Who are you accountable to?

Environmental issues are real, and they are at the level of global crises. But failing to separate the urgency of these problems from the fear-inducing ways in which we communicate them blinds us to the collateral damage of apocalyptic storytelling. We grow deaf to more inspiring and effective possibilities. By hammering children and adults with issues at scales that feel too large to surmount, we inadvertently cause them to downplay, tune out, or shut down. We are fueling an epidemic of hopelessness that threatens to seal the planet's fate. The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope. THIS article SEEKS to right that wrong. Within these articles, I craft an evidence-based argument for hope that reflects the complex psychological, sociological, philosophical, and spiritual qualities of this phenomenon. Here's one that I use. Remember the breaks that I talked about in the previous article? Well, since you are such a jerk to yourself and it is against your very nature to take the chance to relax and recharge, you can use technology to help you out. Here's a conversation I often have with Siri (the iPhone voice thingy). Siri, remind me to take a break today. Okay, Robert. When should I remind you? Reminder set. Simple as that. When an hour comes around, I will get my reminder to take a break and even though I may not feel entitled to one, I dare not disobey my robot overlord. Brinol and Petty (2003) hypothesized that if people were to nod their own heads while generating thoughts about a message, those thoughts would feel more valid and would therefore strongly guide their attitudes. To test this hypothesis, they had college students put on a pair of headphones and listen to a speech advocating that students be required to carry personal identification cards.

Participants were also told that the headphones were specially designed for use during exercise and other bodily movement. Thus, to test the headphones' performance, participants were asked to move their heads while listening to the speech. Half the participants were asked to move their heads up and down (as if nodding yes); Even though this head-nodding exercise was unrelated to the persuasive communication, it had a potent effect (FIGURE 8. When presented with strong arguments for why they should carry identification cards, the head-nodding participants were more confident in their positive attitudes and more likely to agree. But when presented with weak arguments, they were more confident in the negative attitudes they formed and less likely to agree with the communication. In contrast, when participants shook their heads, they felt less confident about their positive or negative thoughts, and so those thoughts had less influence on whether they agreed with the message. Nod If You Agree I share insights about hope and the environment that have been honed through thousands of conversations with people around the world who have generously trusted me with their feelings. It's an eyes-wide-open look at hope within the full recognition of the gravity, urgency, and vast entanglements of the planetary crisis. The situation of hope vis-a-vis the environment is particularly tricky. Whereas a patient in hospital may experience hope within a realistic understanding of even limited treatment options, those suffering from hopelessness about the environment often have little or no notion that environmental successes exist. Because they feel hopeless, they believe the situation is hopeless. In these articles, I argue that hope for the environment is not only warranted but essential to addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and the full suite of environmental crises we face. By focusing our attention so heavily on what's broken, we are reinforcing a starting-line fallacy that makes it feel as if nothing useful has ever been accomplished and that all the hard work lies ahead. We need to pry ourselves free from this disempowering rhetoric and situate ourselves within the positive environmental trends that are already well established and yielding the successful results we need to grow. Turning toward solutions is a tall order. For starters, environmental solutions aren't easy to find. There are also tons of great apps and stuff that you can use to streamline your life and facilitate your quest to a better you. I can't mention a ton of specific ones, because they are changing every week, but I would have a look around your phone's app store and see what's available.

There are apps that help you with your deep breathing and give you different guided options depending on your current mood. There are also journaling apps to help you just get it all out. There are extensions for Chrome that will let you block websites that stress you out or limit your access to email within certain hours. You can really go crazy with these. Just remember to not go down the rabbit hole of fake productivity and look for new and cool apps for 4 hours right before you go to bed. Don't make the solutions part of the problem. One good way to understand how technology might be interfering with your life or disrupting your mood is to track your activities throughout the day. I don't mean tracking the general things you do each hour. Nodding is a subtle signal of endorsement and can magnify your response to an argument by making you more confident of your (either positive or negative) opinion. In this study, participants who were instructed to nod their heads while listening to a persuasive message were more likely to agree with the message if the arguments were strong than if the arguments were weak. But if they were instructed to shake their heads from side to side, they were not affected by the strength of the argument. A double bar graph represents cognitive response to nod head on agreement, with vertical axis labeled as argument with message ranging from 3 to 9 in increment of 1 while the horizontal axis is labeled as head movements, showing double bar graphs for two responses- nodding (left) and shaking (right). The green bar represents ystrong arguments while blue bar represents waek arguments. The results are shown as follows: For nodding- magnitude of green bar is slightly above 8 while for blue bar, it is in between 5 and 6; These findings suggest that sometimes it is our perceptions of confidence in our attitudes that are especially important. Where do these feelings of confidence come from? In part, they come from our own naive theories about how more thought (or elaboration) leads to more confident attitudes (Barden & Petty, 2008). Just think of how you often preface your judgments. Environmental news is almost exclusively reported as bad news. When we do come across a positive environmental story in the media, it's frequently presented as a one-off good-news story.

