When we hear about wildfires devastating whole communities, we mostly hear about the destruction of infrastructure– burned schools, homes, cars, and the humans and animals displaced in the process. For journalists, it’s easier to tell a story about the number of homes burned than it is to cover the short and long-term mental health consequences of these events, which ripple out over time and are hard to track.
What we don’t hear often enough is the long haul of dealing with human and community trauma after an event like a wildfire. Long after the cameras leave and public attention is pulled to the next shocking spectacle, the impacts of a wildfire or extreme weather event continue to powerfully shape lives. Although this protracted damage to communities and the mental and cognitive health of individuals may not make the news, these effects determine how we respond not just in the immediate moment of a traumatic event, but perhaps more importantly, in the arduous slog of the recovery process that follows.
Getting our heads around the rise in wildfires is something we can do, ourselves, in communities, at the grassroots, right now, before we experience a major event. There are things we can do to build our climate magic toolkit to prepare ourselves and our communities.
Helping us prepare our “fire brains” this first week of Climate Magic is Dr. Jyoti Mishra, who studies what happens to the brain– and how individuals and communities can respond – when a wildfire strikes.
Show notes + works cited:
- UC Climate Resilience and Mindfulness course and Climate Resilience Initiative
- Dr. Mishra’s NEAT Labs at UC San Diego
- Mind & Life interview with Dr. Mishra
- April 16, 2025 research report on “Climate Trauma from Wildfire Exposure Impacts Cognitive Decision-Making,”
- 2023 report on wildfire’s effects on the brain
- Research on communities bouncing back from disaster
- Community and climate trauma
- Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell.
- Dr. Ray’s book on teaching and climate emotions in students https://www.existentialtoolkit.com/
TRANSCRIPT:
[Intro music]
Jyoti Mishra:
I think climate change really may impact cognition and brain function, that people haven't been looking at that in a way that's related to what's happening in our communities.
Sarah Ray:
Sometimes a problem feels so big, you just can't get your brain around it. We've all experienced this. We have a to-do list the length of a CVS receipt. We don't even know where to start. So we turn on Netflix. And this is also the problem with climate change. Our brains can't get around it, so we don't even begin to face the problem.
We shut down because the scale of the problem feels really insurmountable. Social psychologists call this pseudoinefficacy. The negative feeling of not being able to fix the whole thing outweighs the positive feeling of being able to fix even just a small part. This response makes sense, but it won't fix our problems. One of my favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit, says despair is appropriate, but it's not a strategy.
I'm Sarah Ray. Welcome to Climate Magic, where we're focusing on how our brains and emotions shape our ability to show up for the Earth. This is about the emotional life of climate politics. Your thoughts and feelings shape your behavior. And so fixing this intractable problem depends on the science of emotions, as much as it depends on the science of climate.
This is a rally muscle. We can't rally our hearts and minds if they're working against us on climate magic. We're trying to unlock these capacities to do what's needed. We'll talk to people who know a lot about the role of thoughts, cognitive biases, neurology, emotions, feelings, mental health, and nervous systems in climate politics. We're going to learn about what your brain and your nervous system needs to build that rally muscle to get unstuck and turn your climate despair into climate magic.
Today I'm talking with Jyoti Mishra, who I think of as the goddess of climate trauma and the brain. She entered my research orbit when I learned of her groundbreaking work that she's doing with people who survived the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. There, she worked with people, colleagues and the community to figure out what was happening to the brains of these people who are traumatized by climate distress, and to identify community based interventions, both short term and long term.
Formally, Doctor Mishra has trained in computational, cognitive, and translational neurosciences. She's founder of the neural engineering and translation labs Neat labs at the University of California, San Diego. She's on the scientific advisory board of the Climate Mental Health Network, and she co-developed a UC wide course on mindfulness and climate resilience, which was piloted last year and offered this spring on all ten UC campuses.
In this conversation, we dive into the impacts of climate trauma, especially wildfire, on the human brain, cognition and mental health. Doctor Mishra talks about how mental health support for the most impacted communities is a climate justice issue, and how important it is to build the inner muscle of climate resilience well before any disaster. Spoiler alert it involves building community trust across differences.
We talk about how she maintains her motivation to keep being of service despite terrible news around every corner. And we dip a little into the existential realm of facing mortality and recognizing that you are just a tiny speck on this third rock from the sun. And just how beautiful that is. Are you ready to dive into this conversation? Let's go.
[MUSIC FADES]
___________
Tell us a little bit about your research on climate trauma, and geek out a bit about what is exactly happening in our brains when we experience climate distress?
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. So climate trauma is really a term that's come about more in the literature. Over the last decade or so we've seen an increasing frequency of disasters which were previously known as natural disasters. But now in the times that we live in, with the higher intensity and greater frequency of disasters like wildfires and floods happening amidst us, they are now climate disasters because there's also unequivocal evidence that they are linked to climate change and global warming.
