Action Absorbs Anxiety

What practitioners should remember when the world feels unstable

TL;DR: Anxiety expands when people feel powerless. Action restores agency. During destabilizing moments, change practitioners have a responsibility to create clarity, stabilize their teams, and remain human without becoming ineffective. You may not control the scale of what is unfolding, but you can refuse paralysis and create motion where you stand.

In Minnesota, it has been difficult to concentrate at work lately.

Not because the work has become less important, but because the emotional noise surrounding it has become harder to ignore.

Some people are navigating far more than distraction.

Across communities, there are families living with fear, with absence, with unanswered questions about people they love. There are individuals whose daily calculations are no longer about productivity or professional growth, but about safety, visibility, and survival.

Recently, I heard someone say, “Action absorbs anxiety.” I have not stopped thinking about it since.

The phrase is simple, but it captures something fundamental about how humans function during periods of instability. Anxiety expands when people feel they have no influence over forces that feel larger than their safety or future. Action restores the boundary between what is happening in the world and what we can still shape.

What Anxiety Does Inside Organizations

Large-scale societal disruption rarely stays outside the office walls. It travels inward through attention, emotion, and conversation. Even when it goes unnamed, it alters how people show up.

Organizations are not sealed environments. The weight people carry walks through the front door with them each morning, whether it is discussed or not. This is not productivity advice. It is nervous system protection. And for change practitioners, it is operationally relevant.

Because when the ground moves beneath a workforce, execution does not pause. Programs continue. Deadlines remain. Leaders still expect momentum. Yet beneath the surface, something more fragile is often unfolding inside the organization: people are trying to figure out how to remain human while continuing to perform.

In these environments, organizations often produce two predictable populations.

The Frozen.
Overwhelmed employees whose cognitive bandwidth is quietly consumed. Decision-making slows. Creativity narrows. Work that once felt manageable now requires disproportionate effort.

The Over-Activated.
Employees who cannot look away. Doomscrolling between meetings. Tracking every development. Carrying a level of emotional activation that makes sustained focus difficult.

Both states reduce execution capacity. Most leadership teams underestimate this dynamic because the signals are subtle. Calendars remain full. Deliverables still appear. The system looks intact, but the human machinery powering that system is working much harder than it should.

It is also true that some employees are not simply processing distressing news. They may be experiencing direct threat to their families, identities, or communities. Others may be supporting loved ones who are.

Change practitioners should recognize this terrain immediately. We work inside human response patterns. Ignoring them is not professionalism. It is operational blindness.

Why Action Stabilizes Us

When people cannot influence forces that feel larger than their personal safety or future, the brain searches for controllable terrain. This is not a character trait. It is biology.

Intentional action interrupts fear loops. It reduces rumination. It creates forward motion. Most importantly, it restores a sense of agency, one of the strongest psychological stabilizers available to us.

Helplessness is emotionally loud but operationally useless. Action, even small action, redraws the perimeter of control. This does not mean pretending everything is fine. It means refusing paralysis.

For practitioners, the question becomes less philosophical and more practical: Where can I create motion?

The Practitioner’s Responsibility

Change practitioners are not bystanders to human emotion. We work inside it.

Periods of societal strain test a quiet aspect of our profession. Can we help organizations remain functional without asking people to become numb? Can we create clarity without minimizing reality? Can we stabilize execution while honoring the fact that employees are carrying more than their job descriptions?

This is leadership work, whether or not your title includes the word leader. Action becomes the bridge. Not performative action. Not reactive action. Deliberate, grounding action.

Consider four arenas where it matters.

Personal Action

Protect your inputs.

Continuous exposure to distressing information fragments attention and elevates stress chemistry. Staying informed is responsible. Saturation is not.

Create boundaries that allow you to remain steady enough to be useful to others. Practitioners often feel pressure to be endlessly available. Stability requires energy. Guard it.

Functioning professionals are not disengaged professionals. They are sustainable ones.

Professional Action

Name what the system is experiencing.

You do not need sweeping statements or institutional language that feels rehearsed. Often the most stabilizing move is the simplest one: acknowledge that focus may be harder right now and adjust where appropriate.

Clarity lowers anxiety inside organizations. Silence allows people to assume they must carry the emotional load alone.

Also watch for the organizational reflex toward “business as usual.” Stability is valuable. Denial is not. Employees are highly attuned to the difference.

Sometimes professionalism is not about maintaining normalcy. It is about responding to reality with maturity.

Relational Action

Check on people.

Not performatively. Not as a script. As a human.

Periods of strain compress social connection, yet connection is one of the strongest regulators we have. A short, sincere conversation can stabilize someone more effectively than a polished communication cascade.

Local systems matter. Teams matter. The five people someone works with daily often shape their experience of the organization more than any enterprise message.

Be part of the stabilizing layer.

Civic Action

Act according to your values in whatever way aligns with your judgment and circumstances.

Some will engage publicly. Others will contribute quietly. Some will focus on their immediate communities. Others will support from a distance.

The specific form matters less than the preservation of agency.

History is not something unfolding somewhere else. It is the operating context in which we live and work. Choosing not to act is still a choice, but it often deepens the very helplessness people are trying to escape.

For some, action right now is about professional steadiness. For others, it is about endurance. Both deserve our respect.

A Note for Leaders

Employees do not expect perfection during destabilizing periods. They do, however, look for signs of adult leadership.

Acknowledgment signals awareness. Consistency signals safety. Humanity signals trustworthiness. What erodes confidence is not uncertainty. It is the pretense that nothing unusual is happening.

Leaders sometimes worry that naming difficulty will amplify it. In practice, the opposite is usually true. What is named becomes more manageable. What is avoided expands.

Refusing Paralysis

There are moments in history when the emotional climate makes forward motion feel trivial or even inappropriate. Yet organizations still require thoughtful practitioners. Teams still need steadiness. Work that supports livelihoods and communities continues to matter.

Action is not a denial of seriousness. Often it is how seriousness expresses itself.

So create motion where you can.

Stabilize the team in front of you. Bring clarity where ambiguity is spreading. Protect your capacity to lead. Support someone who is struggling. Contribute in ways that align with your values. You may not be able to influence the scale of what is unfolding. But you can refuse paralysis.

Sometimes stability does not begin with sweeping change. Sometimes it begins when one person decides to act with intention exactly where they stand.