After the Layoffs: What Really Happens Inside a Company – and Why Energy Matters More Than You Think
How Portland’s wave of job cuts mirrors a deeper issue: the emotional and energetic state of the people who remain.
In a time where business survival often demands hard decisions, we rarely talk about what happens after the layoff.
What happens to the soul of a team? The heart of a product? This is the part that’s harder to measure — but impossible to ignore.
Last week, The Oregonian reported a staggering rise in layoffs across the Portland metro area — with Multnomah County bearing the brunt.
Employers Impacted:
- Nike — corporate roles in marketing, product, and design
- Intel — engineering and project teams
- Adidas North America HQ — creative and marketing functions
- Moda Health — administrative and customer support
- Legacy Health — clinical and non-clinical staff
These cuts span tech, healthcare, retail, and consumer goods, with a heavy concentration in creative and professional positions.
The Invisible Impact on Those Who Remain
We often focus on those who’ve lost their jobs (and rightly so). But those who remain experience an equally complex emotional terrain:
A cocktail of relief, survivor’s guilt, anger, fear, and overwhelm.
They’re overtasked, emotionally disoriented, and silently bracing for the next wave — while trying to hold themselves together in meetings and production cycles that haven’t paused.
Managers, too, are quietly carrying a heavy load. Many have just laid off friends and colleagues they personally advocated for. They’re left compartmentalizing grief while pretending everything is business as usual.
My Own Layoff Story
I know this terrain intimately. In the fall of 2008, after two prior rounds of layoffs, I received a pink slip and was let go from a role I loved. Overnight, I lost my daily structure, my sense of belonging, and a deep-seated human need: to be useful and wanted.
Yes, I gained more time with my family. But I lost my income — and with it, a piece of my identity.
It took me years to heal from that experience, even though I went on to build a multi-6-figure design consultancy that helped me patch up my confidence, but only years later did I learn to regulate my own nervous system and heal that wound.
What Happens to the Product
During the two prior waves of layoffs, as the remaining team, we were in a state of fear and overwhelm.
We had to pick up the work from folks who had to clear out their desks abruptly.
Our design work? We played it safe.
Vanilla.
Not exciting, but commercial, common.
We like to think the energy state of employees doesn’t matter. But it does.
If your team is creating from a place of fear, grief, or apathy… that energy imprints onto the product.
And customers feel it even if they can’t name it.
They hesitate. They disengage.
They “just don’t feel pulled.”
They stop buying.
What Companies Can Do Now
Do I have a silver bullet? Yes… and no.
No, because it requires a different kind of thinking:
- Nervous system repair
- Belief recalibration
- Whole-brain state activation
- Energetic realignment
This isn’t woo. It’s what neuroscience and performance research confirm. And no, it doesn’t take years.
- Regulation can begin in 15 minutes a day.
- Massive emotional loads can be cleared in an hour.
- Reconnection and team coherence can be re-established faster than you think — with the right tools.
If you’re a leader, a founder, or a team builder, and this message strikes a nerve:
📩 Reach out. Not just for retention. Not just for performance. But for the health of your team, the humans in human resources.
Because your people’s energy is woven into the product and service they create.
And they’re worthy of something more sustainable than burnout disguised as gratitude.
If you’d like to start your exploration – sign up for the next 5-Day Breathwork RESET!