And in our own state where we live, you know, the 0.5 degrees rise in temperature over the last 30 years has directly correlated with 1,000% increase in the fire-burned areas. So, wildfires are directly linked to the global warming that's been happening. So these climate disasters are causing a trauma for individuals and this linkage between the climate disasters and mental health, that itself is a new field. There has been work before on how climate disasters can impact health in general. A lot of work around heat and air pollution and how that can impact cardiac and respiratory health and so on. But really, mental health has come to the fore in the last ten years at the max.
And we've started looking at this in the context of the Camp Fire. That's where my work first started as we all know, it really affected Butte County, and the town of Paradise really was so massively affected by it that the whole town had to rebuild after that. And we found that there are complex mental health sequelae of being exposed to wildfires, including, anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.
And these complex sequelae, they are encompassing up to 35% of the community that is impacted by the disaster. So this is not individual trauma. This is really community wide trauma. When we're seeing, every individual being affected. The second major point about it is that even six months to a year and beyond that, we've looked and other studies have looked at multiple years out, the trauma still exists.
And so the field has come up with this term and really linked these mental health impacts to climate trauma. And we need this terminology out there to really bring attention to this problem, because people really don't think about mental health in the context of climate change. And then, to develop interventions for it. And you asked me, you know, what climate trauma is, and that's really the mental health distress that we see in this severe distress that we see that's actually community wide after disasters.
And then, you also asked me about what happens in the brain. So we had the good fortune of being able to work with community partners in the far impacted regions, and we conducted neuroscience studies alongside them. And we found that this traumatized brain is really showing signatures of being hyper alert, hyper vigilant and hyper aroused.
And the brain activity, especially in parts of the brain that involved cognition. So the frontal brain areas that control how we go about our daily life activities, the decisions that we make, and also the parietal brain areas. And they are hyperactive in people who are exposed to the fires. And this hyperactivity can last quite a long time as well, until the right rehab supports come along for the mental health needs.
And really, what's that signaling? Is that people's minds going to the state where there is constant stress and you're constantly vigilant about the environment around you as if it's threatening you, and it might be a threat to your survival. And that hyper vigilance is obviously, you know, not something that should exist a year after the fires. Of course, that's something that can happen immediately after you've witnessed an apocalyptic event.
But a year after the fires, the brain should not be wired that way. But yet there are. We're seeing, high, frontal arousal and, parietal arousal, which is also been termed “the fire brain” in this context. And the fire brain needs to be normalized. And, more work needs to be done here.
Sarah Ray:
I'm loving that you're geeking out with your language about the different parts of the brain. In some of your writing,you describe it really specifically about how it impacts cognitive functioning and exactly how people are experiencing not just the vigilance around the environment a year later or PTSD, but what is it doing to people's ability to be able to, you know, do executive functioning activities in their daily lives?
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. So we measure executive functioning through objective tests of cognition for an individual's experience. These are actually just simple game-like activities where they're asked to pay attention to certain symbols on the screen, while there are other symbols or objects that are distracting. And that's like a simple attentional task where there are distractors and when there are things to attend to, and specifically on a task like that.
We had a paper in 2023 that showed that distractibility is extremely high in people who are fire exposed. It's the ability to suppress distractions. The impact on that is 20% more than what the normal individual who's not far exposed would be. And then this year, we came up with another study that was just published that talked about how decision making skills, especially when you have to think about long term decision making, that's, very much impacted in this context as well.
Sarah Ray:
It's just so astonishing. It's one thing to think that that makes intuitive sense is another thing entirely to have the kind of research you're producing prove it in the brain. I know that the way that you kind of got into thinking about climate trauma and the brain was through adverse childhood experiences or ACES, and you spend some time in your writing and in your research thinking about how those ACES might intersect with climate distress.
I wonder if you could say something about, is climate trauma just another form of trauma? Is it uniquely different? How does it intersect with these other kinds of traumas?
Jyoti Mishra:
Right. You really read up!
Sarah Ray:
I'm a big fan, I gotta admit! [Laughter]
Sarah Newman:
Oh, that's that's so sweet! [Laughter]
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. So I did work on ACES before I did actually climate trauma work or how essentially the changing environment affects us and and our brains. And as a neuroscientist, I've always just been interested in what are all the things that could affect our brains. Of course, there are things in our daily lives that are how we sleep, eat, and so on.
And then there are families, which is where ACES come along. If we've been exposed to pre childhood, been neglected emotionally or physically or sexually or there's been abuse, all of that impacts the brain incredibly. And much research has shown that that can lead to future psychopathology, even early life morbidity. And so that's the immediate family context. And then beyond the immediate family context, of course, we see today that our environments are rapidly changing beyond the home.You open the doors and there's a wildfire and there's smoke in the air. And what is that really doing to our brains? And so all of these environments, the home environment and the environment outside the home, all of that is influencing the brain and cognition. And so in the first study that we did in the context of the Camp Fire, where we had 725 individuals taking part from these communities, we also asked them about their ACES, essentially their childhood trauma experience.
