UEA pioneers first ever eco-anxiety course for students

Photo: Joe Bunker

The University of East Anglia has become the first university in the country to run courses in mindfulness, to help students that are struggling with ‘eco-anxiety’.

The course, which has been created in collaboration with Norfolk and Waveney Mind, aims to help students manage their worries and concerns over the ever-changing climate and its devastating consequences for people across the world.

It comes as according to a recent study carried out by The Lancet, over 45% of 16 to 25 year olds said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives.

Caroline Fernandez, from the charity Mind who works on the course, described how it was set-up “in response to more and more people coming to Norfolk and Waveney Mind with anxiety around the climate crisis”

She described how people were coming to the mental health charity worrying about “whether to have children [and] not wanting to bring [them] into the world.”

She went on to say that many students are “studying the academic side of [climate change] … but they don’t actually have anybody else to talk to about how they are feeling about it.”

The course, which started on the 2nd November this year, runs 2-hour sessions every Wednesday and will last for 6 weeks at Earlham Hall on the UEA campus.

Earlham Hall | Photo: Joe Bunker

The sessions incorporate mindfulness with the ‘Active Hope’ model from the world-renowned book written by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, and looks at how to transform despair and fear around the climate crisis into more positive emotions of hope and appreciation.

Lourdes, a Masters student at UEA who used to host a podcast about environmental issues back in her home-country of Columbia, described how she found the course.

“I find the course very useful in terms of peace of mind” and she says the skills she has learned “can be applied to any other [aspect] in life.”

She further explained how it has been “very useful just to ground yourself and actually follow the cycle of ‘Active Hope’ which includes gratitude and acknowledging our pain… and then to change [our] perspective.”

“[The course] makes you more conscious of the inter-connection we have as humans and as a society and the impact we can [have].”

To find out more about the course, which is being run as part of ‘Project sUSstain’, you can contact: sUStain@norfolkandwaveneymind.org.uk or phone: 0300 330 5488.