2026: Beginning Again Amid a Mental Pandemic

We are living through a time that defies easy explanation. People are struggling to find the words for what they are feeling.  The reactivity, the sense that everything feels louder, faster, and heavier. The world as we know it is deeply divided and mentally strained.

What we are living through is not new. History has shown us when fear, violence, and psychological destabilization are used to fracture communities and consolidate power.  This is a modern version of a pattern to maintain power and control. Fueling rising hate, polarization, and the normalization of harm through racism directed at Black and Brown people, the open degradation and control of women, the active erasure of LGBTQ people, history and rights, and targeting immigrants through ICE raids, detention, deportation, family separation, and constant surveillance.  This is all designed to instill fear, destabilize families and communities, and keep people in a constant state of anxiety and precarity.  They create fear, confusion, and exhaustion that make collective resistance harder and control easier.

Recently, I sat with the mental and emotional toll, and it became clear we are in a mental pandemic.

Not all pandemics are physical. Some are psychological. Like mental epidemics throughout history, which together form a mental pandemic, this one thrives when people are overwhelmed, unsure what is real, and disconnected from one another. Social media has only accelerated its spread, flooding our nervous systems faster than we can metabolize what we are seeing.

Moments like this reveal whether we are willing to change how we think, choose, and act. As 2025 gives way to 2026, we are being asked to decide what we will carry forward and what we are finally willing to leave behind.

2025 has been the year of the Snake -- Year 9—an ending year. In many wisdom traditions, it is associated with truth-telling, grief, detoxification, and the collapse of what can no longer be sustained. It is the year of shedding skins, lifting veils, and closing cycles. Many of us have felt this personally, professionally, and collectively.

2026, by contrast, is the year of the Horse -- Year 1—the beginning of a new cycle. It carries the energy of movement, initiation, courage, alignment, freedom, and possibility. But here is the truth many people miss: new beginnings only work if we don’t drag old patterns into them.

We cannot take our bad habits, negative thinking, toxic relationships, and unconscious behaviors with us into 2026 and expect something different to emerge.

Two Tides Are Colliding

As we step into 2026, we are experiencing two powerful forces at the same time.  It’s two tides moving toward one another.

The first tide is human made: the mental pandemic.

The second tide is the Universe at work: negative cycle clearing.

This collision is what will make 2026 feel intense, disorienting, but if we choose to do the work, it can be profoundly transformational.

A mental pandemic is when sanity begin to erode and rationality is weakened. We see this happening every week where clear evidence is ignored.  Emotional reactivity.  You see people convinced they are seeing clearly while losing alignment with reality itself.

And this is not confined to politics. It is showing up in workplaces, in families, and in friendships.  It’s shaping how people communicate, make decisions, interpret conflict, and relate to one another.

What makes this moment different is the scale and speed in which everything is moving.

Social media and AI have created an unprecedented environment where misinformation, fear-based content, and emotionally charged narratives are spreading globally in minutes. The sheer volume of false images, false stories, and manufactured outrage dissolves our shared sense of reality. People retreat into parallel perceptual worlds. Dialogue collapses and relationships become fractured. 

In my own life, I’ve felt this personally when I receive negative videos in my DMs, or watching entire dinner tables spiral into despair or conflict the moment someone brings up the news or talks about some polarizing person. As if nothing good is happening anywhere. As if beauty, creativity, generosity, personal growth, social change and good people have ceased to exist.

But during a mental pandemic, fear is louder than truth.

The Cost of Unconscious Living

Mental pandemics do something especially dangerous because they disconnect us from one another, which is the goal.  And unfortunately, people feed into this and isolate.  People begin to mistake separation for safety.

The reality is isolation makes people easier to control. It removes the corrective force of community. It weakens our ability to reality-check each other. And tragically, many people begin to defend this isolation as if it were a personal choice when in fact it is a symptom of collective distress.

At the same time, our nervous systems are under extraordinary strain. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, our capacity to listen, reason, and empathize shuts down. We become reactive instead of reflective. Protective instead of discerning. This affects our health, our digestion, our immune systems, and our relationships.

Everything becomes harder, including the things that once felt easy. And when everything feels hard, people gravitate toward ease at any cost. This is one of the great risks of 2026: turning over our power, our agency, our discernment, and our responsibility in exchange for temporary relief.