And we did find that if you had higher levels of childhood trauma, higher levels of ACES coming into this disaster context, then you would have worsened climate trauma as well. So prior trauma risk will produce greater traumas later on as well. It's not essentially that all traumas are exactly the same. The context differs. How long it may last,that context may differ as well. You know, sometimes even if you take the example of childhood trauma, if it's from a specific parent, and when the child grows up and that parent's not in their lives anymore,nd then sometimes therapies help to renormalize that state. And people can be resilient to childhood trauma as well. In fact, there's a lot of research looking at that even when we grow up in environments that are not very nourishing, many people turn up very resilient. So resilience is a very important factor in this context.
But similarly climate trauma is something we've not really seen before. Given how widespread it is. Again, going back to the numbers, 1 in 3 individuals in a community can be impacted by such trauma.
So that, and the highlight on community community is very important because, I think the interventions then should also focus on community rather than individually focused solutions.
Sarah Ray:
I think that is such an important point that you're making. I also love the way you're describing all of this in terms of the kind of vicious cycle of climate injustice. You're bringing attention to the fact that a dimension of climate justice is this mental health aspect, that if you're already in a situation of where you might have more ACES or you're in a more vulnerable environment because of socioeconomic situation, then you are going to be more vulnerable to this layer of climate trauma and mental health and all the cognitive functioning problems that come with it, and then year-long out potential PTSD and disrupted relationships with your environment.
And then that can then decrease your ability to sustain your life. And so the kind of cycle of that I think you're drawing attention to in a really powerful way.
I want to talk about your interview with Mind and Life, the podcast you did with Mind and Life. I love that interview. You describe this research about the Camp Fire research from 2018, you talk about and this segues with exactly on what you were just saying.
You talk about the value of social connection and community action. So the interventions you said shouldn't be just at the individual level, which, of course, we think about when we think about mental health. And there's a lot of people moving in the climate emotion space towards this thinking. Climate emotions are a different thing than what's happening in a private therapy room. This is going to be a collective thing. This is a political matter.
You define, in that podcast, y ou define climate resilience as a kind of a muscle that you would need to build before a disaster that helps you direct your fear response toward helping your community survive, and really knowing what your skills would be for that. One might think that all climate trauma work happens after the disaster as you've been describing it. But what are the implications of your ideas here about community resilience for how we can prepare before a disaster happens?
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah, that's a great point. I think we definitely need to focus on community resilience efforts, with mental health in mind many times when disasters happen, even like the recent LA fires, research from around the world has shown that when people know what to do cognitively about disaster and prevention. So, for example, if you know your house is at risk for fires or floods, then you know what the evacuation plan is, then, you know, where are you going to seek out support?
Where will be the support centers? Where are you going to get your food, water, shelter, etc.? And then, what are the tracks where insurance can help you quickly to rebuild your homes? If all of that is in place, then our brains go away from that emotional processing state to a more cognitive processing state. Our top-down cognitive brain systems, theyget engaged to say, okay, this is what just happened. Say, post-disaster. But, ‘here is my checklist of my disaster preparedness plan. And these are the numbers I need to call. These are the places I need to go’. And that's much harder to do when you have to come up with that on the fly. And your emotional system is really off the charts.
The preparedness portion is very important. Now, that's cognitive preparedness through just, you know, cut and dry disaster preparedness plans. But like you mentioned, mental health resilience is also a muscle that we build. And, the work that we did, again, in the context of the Camp Fire, there are, both individual specific muscles and there are muscles that are community wide.
So what do I mean by that? It’s that individual resilience, we found, was driven by how physically healthy you were to people who were fitter and moved about more, and also people who were more mindful just as a trait. They were going about their lives more in the present moment, really not letting prior experiences change how you experience the present moment.
That sense of mindfulness translated into better well-being, lesser symptoms of climate trauma after the disaster. So those individual resilience skills are very important. And in fact, when you connect with psychological first aid providers, those are the first things they'll tell you. Also is make sure that you can move around, make sure that you're stabilizing your breathing.Make sure that you're mindful of your present moment and what you have right now. Do you have your family members safe around you and being grateful for that and then moving forward from there? I know this can be very difficult. And again, I'm not talking about mindfulness, like sitting on a mountain and meditating. This is really just every moment. I appreciate what I have right now. Like I really appreciate we're having this conversation right now.
Sarah Ray:
I was thinking the same thing. I just took a deep breath. I said, yes, I'm mindful of this moment.
Jyoti Mishra:
So, and then in another study, we showed that resilience is also very much dependent on our social networks. People who said they had good emotional supports from their families as well as had a sense of community, that this community is who they belong to, who they were part of, that that community will take care of me.
Those people were more resilient to climate trauma as well. So having a sense of social cohesion is extremely important. And yes, again and again, we've seen that post-disaster, communities do come together and humanity is alive. And we are seeing that, and also regardless of our belief systems, if my house burned down, if I were a Democrat or Republican, I would want to, regardless of what political belief I may have, I still would want to rebuild.
