We Are Living in a Polycrisis: What That Means for the People You Manage
In the Guardian piece We are living in a time of polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone that came out earlier this year, science writer Theresa MacPhail says, “People are feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated, bombarded with bad news each day – global economic and political instability, the rising cost of living, job insecurity, severe weather events. This not only heightens anxiety but also makes it more difficult to keep going.” Most abent, she shares, is that people are losing their ability to hope for and plan for the future. (1)
You may have noticed the minds of your colleagues get scattered during the COVID-19 pandemic and then…just kind of stay there, stuck. Maybe you’ve noticed folks are more frazzled than ever.
It’s not just all multitudes of crises that are occurring, but our newfound access to every piece of news that exists on Earth, and every person’s opinion about it, augmented by ever exponentially evolving technological advances. Life has always been unexpectedly cruel and randomly chaotic, but now, we can tune into the cruelty and chaos in any given millisecond. While technological advancements and the life changes they pull us into are an inevitable fact of evolution, our brains and bodies are perhaps not designed to adapt to these changes as quickly as they’re happening.
And so, you may have noticed some breakdowns in every arena from dispondent friends to parents who can’t be talked out of the Fox News cult. You may be feeling things most acutely at the place we’re all spending at least 40 hours a week: at work. If you have noticed that your team seems more distracted, more reactive, and harder to reach than they used to be, you are not imagining it.
Polycrisis is here, and it feels awful. As the word “poly-crisis” suggests, we’re feeling crises everywhere all at once.
Are you struggling to manage others in crisis while you muddle through your own sense of disillusionment, lack of focus, and dearth of hope? That would be…normal, if you were.
What can leaders and managers do in this moment? Understanding polycrisis, stress, and the brain, both for you and the people you lead, is one of the most important things you can do right now.
The Polycrisis, Stress, and the Brain
Dr. Gabor Maté wrote in his book When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress Disease Connection (2), that three factors universally produce stress:
uncertainty,
lack of information, and
loss of control.
Think about the state of the world right now. We do not know what is coming next, we no longer trust much of the media, and for many people, the actions available to them feel completely inadequate to the scale of what is happening. It’s the perfect conditions for how Dr. Maté has described stress.
The neuroscience here is not subtle. When the brain perceives threat, whether that threat is a tiger in the jungle or a destabilizing news cycle, the amygdala activates, and the prefrontal cortex, the seat of rational decision-making, empathy, and creative problem-solving, goes partially offline. This is adaptive in a genuine emergency. The problem is that when we experience chronic threat, the bodily system that was supposed to keep us safe starts to harm us.
According to a 2017 peer-reviewed article on chronic stress (3) by Bruce McEwen, the brain distinguishes between good stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress quite well. Good stress is needed! It helps us feel motivated to complete tasks.
Toxic stress, however, is when uncertainty, a lack of information, and a loss of control become constant. Chronic stress physically remodels the brain: it shrinks the hippocampus (memory and learning), weakens the prefrontal cortex (decision-making and emotional regulation), and expands the amygdala (threat detection and fear response). Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) compound adult stress responses through epigenetic mechanisms, meaning early life conditions shape how the brain and body respond to stress decades later.
How this shows up at work is unfocused workers, reduced ability to problem solve and consider lots of information at once, loss of ability to collaborate, an increase in interpersonal conflicts, tunnel vision, and a lack of purpose and meaning. This is called Allostatic Overload. Allostasis is the body's achievement of equilibrium between systems. “In a changing social and physical environment, the brain and body respond physiologically and behaviorally in order to adapt. Physiologically, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, immune system and metabolic hormones and molecular processes within all organs, including the brain, operate non-linearly and promote adaptation via “allostasis” (achieving stability via activation of these systems).”
When hit with chronic stress overload, the ability to maintain a healthy stasis is compromised. So, whereas acute stress is the immune response reacting in a healthy way to prevent disease, chronic stress is when the immune system exacerbates the system, possibly by inducing an autoimmune condition. (3)
So your staff not only have these short-term effects that compromise the quality of their work, but in the long term, they are taking more sick days, living shorter lifespans, or burning out and quitting more quickly with high rates of employee turnover.
