Chronic Threat and Chaos: The Human Response and Higher Education Leadership

This AGB blog post is the second in a series on mental wellness in higher education. Part 1 is available here.

Wherever you turn these days, there are overwhelming events. They’re close: graphic images on the news of horrific events from natural to human-made; disturbing articles about all kinds of terrible things that have happened. It may be people talking about the lived experience of those events in the present as well as the past and concerns about them happening again in the future. All three spaces (past, present, and future) fuel tension and challenge.

Worse yet, the incidence of individual and mass trauma is rising fast. Outbreaks of diseases that could easily become pandemic, random violence, political conflict, wars, famine, transportation and weather disasters, and more add to the load, as does the increasing divisiveness in spaces where people congregate.

A Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) Environment

As leaders in higher education, you also face an unprecedented VUCA policy and regulatory environment. This environment, prone to whipsawing decisions, is especially hard for people who have limited resources and limited access.

Think about students who:

• Find their education abruptly terminated
• Face real fears not of deportation, a return to their home country, but of removal to a third country
• Lose required support for daily living or learning differences
• Fear violence in the classroom

And faculty members who:

• Fear a student might record their class and find something to object to
• Discover their curricula can no longer be taught, or that their department no longer exists
• Wonder whether they will continue to have income or work soon
• Fear violence from disgruntled former students
• Support terrified students, staff, and their own family and friends

Include in your thinking the support staff who work in facilities, food service, and other functions. Their concerns impact physical plant operations, administration, and everyone in their circle.

Remember, too, the leaders at the top— the presidents whose institutional business model and transformative plans have collapsed overnight. In addition to the maelstrom of strong feelings and the new unknowns typical to VUCA environments, presidents might need to implement a sudden, unexpected redesign to save their institutions.

Board members also face these pressures, along with the challenge of charting a new, unknown strategic path.

If your heart rate is up a little or your shoulders are little higher, that’s appropriate. Creating this image made of words in a VUCA context impacted your physical body. Just imagine what living with the realities does to all the people who are part of your institution, and to the institution itself.

Leaders need to know that specific behaviors might increase or decrease in individuals and in organizations dealing with VUCA policies and practices.

Chronic exposure to overwhelming events increases:

• Rigid thinking, irrational thinking, mistrust
• Problems with receptive and expressive communication
• Risks of emotional outbursts and difficulties managing emotions effectively
• Irritability, blaming, and shaming as forms of control
• Physical complaints
• Self-doubt, loss of trust in one’s own instincts, helplessness

At the same time, there are behaviors that decrease. Such behaviors include:

• Creativity, flexibility, open-mindedness
• Happiness, ease, fairness
• Ability to maintain certain types of boundaries
• Thinking through potential consequences

And above all, empathy and effective decision making can decrease.

How Individuals Can Cope

This might be enough to cause you to feel numb. Feeling numb helps, except that you can’t feel anything, good or bad, which means you might miss important signals.

Using protective behaviors insulates the self, and this helps increase the self-capacities—empathy, patience, adaptability, and so forth—which increase resilience. Although a VUCA situation is uncomfortable, resilience reduces the impact of exposure so that there is more capacity for constructive, creative action. Here are three simple strategies you can use:

1. Hum, laugh, or whistle every day for as much time as you can without disturbing others. This stimulates the vagus nerve, increases blood flow, and makes you feel better. Start groups and play together, enjoying your mistakes.
2. Install good thoughts and feelings, and teach others. This helps create positive neural networks, which can help mood, thinking, and self-soothing. How to do it? Think about something pleasant, good, uplifting, or beautiful you saw during the day. Bring the memory up, turn its intensity up, and focus on it for 20 seconds. How can you engage others in making this a daily practice?
3. Focus on positive inner connections you can call on. Your cellphone? I doubt you have photos of people you hate on it. Your playlist? The same. What is your favorite recipe and how did it get to be that way? Think about how you developed a love for this food. Imagine a potluck where people brought and told stories about favorite recipes. Self-soothing, shared experiences bathe the brain in feel-good chemicals.

Why these three? They are simple, easy, and free. They work with all levels of staff, leadership, and the campus community. They might not change the external pressures of living in a VUCA environment, but they are likely (with practice and a little celebration) to make it more tolerable, open up your thinking a bit, lower your heart rate (and shoulders), and give you mechanisms with which you can build communities of more joyful resistance as you rebuild and pivot.

Why is this important? Institutions of higher education—and their brave and courageous leaders—are all about relationships. The traumatic experiences impacting higher education affect and might disrupt relationships, and effective responses to traumas are best tended in relationships that support wholeness.

Key Questions for Boards

As a board, how might you implement these three simple strategies across the campus? It begins with your adoption and demonstration of them: You become the educator and the model for each other, faculty, staff, and students.

Here are three questions that will help you design a larger campuswide strategy:

1. How are you measuring/assessing both wellness and distress on campus at all levels?
2. What might you create in terms of living campaigns to model practical skills?
3. And at the highest level, will you commit to supporting the president’s mental wellness? How will you do so?

The truth remains—it’s all about building healthier relationships.

Elizabeth Power, MEd, is the founder of the Trauma Informed Academy and an adjunct instructor in psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center.