I want to be part of recovery and would also want to help my neighbor. It doesn't matter whether I believe in climate change causing it, which obviously I do, but it doesn't matter if I do or not. Everyone wants to have a good and happy life, and those communities will survive better post-disaster and even thrive. And there's actually evidence where community members are our firefighters that there's not just the firefighting support force.In fact, you know, like the bushfires are so huge that you can't just rely on a small workforce that is specially trained. In fact, the entire community does the firefighting together. And so, you know, we need to think about these kinds of solutions more broadly, more creatively and together. And again, this example came from the LA fires, where the communities were very frustrated that when disaster preparedness plans were being play and made, the community members were not stakeholders in those plans like they are the ones being affected.
They have to be part of it. They have to be part of the town halls. This is not gonna work in silos. We all need to be on the table.
Sarah Ray:
You know, this is a real pushback on individualistic culture. That's very, very much the water we're swimming in in the US. And what you're saying is, you know, I love this. You're saying there's so much we can do as a climate action. We often think about climate actions as composting or driving an EV or something. And what you're saying is the best climate action you can take is getting to know your neighbors and building community trust in your neighborhood, regardless of what political side people are on, or whether you agree about all the things, all the political things, and I did.
It reminds me of some research I did come across where that said, the number one thing that helps the community bounce back from a disaster and not experience, as you point out, that kind of longer-term PTSD is whether or not they know their neighbors well. So, yeah, something along the same lines of what you're just describing.
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. Send that paper to me.
Sarah Ray:
I'll find that. I'll put it in our show links to. I am so excited. And this is one of the places that I also came across your work about your UC Mindfulness and Climate Resilience course and the work that you're doing with that project with the initiative. You mentioned in this article you wrote for Mind and Life Institute that you're hoping to assess the outcomes.
And now that you've had a pilot and a course running again, I'm wondering, first of all, do you have any outcomes from the class? You also point out that you don't just need climate science classes, teaching students about the science of climate change, that there was a moment that that was what climate education was. You write: .“What's been missing is instruction on ways students can effectively process such information and protect against added distress.” I'd love to hear more about the goals of this course along those lines, and what you think climate education needs to be in this moment.
Jyoti Mishra:
Thank you Sarah. So first of all, I acknowledge that you lead really great climate education as well. And, you have an amazing book on this. And, part of the work is driven by your insights that you've been leading at the California State University for more than a decade now, and I'm really a big fan of your work and how you build in instilling this concept of collective efficacy that we should do things together.
This is not just about one person alone composting or recycling. This is about us being part of a larger movement together and as a collective. So very much a fan of your work and, and have learned so much from it.
So yeah, so very fortunate to get to work alongside Doctor Elissa Epel at UC San Francisco and doctor Phillipe Goldin at UC Davis, who are the co-directors with me of the UC Climate Resilience Initiative. And, you know, it was the journey of that initiative initially started when I naively said to Mind and Life, I will do mental health processing as part of existing climate, the climate change courses and of course, existing climate change courses were very packed and they had their own syllabus to get through, and we never got to the mental processing part.
And so, we still wanted to address some of them, as you know, growing up coincided in this sense of gloom and doom, especially amongst our youth. And, so the Climate Resilience Initiative really started off with education, where we wanted to focus on, building these inner resiliency skills, including mindfulness, connection with others, empathy for others, compassion, active listening.
So just these, core, mental health resiliency skills that a person can really exercise, you know, the mind is a muscle, resilience is a muscle. So teaching those skills in the context of climate change. So, students do get to listen to, a climate change expert, but in this case, we really have them listen to climate action experts in, sort of the meta way where each climate action expert talks a little bit about what they do, but also a lot more about, why they do what they do and continue to do what they do, because this is difficult work, and there are more times that we don't win than when we win. And so we really wanted to talk to all the experts around who are doing inspiring climate action, about why they do what they do. So they do it so that students listen to a lot of these lectures and then come to the classroom and they talk about their emotions. And we then process emotions together and talk about how we can cognitively address these emotions, using emotion regulation skills and mindfulness skills and so on.
So that's a lot of what the classroom is about. And then if we're turning individuals into more resilient beings, then they should also be contributing to the communities around them in a resilient way, in a collective way, trying to do their part of climate action. So, the course does include a capstone project that they have to do as a collective with others, which includes climate action in the community.
And, yes, we've had great outcomes, actually our paper on the first year of the course, has just come out in the journal Sustainability this month, in April, and it showed improvements in both climate anxiety and distress, but also just general mental health distress was improved amongst the students. And then we also found this constructive collective efficacy that I can be part of a whole group, the movement and I can contribute.
And then I have that belief of being part of that movement that went up. We had to do a bunch of classes in nature. So nature connectedness went up. And just being able to cope with all of these climate emotions and, the difficult emotions that come up within us that that coping skills, were improved and, yeah.
