Is This Why the World is in Crisis?

We are living in troubled times with multiple world crises: environmental collapse, geo-political instability, economic fragility, technological disruption, global health threats, social fragmentation, food and water scarcity, refugee displacement, governance deficit, education and skills deficits, and aging populations.

And worse still, we're facing what systems theorists call a "polycrisis": these multiple crises interact to create emergent risks greater than the sum of their parts.

During such unprecedented crises, we need our senior executives at their best, and yet many of them are in crisis themselves.

Our Most Senior Leaders Are Struggling The Most

When the people making decisions that affect millions are operating in crisis mode, what does that mean for the rest of us?

I recently published an article about the global Executive Mental Health Crisis outlining a number of global studies identifying this health crisis.

If our leaders are this dysregulated with impaired cognitive function, what does that mean for the state of the world?

The Decisions Being Made

Consider what senior leaders decide on any given day:

On the organisational and strategic front: 

• whether to restructure, affecting thousands of jobs; 

• how to respond to geopolitical instability; 

• where to allocate capital in uncertain markets; 

• whether to prioritise short-term shareholder returns or long-term sustainability; 

• how to navigate supply chain disruptions, technological transformation, regulatory changes, and stakeholder conflicts.

On the leadership/management front: 

• staff turnover, absences, illness; 

• performance issues, disengagement, psychological distress; 

• conflict and team dysfunction; 

• leadership skills not matching the increasing demands of modern workplaces.

And on the personal and home front: 

• depression, anxiety, stress, burnout; 

• divorce and relationship breakdown; 

• children with mental or physical ill-health; 

• their own chronic illness; 

• the death and illness of loved ones.

These aren't minor judgment calls or life challenges. These are civilisation-shaping decisions made by, in some cases, under-skilled, over-stretched executives with impaired prefrontal cortex function, despite their good intentions.

If executives making the most crucial decisions are impaired in the very region of the brain responsible for complex decision-making, long-term planning, and perspective-taking, the implications are staggering.

No wonder the world is in crisis.

The Cascade Effect

McKinsey's research on organisational health demonstrates what their Organisational Health Index (OHI) has consistently shown over two decades of data from more than 1,500 companies across 100 countries: leadership quality cascades through organisations. 

Executive state influences manager state, which influences employee state, which influences customer experience, which influences organisational outcomes. 

Healthy organisations deliver three times the total shareholder returns of unhealthy ones — and leadership behaviour is central to that health equation. [Keller & Price, McKinsey Quarterly, 2011; McKinsey OHI research, 2024]

The cascade doesn't stop within organisational boundaries.

When a C-suite executive at a major bank makes a risk assessment while operating in chronic stress — with an overactive amygdala scanning for threats and reduced prefrontal cortex capacity for nuanced analysis — the decision ripples through financial markets.

When a pharmaceutical executive allocates research funding while experiencing decision fatigue and burnout, that impacts which diseases get studied, which treatments get developed, which populations receive care.

When a technology leader navigates AI ethics questions while dysregulated, unable to access the cognitive capacity for long-term consequence analysis, those decisions shape the future of human-technology interaction.

Individual executive mental health isn't a personal issue. It's a systems-level, country-level, and global-level risk factor.

The Short-Term Thinking Epidemic

Neuroscience research reveals a consistent pattern: chronic stress narrows temporal horizons.

When we're stressed, our brains shift into a faster, more automatic mode of thinking rather than careful, logical reasoning. Whether from time pressure, high stakes, or feeling overwhelmed, our brain's more primitive survival systems take over in what is the classic "fight or flight" response.

Rongjun Yu's research (2016), on the "Stress Induced Deliberation-to-Intuition" (SIDI) model, demonstrates that stress elicits a switch from analytic reasoning to intuitive processes, associated with diminished activity in the prefrontal executive control regions. 

When you're under pressure is precisely when you're least equipped to make your best decisions, because stress biologically nudges you away from careful thinking and toward emotional reactions.

Leaders become increasingly focused on immediate threats and short-term outcomes, while long-term strategic thinking becomes neurologically less accessible.

