Is this you? Well you aren’t alone. This is why we need a smart strategy, so we can all live responsibly and still keep our sanity.

Meet Claudia and Jason. A hard working young couple, with two boisterous toddlers. They are run off their feet, but they’ve stopped to think. Their kids need a habitable world to live in, and that’s the most important thing of all.

So Claudia and Jason have taken the climate pledge. Between studies and soccer matches, Jason has been busy insulating skylights and hot water pipes. Claudia has been looking at ways to reduce heat loss through their windows.

They’ve had a Home Energy Assessment done on their home and are now planning ahead to improve their home’s comfort and reduce their energy bills. One step at a time. That’s the key.

The ‘Powerdown Method’, brainchild of Richard Heinberg, is a wonderful way to go about changing our lives in manageable chunks. It can be used by householders, businesses and even big government.

Faced with the challenge of reducing our footprint by a whopping 40 or 50 percent is mind numbing stuff. Heinberg’s advice is to take the sweat and drama out of this challenge. He argues that reducing our impact by a mere 5 percent is eazy peazy. Then repeating this again next year is, well… eazy peazy again.

Each 5 percent adds up (like compound interest) so that in 6 years we have reduced our impact by some 30 percent and have hardly noticed.

Except we do notice that a little more sanity has entered our lives. All it takes is a little time to take stock of our lives and so free us from the proverbial treadmill.