So that was our first year. And this year we're also doing brain recording. So we'll see what brain resilience looks like in the brain by next year. So talk to me again.
Sarah Ray:
Gosh I'm so excited. That is going next level; I love it I love it. Oh my gosh I can't wait for this. Because of course it resonates with my experience, right? For the first time ever in the last two years, because of my own research, I do talk about nervous systems.
I do talk about our community as a classroom, as a lab for what we need. We want to be more like Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell than like, the Christchurch massacres or something, right? When we respond to our fear about these things, we can respond in a way that is really resilient and community centered, or we can respond in a way that's really disruptive.
And so in your work, you're pointing to that: the necessity of us focusing on what's happening in the brain so that we can make sure that that's happening, but also teaching that to young people, that's what, you know, don't go down that path, go down this path, right? There's this culture we’re seeped in is telling us to go down a, a more isolating, more harming, more self-protecting direction.
So I love that the work you're doing is trying to also correct that at a cultural level, which is really important to highlight. I'm so excited about the fact you're going to be seeing the brains after it. Just like, what? Oh my God.
I wanted to ask you, you talk about in your writing and what you just mentioned, about nature therapy. Ecotherapy, you describe studies of brains again, of people who spend time in nature after the Camp Fire to do some ecotherapy and kind of climate grief circles and that sort of thing. And then you describe actually what's happening in their brains, which is really cool. First of all, I'd love you to describe what is happening in people's brains when they go into nature.
Unpack that for us, because I think a lot of people think intuitively that feels good for me, and I don't know why. I just keep doing it. So it'd be really cool to say, okay, behind the curtain, what's happening in there? And then also a slight sort of pushback on that or an alternative way of thinking about that when people have gone through big climate distress or when people are just experiencing pervasive climate anxiety, when they go into nature, sometimes they experience more triggering.
And this happens actually, to me, I should say, I will feel overwhelmed by the news. And I think I just need to get out to nature. Sort of like when, you know, Wendell Berry, you know, let's go to the where the wild geese are so I can forget about all this stuff. And I will look at the bird, or I'll look at the tree and I'll think “you're going to die”.
Some of the, like, cascading, catastrophizing of extinction and, apocalyptic images in my mind. And so it's, you know, that sometimes doesn't help. So I'm sort of curious what's happening in our brains that makes it a healing thing. And what would you say about this other thing? Because I've never really talked about it with anyone. I'm curious from a neuroscientist perspective, whether you've seen that come up with some of these subjects who have experienced actual climate distress.
Jyoti Mishra:
Nature research, again, is something that came to me from the work that you were just describing. The communities are coming up with creative, grassroots solutions to address the climate trauma that their brothers, sisters, community members were facing. And unfortunately, the way it is with mental health care around the world, there is a dearth of mental health care and the access to practitioners is very scarce, especially in our low income communities.
Again, it's a climate justice issue that health care and especially mental health care is not well addressed in our most vulnerable and most impacted communities. And so in this context around the world, actually, the community members are coming up with the important solutions and psychotherapy is one of those kinds of solutions, really, you know, just for the listeners to unpack it, that when we think about trauma, there's always a kind of a trigger from the trauma.
So for example, when PTSD was first defined, it was defined in the context of war. And this was back in the 60s and 70s. And the trigger for that is war. And when you get out of that context, it's easy to do therapy for it. And like you're mentioning actually, in this case, when we think about climate trauma, it's your immediate natural environment that was the trigger for that trauma.
And if you live there, there's actually not that much getting away from it. So I'm getting at your second question first, that yes, the environment around you can be triggering for a while. And actually nature therapy solutions are not something that even come up in the acute phase at all. Partly because nature is not back to its flourishing self.
And I'm always hearing from the non-profits like the Sierra Nevada [sic: the Sierra Club] and other things like they are always working on trail restoration and eco restoration. And that portion comes first. People being involved in rebuilding the ecology as much as they're rebuilding their homes and being part of the community in these rebuilding efforts. And, the eco therapy portion, the parts where we can really engage with nature in a therapeutic and mindful way and, look at nature positively, those efforts really start a few months after the wildfire has affected an area, because you need those green leaves to be back in.
You need enough birds to be flying around before you're like, OK, this is gonna be alright.
Sarah Ray:
But then also the signs of resilience of that life too. Must be could be, I should say I don't want to say must, but could be quite healing too.
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So it is in that sense, like any other trauma that we have to very effectively learn to reframe ourselves and yes, well, actually we're all going to die one day. And it's just this moment is what is, inspiring and amazing and actually the effect of nature on our brains is a very unique stimulus around us that can really capture our attention in a way that helps us suppress all those negative emotional firing that's happening in our brains, like the amygdala going off with fear and then the rumination systems going all the, you know, full, full force.
And we're like, this is the end of the world. But hey, look at that green leaf that just came back. And it's resilient. And it came back after the fires. And there's, you know, a beautiful bird chirping on it. And that sense of, it cannot be replicated by any manmade object at all. And so nature is an amazing medium to bring that awe.