This explains much of what we observe globally: 

• quarterly capitalism over sustainable business models; 

• reactive policy-making over proactive planning; 

• crisis management over crisis prevention; 

• immediate stakeholder appeasement over structural change.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Reports (2025) consistently identify "failure of long-term thinking" as a meta-risk amplifying all other global challenges. Yet we rarely connect this to the mental health crisis among those we've tasked with that long-term thinking, our senior executives.

It's not that leaders don't intellectually understand the need for long-term thinking. It's that their nervous systems, flooded with cortisol, stuck in fight-or-flight, cannot access that capacity.

No training on visionary leadership or strategic thinking is going to increase long-term thinking while the executive's personal crisis continues to overwhelm them.

The Empathy Deficit

Research on leadership under stress documents another concerning pattern: stress significantly impairs certain dimensions of empathy and perspective-taking. 

A 2022 systematic literature review published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews found that acute stress can block affective empathy and emotional contagion, with contextual factors playing an important moderating role.

HeartMath Institute research, conducted since 1991, has demonstrated that different patterns of heart activity accompanying different emotional states have distinct effects on cognitive and emotional function. During stress and negative emotions, when the heart rhythm pattern is erratic and disordered, the corresponding neural signals travelling to the brain inhibit higher cognitive functions, limiting the ability to think clearly, reason, and make effective decisions.

What use then is 360 feedback from a team saying a leader lacks empathy, when their behaviour is actually the result of chronic stress leading to neurological impairment, not necessarily a skill deficit?

This empathy deficit has profound implications: 

• leaders making workforce decisions without truly understanding employee experience; 

• policy-makers addressing social issues without accessing genuine perspective-taking about affected communities; 

• executives navigating stakeholder conflicts while unable to hold complexity or nuance.

Gallup's (2023) research on workplace trust found that only 21% of US employees strongly agreed that they trust the leadership of their organisation — a decline from 24% in 2019. 

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 46% of employees globally trust their CEO, down from 63% a decade ago.

Perhaps the issue isn't that leaders don't care. They're neurologically compromised in their ability to demonstrate care effectively.

The Crisis Contagion

Research consistently demonstrates that leader stress is contagious. 

A 2022 study by Klebe et al found that leadership inconsistency under stress is an independent risk factor for follower psychological strain. Employees who experienced stronger discrepancies in leadership between routine and stressful conditions experienced significantly more strain themselves. Leader stress threatens the consistency of leadership, which negatively affects follower health.

The implications scale systemically. 

When government ministers are burned out, does it affect policy coherence? 

When central bank governors operate in chronic stress, does it influence monetary policy stability? 

When healthcare executives make resource allocation decisions while dysregulated, does it impact system resilience?

The broader research literature on leadership cascades and organisational health suggests yes. The quality of leadership decision-making under stress directly affects organisational and system-level outcomes.

Crisis at the top creates crisis throughout the system.

The Vicious Cycle

Here's where it gets truly concerning: the more chaotic the external environment, the more stressed leaders become. The more stressed they become, the worse their decision-making. The worse their decision-making, the more chaotic the environment.

A vicious cycle.

PwC's Global Crisis and Resilience Survey 2023, drawing on data from 1,812 respondents worldwide, found that 91% of organisations reported experiencing at least one significant disruption beyond COVID-19, with 76% of organisations reporting that their most serious disruption had a medium-to-high impact on operations. 

Leadership quality and executive decision-making were consistently identified as critical variables in organisational resilience.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, drawing on responses from 10,796 leaders and 2,185 HR professionals across 50+ countries found that 40% of stressed-out leaders have considered leaving leadership roles to improve their wellbeing, and that trust in immediate managers has plummeted to just 29%, a 37% decline since 2022. 

Companies are struggling to build strong leadership benches, yet those that succeed in prioritising leader wellbeing and development reap measurable performance benefits.

The Questions We're Not Asking

When analysing geopolitical instability, economic volatility, organisational dysfunction, or social fragmentation, we examine structures, systems, policies, and incentives.

Rarely do we ask: What is the mental health status of the people making the decisions within those structures?

When a government minister makes a policy error, we analyse political pressures, bureaucratic constraints, and ideological frameworks. 

