Inside The Emotional Recession, The Epidemic of Low EQ

When Matt started his sales job at an international car leasing company, he was excited to get to the office each day. He worked long hours in a high-intensity environment, but he didn’t mind. He loved hitting his goals, he enjoyed good relations with his coworkers and his boss, and in his own way, he felt like he was doing meaningful work. 

But over the last few years, something changed. Whereas before, supply chain disruptions felt like challenges to overcome, now they felt like a death knell. The transition to electric vehicles stopped feeling like an exciting development and began to feel like a threat he couldn’t control and a race he wasn’t going to win. He started becoming more impatient with his coworkers and more negative about his employer. His motivation dropped. His spark dimmed, and he felt dramatically less able to see positive outcomes. 

His negativity made him hard to work with. Where he used to check in with his colleagues and ask about their weekend, now he had little space to lean into their emotional world. His energy flagged, and his work quality suffered. On the brink of a full blown depression, he eventually took a six-week mental wellness leave to do a complete reset. 

Matt was part of the emotional recession.

What is an Emotional Recession?

An emotional recession signifies a sustained, widespread, statistically meaningful drop in emotional intelligence (EQ). 

Six Seconds, a global consulting and training firm specializing in EQ, conducted a study spanning from 2019-2024, sampling 28,000 adults across 166 countries to learn more about EQ trends. The results were significant. They found that global emotional intelligence has dropped almost 6% since 2019. The steepest declines were seen in the factors of optimism (a decline of over 8%) and the ability to navigate emotions (a decline of almost 6%).

Joshua Freedman, the CEO of Six Seconds explains, “An economic recession is when the economy contracts, and there is less money available. An emotional recession is a contraction in emotional intelligence. This EQ contraction means less human energy is available, and this energy drives economic growth and other aspects of collective prosperity.” 

The study used Six Seconds’ proprietary Emotional Intelligence Assessment, a validated measure that assesses emotional intelligence across eight core competencies. And it wasn’t just optimism and emotional control that declined. Almost all aspects of EQ showed a steady drop over the last five years, showing that people are feeling less resilient, less optimistic, less motivated, less future-oriented and less self-aware. 

The one factor that increased in this period is feelings of cautiousness. “We’ve seen a global shift to a more anxious state. Stress is increasing, and isolation is on the rise,” Freedman says. 

What’s Triggering the Decline in EQ?

While it can be easy to assume the pandemic and related lockdowns triggered the emotional recession, Freedman offers a more nuanced explanation: the pandemic and related lockdowns weren’t the culprit, but rather an amplifier.  

“We started studying this in 2011 and were already seeing declines in EQ, but the pandemic exacerbated the existing trend. It is almost like a trauma response. From 2020-2024, we experienced so much profound disruption and so many months of deep uncertainty. This had a far-reaching effect on the emotional health of individuals, organizations and society as a whole.” 

Freedman suggests that we don’t have a pandemic problem, we have an uncertainty problem. Science supports his theory that the human brain is not wired for this much uncertainty. 

A peer-reviewed scientific study published in the National Library of Medicine found that when people don’t know what’s going to happen, their brains react as if they are under threat. The parts of the brain linked to anxiety and fear become more active, which means uncertainty feels stressful, not neutral, to the brain.​​ Truity’s research supports this finding. Using a 2.8 million person dataset, the study found that people have become more Neurotic (as defined by the Big Five model of personality) since the beginning of the pandemic. Neuroticism describes a person’s tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, depression and vulnerability, reflecting low emotional stability and poor stress responses. 

Freedman explains, “We have a neurological response to uncertainty which is to retreat. People go deeper into their coping mechanisms which is to isolate and to become more tribal.”  He says we are having a “meta crisis,” a crisis that is bigger than the sum of its parts. He likens the situation to being a little ship in a big storm. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a little ship, but the storm is too big for it. We are overwhelmed by the amount of uncertainty in our current world. In response, we need to do something to change the dynamic. Either we need a smaller storm, which doesn’t seem feasible or likely. Or we need bigger ships.

The Role of EQ Tools in the Emotional Recession

While the bad news is that we’re in a big storm, the good news is you can learn the skills to become a bigger ship. Truity’s Emotional Intelligence (EQ) test can give you a baseline of where you stand today across the five factors of emotional intelligence the test measures. And personality systems such as the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs and DISC also help people build emotional intelligence by increasing self-awareness and giving vocabulary to patterns of stress and motivation. In times of high uncertainty, this kind of self-understanding becomes a stabilizing force. Intentional strategies to raise your EQ can also be developed. Even simple things like controlling your media diet and your caffeine intake can have a big influence. 

While there are plenty of things that can be done individually, Freedman cautions that the emotional recession isn’t an issue to be solved on an individual level: “You can’t self-care your way out of the decline of civility.” He points out that if you are in a toxic workplace, for example, getting therapy might help you get through your day, but it won’t fix the workplace.

Freedman calls on business leaders and community leaders to address the emotional recession in a more systemic way. “I often return to Desmond Tutu’s quote: ‘When you see people falling into the river, pull them out. But look upstream to see why they are falling in,’” he says.

Scale is possible, and systemic solutions exist. Firms operating in the EQ space are already working with organizations to help their teams build emotional intelligence skills at scale. And when they do that, things like trust improve. Communication improves, resilience improves. People feel less isolated. They are able to support each other.

Freedman believes one of the best tools to combat the emotional recession is to re-establish trust by increasing EQ. He is so convinced the solution lies in the emotional world, he wrote a book titled Emotion Rules which talks  about how emotional intelligence directly drives performance, leadership effectiveness and organizational value – not as a “soft skill” but as a measurable economic and strategic asset. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist and bestselling author of The Road to Character, agrees with him. Brooks argues that economic growth, democracy and social stability all depend on dense networks of trust. His work points to the development of character and environments with high EQ as the solution to many modern problems.

In Summary

We can’t make the storm smaller. AI, climate change, shifting world politics – along with plenty of other factors – are converging to escalate uncertainty in our world at a pace that’s unlikely to recede anytime soon.

But we can become bigger ships. We can build emotional capacity in ourselves and in our organizations by strengthening the skills at the heart of emotional intelligence, like self-awareness, emotional regulation and empathy. We can narrow our focus and strengthen trust in small, local practical ways that reinforce connection. We can learn to regulate our fear, resist retreat and stay connected even when our instinct might be to withdraw.

In an emotional recession, progress does not come from grand solutions. It comes from what Freedman calls “thousands of tiny umbrellas and from choosing again and again to steady ourselves in the storm. And, when we can, to offer an umbrella to someone else.” Those umbrellas are acts of EQ in practice and markers of emotional steadiness, relational repair and human presence that, taken together, make resilience possible.