And so the effects of nature are that it helps to suppress the limbic, negative fearful responses, helps to suppress the ruminating default mode network parts of the brain. And, you know, it helps to connect our memory systems with the cognitive and brain regions and, really, if you're mindful towards nature, those memories get embedded in our brains.
And, and what's really cool about nature is that we have the ability to feel it with all five senses. You can immerse yourself in nature with, you know all your sights and touch, and you can even, you know, eat, eat that leaf. And, and feel it with so much that you can't do with many manmade things at all.
And that immersion for our brains is this huge stimulus, a positive stimulus, if you will it to be a positive stimulus, that helps our cognitive systems really revive again. And you know, the noradrenaline is important for helping us feel that sense of newness and wonder and that sense of beginner's mind. You know, in mindfulness, we really talk about beginner's mind every day, that I'm here today. And wow, it's a sunrise again. You know, how amazing is that? And this is like one unique planet, third rock from the sun. And this is the unique place that we live in. And, yes, it's stressful times, but, you know, that again, coming back to that present moment. So being able to practice that in nature, really is the most unique lever that we have around us to put our brains in that present moment state and then refreshed, you know, improved cognitive minds.
Sarah Ray:
Yeah. It sounds like you're saying nature, is that nature in and of itself, although there are some qualities about nature that do that. In one of your writings, you say non-threatening nature. So it's important that it's non-threatening nature and that that differs depending on who you are, of course. And that could be also, as you know, a small park in a city, too.
It really is this wide open, idea that really involves what sounds like to me is the absence of a lot of distraction, so that you can immerse your body and let that rumination go. It sounds to me like there has to be no threat to your nervous system, right? So your amygdala can't be firing in all kinds of ways.
So whatever it takes to have that too. And also, you said something in one of your writings about how mindfulness is not just about kind of being in the present moment, but it allows, you know, you even talk about in the case of trauma, because of course, there is research about how people who've experienced trauma have a hard time being still in the present moment.And that oftentimes can be triggering. And you write that, in fact, it's not just about being in the present moment. It's also about this ability in mindfulness to separate yourself,your identity from this event or from this thing that's happening to you. And I wonder if you could unpack a little bit more about what not maybe not just mindfulness, but maybe more of this kind of, insight or, like insight meditation or maybe it’s a Buddhist orientation towards separating yourself, not identifying with the action.That is also helpful when you talk about mindfulness in nature, you're sort of saying some, a little bit of that too.
Jyoti Mishra:
You know, it's true for most mental illness, that at some point there is a huge role around rumination around the self and the negative cycles around the self that, I am bad or, you know, the worse things happen to me. And, the, you know, all sorts of things that we actually do to ourselves every day.
I'm not worth it. Right? And it's these ruminations that are counteracted by the cognitive mind but also these interactions with nature. When you interact with nature in this, in a mindful way, you know, not just like looking at your phone, I'm going to go walk, go on a walk, around the park. That's not going to be very helpful.
Sarah Ray:
Reminder to myself….
Jyoti Mishra:
Yes. It helps you to reconnect in a way that you're beyond just yourself. You know, that there's this whole world beyond you and nature and also a lot of ecotherapy work and, eco-grief processing work also happens in groups and really connecting with others and connecting with nature at the same time, and knowing that what you're going through is not just yours.
Again, coming back to it's community wide trauma and understanding that your neighbors are undergoing the same thing. Partially, that's a sense of relief. And like, you know this, the world's not just out to get me. We're all in this together and we're all healing together. And, and this is just, you know, nature is a great lever we can use, a great tool, we can use in our own healing.
And, but that sense of letting go of the self that we are part of, you know, the world that's around us, that is just part of a lot of meditative traditions in Buddhist traditions and like, just believing in self-compassion, common humanity, that is all part of the, process of letting go of just the self focus, which is, again, a very individualized Western, type of thinking.
And it's not our fault because actually, our systems reward that, right? The individual who will be the best scientist and be the best or in my case, you know, just like one person must set up their labs. And what is this team work? We can't really figure out what how to grade teamwork. So everybody has to have their own one lab and, you know.
Sarah Ray:
Yeah, that's a great example of it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jyoti Mishra:
I mean, that's what we do as scientists all the time. But then there's also like everywhere else. So it's like it's always just one unique individual did this. And Edison made the light bulb when we know he's not the only one who did it. And it's just like, our societies do this to us, that we have to march along, as individuals.
And so fighting that back and then who we are, connected to others and connected to the Earth around us, that's, that's what we need to go back to. And, and, it's so important for it, for our brains.
Sarah Ray:
I really love what you're saying because, one of the premises of this show is that I'm trying to make the case about pseudoinefficacy, which is this feeling of, I'm not big enough to solve a problem this big. And so, because I'm not big enough to solve a problem this big, my brain tells me I shouldn't even try, right? That I have no power, so I shouldn't even try. And that's the collective efficacy points that I try to make in my work and that you're describing and everything you're saying it all your stories. But usually that involves me trying to tell my students or trying to show people, “you're bigger than you think. You have more power than you think.”
