The Doldrums: Climate Change, Mental Health, and Feeling Stuck

“In the Age of Sail, to find oneself becalmed in this region in a hot and muggy climate could mean death when wind was the only effective way to propel ships across the ocean. Calm periods within the doldrums could strand ships for days or weeks.” - Wikipedia article entry for the Doldrums

It looks like death outside. At the end of the longest summer ever, the grass has withered to straw and a single grackle wanders across my yard like a lone survivor. The temperatures in Austin reached a new record this summer, reaching temperatures over 100 degrees for more than 45 days in a row. Even this was broken only by a feeble rinse of rain that brought temperatures briefly down to 99 degrees (oh sweet reprieve!) before climbing right back up into the triple digits.

When we leave our houses, which is less frequent now, the trusty old medium of weather-based small talk settles inevitability into dejected commiseration about the heat, the heat, the dreadful heat. More candidly, clients and friends describe an atmosphere of disconnection, apathy, and an absence of joy. Sometimes we wonder together about what it will be like next summer, and the summer after that.

The chaotic spiral of events in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing unfolds in the midst of an extreme heat wave.

Weather can profoundly impact human emotions and moods. It has long been established that crime and violence increase when temperatures spike. The widespread attribution is that because people are generally uncomfortable, they become irritated to the point of aggression more quickly (relatable.) On the flip side, those of us who have lived up North know how Seasonal Affective Disorder tends to bring on melancholy and listlessness in many people during winter’s shorter days and colder temperatures. Extrapolating these patterns to framing prolonged heat as a public mental health issue, however, is novel to many of us.

In truth, the relationship between climate change and mental health is a still developing area of thought and research. Before dramatic weather patterns like this summer brought the reality into our everyday life, ecological grief and “eco-anxiety” seemed like grave and immediate emotional experiences only to climate activists and your more neurotic NPR listeners.  After all, most people have more immediate problems, right?…Until now. Very little is more immediate than stepping outside and feeling the blast of a 113 degree heat index.

Amidst life in the heat dome, the emotional experience I hear echoed is one of feeling trapped. Not only are we trapped inside, but this inertia creates and reinforces a feeling of being trapped in the routines of our lives, like zoo animals pacing back and forth in our cages. And we’re trapped in our heads, too. Some of my clients note how much more isolated they have been this summer. Not only do the days leave them enervated and apathetic about making plans with friends, but they are also missing many of the casual interactions from neighbors and community members that are stifled by a general tendency towards hunkering down at home. Some clients long for lost routines that brought them into regular contact with nature, frequently as simple as spending time in their backyard or going for an evening walk around the neighborhood.

Trying to understand this phenomenon, I came across Adam Grant’s 2021 New York Times essay in which he elaborates on the theme of “languishing.” While Grant popularized the term as a way to describe the emotional experience of many Americans during the pandemic, it was a concept originally researched and written about in the context of mental health by sociologist Corey Keyes. Keyes decribed languishing as a kind of lower end midpoint on the spectrum of mental health, when you are not exactly depressed or otherwise diagnosable, and yet far from feeling well. Languishing is “the absence of feeling good about your life” for an extended period according to Keyes. You are going through the motions but without a sense of purpose, meaning, or enjoyment.

Languishing may not be the same thing as depression, but they are cousins with a strong family resemblance. A central feature of depression is the overpowering sense of having no way out. Languishing perhaps is a state that approaches depression, but with a little less finality or conviction. Could things get better? Hard to say. However, without a sense of possibility the uncertainty of languishing can slide into the apathy of depression. If we humans are beings defined by change and constant reinvention as Jean-Paul Sartre believed, languishing in the doldrums is the antithesis of this. And maybe they make us feel somehow less human when we are caught in them, feeling ourselves as a persistent fact of biology but without the sense of possibility and self-transcendence that make us feel more certainly human and alive.

But seasons change, it turns out. Shocking, I know! It happens a few times every year and yet it still somehow surprises me when, one day, the air feels different. Last week the days began to start out in the low 70s instead of the high 70s, a small shift but one that brings optimism in with the sun. A few of my clients have resumed those stabilizing routines of evening walks, or little forays into the yard to check on the plants and test the air. The uncertain future of Texas in a context of climate change remains, but we have a reprieve in our lived everyday experience. There is wind in the sails and a sense of a future waiting to be lived.