day, and 2,000 of them are about, “Oh, I think I’ll brush my teeth now,” or “I’m going to go wear this outfit,” or whatever … 2,000 thoughts a day are about what you do in your regular everyday life. If the 8,000 thoughts that are left are all about what’s wrong, all about the grief and the suffering and the pain and the anguish and the fear, then that leaves no time or energy for new ways of thinking, no creativity, no self-care. So what we suggest is cut that 8,000 down to 2,000. You’re not putting your head in the sand – you can still stay on top of those issues that really concern you. But then take that 6,000 thoughts that you have left and see what you can do with them, who you can reach out to, who you can be creative with.
For spirit, we really promote contemplative practices. There are all kinds of ways to be in a state of ease in your mind – stepping out of the everyday thoughts and rumination that a lot of people experience. So finding a teacher or a community or a group or even making a pact with yourself that every Sunday morning you’re going to pack a lunch and go out into nature and sit under your favorite tree with a journal. And just allow that time for you to really resonate with what’s bubbling up from you from your heart, as opposed to what’s coming at you from the radio and the social media and your emails and your work and so on. Just get out of your head, into your heart, into nature, and find a way to let all of the thoughts go so that new ideas, new ways of being, creativity, all of that can bubble up.
There are a lot of people who don’t know how to identify what they’re feeling about climate change. We have something called a Climate Emotions Wheel, which Climate Mental Health Network developed. And it’s just a way for people to look at this wheel and point to what they’re feeling: like, “Oh, yeah, I’m feeling despair. I’m feeling betrayed.” And at a recent conference, we asked people, “How does climate change make you feel?” And there were many people who couldn’t get past the word “anger.” Or they couldn’t get past the word “frustrated.”
A lot of times people have not been taught how to recognize what their heart is really telling them about how they feel. And so we encourage people to journal, just free form – get into a meditative state. “How am I feeling? What is my body telling me? How is my response when I come back from doing a certain activity? – am I pissy to the dog or do I feel joyful and happy?”
Then find somebody to talk to about it. It could be a peer. It could be a mental health professional. It could be other people within the environmental community. Preventing burnout and overwhelm – the only way that’s going to happen if people feel resourced, they feel joyful, they have great relationships even outside the realm of their environmental activism. That’s the only way they can sustain the work that they do.
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