Circling back to MacPhail’s article, the brain, stuck in survival mode, loses access to the future. People stop being able to envision what they are working toward.
In summary, chronic stress of this kind contributes to burnout, increased sick days, higher turnover, and the erosion of exactly the collaborative, creative culture that mission-driven organizations need to survive and thrive. Tasks may be happening, but not with a keen, critical eye. Employees may work harder but not smarter, further contributing to their sense of exhaustion.
What Your Employees Are Carrying
Here is what is important to understand as a manager: your employees are not arriving at work from a neutral place. They are arriving feeling activated by hyperbolic and bombastic social media hot takes, by divisive media pundits, by horrific news from every corner of the globe, and the impending sense of doom that accompanies the chaos of ICE raids, funding cuts, unstable access to healthcare, and rising housing prices. “Will AI make my job disappear?” they may ask themselves while lying awake at night. “Am I keeping up with new technology fast enough?” They are grieving the loss of certainty about the future for themselves, for their families, and for the populations they serve.
For people who work in human services, nonprofit, and mission-driven organizations, there is an additional layer. The very communities and causes they care most about are often impacted the most.
Most of your employees are showing up, doing their best, and holding it together in ways that deserve real acknowledgment. However, their window of tolerance, which is the neurological zone in which people can think clearly, collaborate well, and regulate their emotions. has narrowed.
What This Means for How You Lead
None of us can solve the polycrisis. So how can we muddle through it, as managers? How can we choose to make the workplace the safest possible place for employees to feel calm, collected, and able to weather this massive storm?
A few things to consider:
Naming and framing. One of the most powerful things a leader can do in uncertain times is simply acknowledge reality. Saying "I know things feel really hard right now, and I want you to know that I see that" is the simplest and most meaningful starting point. It is part of attuned management, and it reduces the cognitive and emotional load your employees are carrying alone.
Reduce organizational uncertainty wherever you can. You cannot control the polycrisis, but you can control the clarity of your team's roles, goals, and decision-making authority. In a world full of things that cannot be predicted or controlled, a clear mission, a coherent plan, and a manager who follows through consistently become anchors. Structure is a nervous system regulation tool.
Coach employees on emotional boundaries. We cannot carry everyone’s pain all the time. For those who work in human services, we are even more compassionate than most. But if we bring our work home—worrying about the people we serve and all of the people suffering in the world—we’re never giving ourselves a chance to rest. Recognize that compassion fatigue is real and help empower your team to learn and practice emotional boundary setting.
Be consistent. In turbulent times, a consistent manager is one of the most stabilizing forces a team can have. When the external world is unpredictable, the internal world of your team does not need to be. Show up the same way across different people and different days. Follow through on what you say. Be the thing your team does not have to worry about.
You Cannot Merely Resilience Your Way Out of a Polycrisis
One final and important point: individual resilience is important, but it is not the whole story. Asking your employees to simply cope better, breathe deeper, and practice more self-care in the face of a genuine polycrisis locates the problem inside the individual rather than in the systems and conditions that are producing the stress. It’s important for individuals to have strong self-regulation tools! And it’s important to build cultures and systems that support employees.
The leaders and organizations that will retain their people, sustain their mission, and emerge from this moment with their culture intact are the ones who understand that wellbeing is not only individual, but also structural. It is built into how work is designed, how people are managed, how decisions are made, and how organizations hold their people when the world outside is shaking.
Your team members are struggling because the world is genuinely hard right now. Your workplace can become a place of psychological safety and support.
Want to learn more? Check out our past webinars on Leading in Turbulent Times here.
At Tend Collective, we help nonprofit and mission-driven organizations build the kind of workplaces where people can do meaningful work without burning out — even in turbulent times. We can help your team learn and practice new things! Start by filling out this form.
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References:
(1) MacPhail, T. (2026, January 14). New year, polycrisis: The psychology of feeling trapped. The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped
(2) Maté, G. (2003). When the body says no: Exploring the stress-disease connection. Wiley.
(3) McEwen, B. S. (2017). Neurobiological and systemic effects of chronic stress. Chronic Stress, 1, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2470547017692328