And what you're describing actually sort of isn't the opposite move. And I love it. It has a very Buddhist flavor for me, but it also is, just not individualistic. It's not part of the culture I was raised in, which is almost like “you are you are small. You don't matter. You are just one of a collective.”You're one little short time on this third rock from the sun, right? This kind of we're all going to die thing you just said. Of course we're all going to die. So it doesn't really matter, you know, funny, maybe paradoxical or counterintuitive way frees us up to actually do this work or to have our nervous systems at least in the right place.
So we can do something, contribute some part. I don't know, I'm just putting this into words right now as I'm listening to you. But how does that land with you? Do you have thoughts about that?
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, personally I jam with that all the time. In fact, like on my a signature line, like my favorite quote is from the first, you know, Buddhist sutras and, it's and it translates to “giving is true living” and, and it's there because I remind myself of that if it's if I'm always like me, me, me, me, me, it's there's no happiness there.
But in the moment, you really shift towards “how can I be of service in this moment?” And whether, how can I be of service? It is whatever it might be to myself and how can I be of service to myself? Means how can I have self-compassion today? I'm tired and I'm not gonna you know, I'll go to the gym at 5 a.m. And how can I be of service to myself and then service to my family? Service to the students that I have and I listen to, like, you know, what they want to tell me? And, service to others doesn't mean, like, you know, doing their work. It's really just being there for them and what they want to tell you.I'm here to listen actively, and my brain's not elsewhere.
Sarah Ray:
That's community. That's building community.
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah. Yeah. And when someone wants to tell you about their distress, I'm here to listen to that distress and process those tears with you and help you see that maybe this moment is a safer moment for you. And that we will get through this together. The beautiful thing about mental health is that when your brain's in this contribution mode, this giving mode is building that resilience, that muscle in you.
Yeah. You know, and and and like I said, you know, really keep this giving mode to include yourself. This is not about self sacrifice. This is not about I'm always going to be in giving mode to others, to the planet, to the movements that we care about. Yes, but include yourself. There is time for rest and giving to yourself as well.
Sarah Ray:
It sounds like you speak about these things from personal experience.
Jyoti Mishra:
Oh yeah, I do, I do, you know, there's like moods and seasons to life. I go through my times of depression and times of and enjoying the energy and flourishing.
Sarah Ray:
Even in a given day, you might do that.
Jyoti Mishra:
I've learned over time that, you know, that that frame of giving is, is really where the flourishing.
Sarah Ray:
I was going to ask you what your climate magic is, but I think that's your answer. You've just answered that so beautifully. So, I was going to ask you what your own journey was with climate emotions and whether or not this work has sort of helped with some of that.
Tell me a little bit about your journey with climate emotions, and to what extent the work that you're doing on things like climate trauma might be helping you?
Jyoti Mishra:
Yeah, you know, my own journey, it's been like, we talked about mental health can be up and down. And, I grew up in a home back in India where you never trash anything. And, like, from my parents, like the refrigerator that they had in 1975 when they first met each other. Still running just great.
And, you know, it's that thing where there's never any, you know, everything should be preserved to the maximum life. It can give and also find creative ways to repurpose it and recycle it. And, always reuse and never trash. And so that, journey, you know, just coming to the United States about 20 years ago,that in itself was a little bit of a shock.
So like, the single use stuff… How does that even work?
And so I had to adjust to that a little bit and obviously, adjust to in a way that was also, something that would jibe with me was that I would not use much of the single use work. And if that meant that I would not buy things today because I didn't have my, you know, backpack from home, then, okay, I will not buy things.
Sarah Ray:
You had to align yourself with it…
Jyoti Mishra:
It was a process. And over time, I did align and I'm happy that I would be someone who's obstinate enough that some of my family members also became aligned alongside me, and my kids became knowing of what's recycling and composting and, and before the city started composting, we were like the only family in the neighborhood teaching everyone how to compost. And, you know, you do what you can at the individual level. And, my journey was also aligned with the family that I married into. My father in law is a really famous climate scientist, Doctor Ramanathan.
He discovered chlorofluorocarbons caused global warming, and that led to the Montreal Protocols and that led to the repair of the ozone layer. And so this extremely famous climate scientist then and, well, it's a thing that he gets awards from all over the world, and every time he gets some research money. One time back in 2017, he got some research money where he said, ‘Hey, Jyoti, I really would love to use some of this research from this award at that time to see the linkages between climate change and mental health’.
And I'd been talking to him about that work for almost five years before that. I think climate change really may impact cognition and brain function, that people haven't been looking at that in a way that's related to what's happening in our communities. There's obviously work with how nature affects the brain, but the changing climate environment, hasn't been studied.
And, he gave me that opportunity that said, let's try to see how the foundation can give some of these research funds to the work that you want to do with, with the, the climate change and mental health. And that started off my journey. And, really then it became part of my own profession, not just, you know, an individual at home endeavor that this is how I want to live a more sustainable life.