Too often, this positions environmental solutions as rare exceptions rather than examples of major trends that have been building over time. Furthermore, feeling empowered to act demands a sense of possibility that is being constantly eroded by the now-ubiquitous exposure to horrifying events happening around the world daily. The strains on human emotions are far greater than ever before thanks to social media, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and alerts on personal devices. Relentless exposure to widespread tragedy fuels emotional exhaustion, leading to desensitization, cynicism, and resistance to help those who are suffering. FOR YEARS, I would ask every scientist I met what made them feel hopeful about the environment. They always had an answer. I mistakenly thought that the only way to increase exposure to under-reported successes would be for me to interview these folks and gather examples one by one. Luckily, in April 2014, I met Patrick Meier, a pioneer in the rapidly developing world of digital humanitarianism, while we were fellows together at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. I mean hardcore, obsessive, annoying tracking of every single thing you do. You really only need to do it for a day, but every time you switch the tab to Facearticle or go to that blog of that person you hate, every time you check your work email when you should be enjoying your lunch, you will start to see the effects laid out there for you. It's pretty scary actually. Oooo mysterious. This isn't like the other secret that you've been told about in other articles where you think happy thoughts and then magically good things start happening to you. This is a bit of a side note, but you should really be careful with that sort of thinking. If you get in the habit of thinking that positive thoughts bring about positive things and negative thoughts bring about negative things, it can get really damn confusing when you realize that the universe is random and bad things can happen while you are thinking your happiest magical pixie dust thoughts. My secret is that I haven't been entirely honest with you so far. The secret is that when I talk about slaying anxiety, kicking it in the balls, or any of the other stupid things that I've said so far, I don't mean that you will be able to make it disappear from your life. Just like you can't make your stupid boss go away forever, you can't make anxiety suddenly poof away in a cloud of smoke. Starting with Now that I've thought about it a lot . But when we're less sure, we often preface with I haven't given it much thought, but .

Most people subscribe to the naive theory that when they've thought deeply about an issue, they have a more informed attitude. Sometimes giving an issue a lot of thought simply allows us to become more certain of our initial hunches and intuitions, even if those hunches are no more informed than they were initially. Statistical Trends Versus Vivid Instances Persuasive messages often feature statistics (Four in five dentists agree. Which is more persuasive? Consider this scenario: You're wondering which city to move to after graduation. After comparing statistics such as per capita crime rates and housing market trends, you tentatively decide on Chicago. But soon after, a friend tells you in vivid detail that her purse was stolen in Chicago, and she's not likely to return. When he described how he mobilized the Haitian diaspora after the 2010 earthquake to create and interpret a crisis map for rescue workers from the tweets, text messages, emails, and Facearticle posts coming from people on the ground, I began to imagine ways we might use social media to gather specific cases of environmental successes from all over the planet and to make them easily shareable. We could try to crowdsource hope. The result was #OceanOptimism, a social media campaign designed to crowdsource and share examples of ocean conservation successes and solutions. We launched it on World Oceans Day in June of 2014, and to the surprise of our tiny group behind the campaign, the tag went viral, reaching more than ninety million shares to date. Within seconds of logging onto Twitter or Instagram, users see current accounts of ocean successes: whales returning to New York City harbor, or the resilience of corals on a damaged deep-sea reef off Scotland. They find inspiring surprises, like the discovery of 200,000 cold-water coral reefs off the coast of Norway, or the recovery of groundfish along the California coast--some populations rebounding fifty years sooner than predicted. Knowing what works matters. These social media feeds make searching for replicable solutions or finding people working on similar issues much easier, which translates into successful actions being reproduced and tailored to other situations. And daily exposure to posts of conservation successes changes how people feel about the state of the planet. These successes empower us. What you are working towards in your recovery from anxiety issues is not only to help yourself avoid unnecessary anxiety when it's possible, but also to learn how to better tolerate your anxiety symptoms. One of the things that really maintains and worsens anxiety symptoms and panic symptoms is the phenomenon of getting worked up about the symptoms themselves.