STUDENTS worried about climate change are being enrolled in special therapy groups at the University of East Anglia in the UK.
According to a BBC report, almost half of all university students worried about climate change “once a week or more”. They felt “hopeless, angry and depressed”.
The therapy groups are designed to help students overcome despair about climate change.
I’ve not seen the therapy group curriculum, but here offer my own helpful 10 tips for those who want to stop wetting the bed over climate change.
Don’t worry that you can’t get to the University of East Anglia climate catastrophist counseling course. Just follow my simple 10 tips for overcoming climate anxiety …
1. Breathe. If you can still do that then the environment is still going. If not, then you are right to worry.
2. Turn off your electricity and gas. Bin your phone. Walk everywhere. Stop ordering takeaway food. Eat only vegan sandwiches. You will soon get over your climate anxiety. I promise.
3. Stop watching the BBC, ABC and MSNBC. Try to find news sources that give all sides of the story. Difficult, but not impossible. Have you subscribed to The James Macpherson Report?
4. Go to the student union bar, have a couple of drinks, and find a girlfriend. She will either remove all your worries or give you a host of new ones.
5. Worry instead about an actual problem, like World War 3. That blinding flash of light that destroys the world is more likely to come from a Russian missile than from a soccer mum’s SUV.
6. Stop relying on your parents for everything. This will open up a whole new world of worries.
7. Get off social media. Turn off all notifications on your phone. (Okay, scrap that one. We all know it will never happen)
8. Go to China, the main emitter of emissions, and glue yourself to a road. Whatever happens after that will probably cure your climate anxiety permanently.
9. Stop complaining about climate change. Every time you talk you spew CO2 into the atmosphere. All your whining is actually destroying the planet.
10. Wait 50 years, realise nothing has changed, then feel stupid instead of anxious.
As I said, I’m no mental health expert so I may have missed something.
Help to care for the mental health of our young people by hitting the comment button and adding your own helpful suggestion. We are in a crisis people, so no idea is too stupid …
Loved this and love your sense of humour : )
Quite a good list, I hope this has been forwarded to Saint Greta! Could add: Learn about history, and more than just the last 5 years. Learn how to interpret proper data like long standing temperature charts and reports about droughts and floods over a few centuries. Visit old people in nursing homes and let them tell you a few stories about droughts and floods when they were young and how they managed to survive those.
Thanks for keeping us amused, James!