But, climate change and mental health became part of my work. And my kids have grown up with that. And, my son has a book of his own in climate education. It's called Listen Up, Kids: Our Climate Is Changing. And, he's, you know, he's just seeped in everything that the adults in the house talk through. His mom, his grandparents, and he turned it into this comic book for kids. And, we go around the cities and showing it around in San Diego and, you know, so the journey has been up and down. But what I want to point out again, is really coming back to this point of connection is that this work, fortunately, it's so meaningful to me because it helps me connect across generations.
It helps me connect about a topic that really means so much to us with the generation of my father in law, with the generation of teenagers like who? How can you talk to your teenagers on a topic that's passionate to you and your teen? Like, when does that ever happen? But, and, I get that good fortune sometimes when I see my son's eyes light up about climate action and, being able to talk to him about these issues and, and him, you know, being a part of climate action, he's also not, you know, a pessimistic about the world.
So and seeing that not just in my family, but also in my students in the climate resilience course that we teach, that when you are a part of this giving, this contributing, this action is part of this bigger movement. You're moving away from that ruminative state that's really in our brains and in its best form. It's supposed to help us prepare for the future, but in its worst form, it's just ready to annihilate us in every possible way.
Sarah Ray:
I love that. Thank you for that. Yeah, rumination has some strength. There's a reason why we decide to do it. However, sometimes it's misfiring.
Sarah Ray:
You know, that's so beautiful because you didn't say my climate emotions are in a hole right now, because I think that the future doesn't look good based on current politics. You didn't say my climate emotions depend on some hope or some promise that the future is going to be the way I want to be. You said my climate emotions are stable because of my relationships and the fact that I'm doing my climate magic and my part.
Yeah, that's that. And there's some really cool research on this that I also put in the show notes, and I'll send it to you too, if you haven't seen this already, but it's basically that, the when they disaggregate in the research around people who try to solve their climate anxiety through climate action, many people say, oh, climate action directly solves your climate anxiety.
You won't feel climate anxiety more and there is a correlation there. But the causal thing is actually the community part, not the action part. So again, going back to the action being getting in community again, it seems to be a theme that's threading here. Yeah. I love that you did not say I need to have hope that everything's gonna work out okay.
And that makes me feel okay today. No, I think we're gonna need to let go of that one for a while. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. What a model.I'm gonna hold on to that for a while now. So. Yeah, just to wrap it up this way, you know, what kinds of people or organizations or research bodies are doing stuff that you think is really cool, cutting edge. It's not getting a lot of shine that you'd like us to pay attention to or learn from.
Jyoti Mishra:
You know, we talked about the climate disaster context. So in that context, I really give them a shout out to After the Fires. It's a great, incredible organization that comes up to build community in fire impacted areas. And that's the work that it does. It's not, supposed to be all, experts in, you know, rebuilding homes and whatnot.
It's out there to help out community members and to deal with the strife that they're going through. And again, no one has the right answers as to how to deal with a person's specific strife by being there for that person is important, and that's the work that they're doing on the East Coast. I was just on a webinar with the community neighborhood projects.They're doing really good work. And, and there's a pastor who's the head of that project, and they talk about how, you know, when you say community, what is community? Well, and he says community is what you make of it. And when you model good community hood, and that's the community that exists, I think they're doing some incredible work in this, really.
We haven't talked about it. But, you know, this part that I love here is that the sense of community is so diverse and multi-expertised. And sometimes I talk to, say, faith leaders. You know they sometimes are the ones providing the best disaster supports. And when do the scientists go talk to the faith leaders? Not so much.
But we do need to and if our faith leaders are the ones that our rural communities and suburban communities listen to the most, and if they imbibe, you know, these constructs of sustainability about community action, community cohesion, then, you know, we're all going to be better. Scientists don't go out in communities and say, you must do this.This is not how it works. So it's BS.
Sarah Ray:
And you can do that without even saying the word climate change. And yeah, being political about it.
Jyoti Mishra:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, we let go of the words that are polarizing.Unfortunately ‘climate change’ is polarizing. Okay.
Sarah Ray:
Well let's talk about community then. Yeah, I love it. Thank you. Jyoti, I'm just been so happy to talk to you. I really appreciate your time. So thank you so much.
[Outro music]
Jyoti Mishra:
Thank you. The pleasure is mutual. Someone to talk to you, Sarah. Any time. Yeah.
Sarah Ray:
Doctor Jyoti Mishra is a neuroscientist with UC San Diego and an expert on climate and wildfire trauma. Next time on Climate Magic, listen in as I talk with Sarah Newman, founder and director of the Climate Mental Health Network.
Sarah Newman:
You know, and I think it's also just very scary for people to cognitively go Into a place where you try to wrestle with what is happening now and what all the modeling shows.
Sarah Ray:
I'm Sarah Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic here on KHSU.
