What to do About Eco-Anxiety | Jay Michaelson
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2021
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the mental health community, there's a new term: "Eco-Anxiety."
Our guest in this episode, Jay Michaelson, has been thinking hard about climate change for many, many years. Michaelson is a meditation teacher, rabbi, lawyer, activist, and journalist. And he is also a core teacher in the Ten Percent Happier app. He's covered climate change extensively, and has taught environmental ethics at Boston University Law School and Chicago Theological Seminary. He has also been a leading environmental activist in religious communities.
In this conversation, we talk about what Jay thinks some meditation teachers get wrong about climate change, what he calls the "delusion" that individual habit change can make an impact, how we can use meditation to engage more effectively in the kind of politics he says we need to move the needle on a systemic level, and how to use meditation and deep breathing to handle eco-anxiety.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:09.0 | Hey, gang. |
| 0:12.4 | Before we dive in today, some personal and professional news. |
| 0:15.9 | As you may have heard, I recently left my job as an anchor at ABC News to focus full time |
| 0:21.2 | on 10% happier. |
| 0:23.1 | Both this podcast and our companion meditation app. |
| 0:26.5 | I had 21 amazing years at ABC News. |
| 0:29.2 | I got to travel all over the world and witness history in real time. |
| 0:34.6 | I'm also beyond grateful for the fact that my bosses supported my wacky little meditation |
| 0:40.1 | side hustles so robustly and then graciously agreed to let me step aside when it was clear |
| 0:45.6 | that that was the right thing for me to do. |
| 0:48.6 | I'm incredibly excited to triple down on all things TPH. |
| 0:53.1 | We get a lot of notes from all of you about ways we can up our game in various ways. |
| 0:57.8 | We've been listening and so we're working really hard on things like creating more |
| 1:01.9 | meditation challenges, bringing our podcast guests into the app to teach you how to apply |
| 1:08.3 | the insight you hear on the show, and a few other things that I can't share just yet |
| 1:13.0 | but I'm pretty sure you're going to love. |
| 1:15.3 | One thing you may notice here on the podcast is that we will continue to run ads, including |
| 1:21.2 | some different kinds of ads, some of them read by me. |
| 1:25.5 | The goal here, as you might guess, is to make sure that this recent turn in my career |
| 1:30.4 | trajectory doesn't end up with me living in a flop house in Duluth. |
... |
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