Ask a Climate Therapist Column, We’re Tackling Two Questions at Once — Each Examining Similar Themes of Burnout and Paralysis From Two

Wherever you are on your own path of climate engagement, I hope the advice will resonate. Dear Leslie, I have been working in sustainability for over 24 years. I'm tired, demoralized, feeling pretty beaten.

Do I give up, and say I tried? Or how do I continue trying in a world that I have little influence or control over? —An Exhausted Specialist.

I'm 31, and I know more about climate change than anyone I work with. Twice now I've driven to a neighborhood canvassing event and left without getting out of the car. The only way I can explain it is that I’ve started to believe that nothing I do could make the slightest dent in the immensity of the planetary crisis.

It sounds true when I say it out loud, but I can't tell if it’s clarity or just fear dressed up as reasoning. —Frozen Activist. Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column.

Dear Exhausted Specialist and Frozen Activist, You're arriving at the same boulder from opposite directions: One of you has been pushing against it for 24 years with shaking arms, and the other has backed off because you've decided that you can't possibly budge it. It's painful to track worsening climate impacts knowing that they were coming, and to then assume the burden of failure. What I see in common with your struggles is a belief that you need to be equal to the scale of the crisis.

What I would offer you instead is the reality is that none of us can do it alone, and when we try, we’re on the road to burnout. Ask a Climate Therapist tackles your questions about how to navigate the emotional side of climate change, with leading climate-aware therapist Leslie Davenport. Have a question?

Ask it here! Cultural shifts happen through collective efforts that don’t always arrive in a straight line, and can be hard to see from our limited individual vantage points. Slow progress in your corner of the work isn't a fair measure of what’s being done throughout the system; that requires a group mindset, not an individual one.

Think about what it takes to restore a wetland, pass a new policy, retire a coal plant — these things can take years of unseen groundwork before anything tangible changes. But when we put the blame on ourselves as individuals for society’s slow pace of progress, we feel overwhelmed, and then our brains start working overtime to prevent that. That’s what leads to reactions like freezing (Frozen), or walking away (Exhausted), or even intellectualizing until the bad feelings fade.

Your part in this transformation was never about matching the magnitude of the problem: It's about finding a way to stay in it that's personally sustainable. Your effort matters, even though it's never going to be enough on its own — and you can carry that tension without letting it flatten you. Learning to live with the not-knowing, the incompleteness, the years without a clean resolution, is an essential part of the work, too.

There's a practice I like to use that helps you hold that tension without asking one feeling to cancel out the other. Make a statement naming the harder truth first, then follow it with one that’s also true, like in the examples below. “I'm exhausted by 24 years of pushing, even as I still feel needed in this work.

I'm afraid to start participating, even as I feel pulled to take a first step. I’m frustrated by the limits of my capacity, even as I recognize that I'm not alone in this work. Try writing a few Even As” statements of your own.