The Other Tide: Negative Cycle Clearing

At the same time, something else is happening, which is the Universe is calling for negative cycle clearing.  If you look honestly at your life, you can probably see patterns that repeat. Relationships that end the same way. Conflicts that replay with different people. Emotional reactions that feel automatic rather than chosen. These cycles often originate in unresolved wounds, unmet needs, inherited beliefs, or unexamined fears.  People repeat patterns again because the unknown is scary to them.  But letting go of patterns, including people that don’t serve you is when transformation begins to happen in your life.

In 2026, these cycles are coming up to be cleared.  This is not the time to go backwards.  It’s the time to let go of what was not working in 2025. This is true at the individual level and at the collective level. Humanity has repeated cycles of domination, totalitarianism, and mass psychological manipulation before. The question before us now is:

Will we clear this cycle or repeat it again?  Are we ready to evolve?

Negative cycle clearing is rarely comfortable. It often feels like pressure, but when a cycle truly breaks, a new story becomes possible.  That’s what 2026 is all about.  It is a year for fresh starts, but for those who are willing to unshed and do the work. 

What This Means for Leaders — Especially in the Nonprofit Sector

Transformational leadership is critical currently because the nonprofit sector is absorbing our societies mental pandemic and, in many ways, they are carrying more of it than most.  They are navigating misaligned boards, fragile funding environments, relentless urgency, and cultures shaped by crisis rather than care. At the same time, they are living in a world saturated with exposure to unethical behavior. Whether that’s corruption, deception, abuse of power, greenwashing, and the normalization of harm without accountability.

And yet, despite absorbing so much of what is happening in the world, many nonprofit organizations do not make space to acknowledge any of this.  The unspoken assumption is that what is happening “out there” does not belong “in here.” But it does. People carry the weight of the world into meetings, decision-making, conflict, and leadership every day. When organizations refuse to acknowledge this reality, that unprocessed pressure doesn’t disappear it leaks into culture, relationships, burnout, and the very fires leaders find themselves putting out repeatedly.

There is little room to slow down, reflect, or metabolize what people are carrying. Instead, organizations push forward as though ignoring the impact will somehow contain it. It doesn’t. What goes unspoken shows up elsewhere: in miscommunication, reactivity, ethical shortcuts, fractured relationships, and cultures that feel perpetually on edge.

Silence does not protect organizations. It destabilizes them.

Many leaders are working constantly not because it is effective or ethical, but because their nervous systems are activated and there is no space to pause. They stay in motion because stopping feels unsafe.

I have spent years helping organizations develop actionable values and how to implement them through governance, management, programming and fundraising.  That work matters. But what this moment is revealing is that values must be matched with ethics.

This is the shift 2026 is asking for.

Ethics ask leaders to slow down and interrogate.

• Is this decision rooted in integrity, or driven by fear?

• Who bears the cost of my urgency?

• What am I normalizing that I would never publicly defend?

• Where am I trading my own well-being or someone else’s for the illusion of control?

• Does this action align with my stated values or contradict them?

Without this level of inquiry, leaders internalize dysfunction and lead without clarity in their planning and decision-making.  Leaders cannot lead with confidence and clarity when their nervous system is in a constant state of threat. There is an ethical gap running through many organizations.  A gap that leader’s sense intuitively but are often unable to articulate.

And you cannot build ethical organizations when:

• values are spoken but not operationalized

• governance lacks ethical clarity

• power is exercised without accountability

• and causing harm to others is minimized or normalized.

  
  

Choosing the Year of the Horse + Year 1

Humanity is standing at a crossroads. One path continues the mental pandemic fueled by fear, hate, reactivity, isolation, and ethical erosion. The other path leads toward a world organized around ethics that requires personal and collective consciousness and practice. The more we put ethics into practice and make it a part of our conversations and name what is unethical, the less tolerance there is for it. Basically, the more humanity expects ethical clarity, the more ethics becomes a guiding force.

The future is not predetermined. But it does require something of us to move change.  We can’t simply expect other people to make the change. We must be the change in our own lives, in our communities and where we work.

For leaders who are entrusted with mission and staff — 2026 is an opportunity to move boldly and with intention.  To align with the truth and center ethics in every move.  This time is asking for ethics as a lived practice. 

There is no question that 2026 is calling us forward.  It is a new beginning to align with the truth, ethics, and step into our power.