We don't ask: Were they sleeping? How's their cortisol? When did they last process their own trauma?

When a CEO makes a strategic blunder, we examine market conditions, competitive dynamics, and organisational culture. 

We don't ask: What's their current level of nervous system dysregulation?

We need to.

The Uncomfortable Truth

A 2022 Forrester survey of 1,207 employees and over 500 HR leaders and C-level executives found that 49% of workers worry that sharing how they're feeling mentally could lead to repercussions including job loss. 

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the importance of mental health, fear of career consequences continues to prevent those who most need support from seeking it.

Gallup's research has tracked a worsening crisis. In 2020, 76% of employees reported experiencing burnout at least sometimes, and that burnout is directly linked to manager behaviour, with unclear communication and lack of manager support among the top five causes. By 2024, 41% of workers worldwide were experiencing significant stress daily, with the US among the highest-stress economies globally."

So we have a system where: 

• the people with the most power are under the most stress; 

• the people making the biggest decisions have the most neurologically impaired capacity; 

• the people who most need support are least likely to seek it; and 

• the people whose dysfunction creates the most damage face the most pressure to hide it.

Is anyone else seeing the problem here?

What If We Got This Right?

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast research has consistently demonstrated that organisations which prioritise leader wellbeing and development show measurable advantages in profitability, productivity, retention, and reduced absenteeism compared to those that don't, and the performance gap widening over time.

Now imagine scaling that to societal level.

What if ministers made policy from regulated nervous systems? 

What if CEOs allocated capital with full prefrontal cortex function? 

What if central bankers set rates with access to long-term thinking and nuanced analysis?

What if the executives shaping our world were actually well enough to lead wisely?

The neuroscience is clear: nervous system regulation techniques, mindfulness-based interventions, and trauma processing have demonstrated measurable improvements in stress reduction, cognitive function, decision-making quality, and leadership effectiveness across multiple peer-reviewed studies. We have the tools. We're just not implementing them at scale, yet.

The Systemic Intervention We Need

This isn't about individual executives being "weak" or needing to "toughen up." This is about acknowledging that we've created leadership roles that are neurologically unsustainable, then acting surprised when the people in them become dysregulated, and a leadership crisis unfolds through anonymous complaints, poor decision-making, bullying, and boardroom dysfunction.

What's needed is systemic intervention.

At the organisational level: 

• leadership development that prioritises nervous system capacity before skill development; 

• confidential, stigma-free mental health support designed for executive-level needs; and 

• structural changes that make sustainable leadership actually possible.

At the societal level: 

• recognition that leader mental health is public health; 

• investment in leadership resilience as infrastructure; 

• cultural shifts that make seeking support a sign of wisdom, not weakness.

At the individual level: 

• leaders courageously choosing to prioritise their own wellbeing, not as self-indulgence, but as their most important contribution to the systems they lead.

The Bottom Line

Is the executive mental health crisis why the world is in chaos?

Not entirely. There are structural issues, resource constraints, genuinely intractable problems, and forces beyond any individual's control.

But is it a significant contributing factor that we're almost entirely ignoring?

The research suggests yes.

When the people making civilisation-shaping decisions are burned out, when their cognitive function is measurably impaired, when their capacity for empathy and long-term thinking is neurologically compromised, that matters.

It matters for organisational outcomes. It matters for economic stability. It matters for social cohesion. It matters for our collective future.

The executives leading our organisations and institutions need support. Not just because it's humane, though it is. But because the quality of their internal state directly impacts the quality of our shared external reality.

The world is complex, volatile, and genuinely challenging. We need our best minds making the best possible decisions.

Right now, we're asking people to navigate unprecedented complexity while operating in unprecedented crises.

Perhaps it's time we start looking within our leaders' hearts and minds for the answers.

About the Author

Caryn Cridland is a business psychologist, lawyer, and mediator who transforms Fortune 500 executives' career-defining crises into conscious leadership breakthroughs through her proprietary Executive Evolution System.™ With two decades specializing in high-stakes workplace conflicts and leadership development, four degrees in psychology and law, she helps "brilliant exceeders" evolve from intellectual dominance to conscious leadership.

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