Skip to content
Kata Nylén

About Kata Nylén

Psychologist, author and speaker, working on what happens to people when the world around them changes faster than the mind expects.

Portrait of Kata Nylén

Her work

Kata Nylén is a Swedish psychologist, author and speaker. Her work sits where climate psychology, psychological resilience, behavioural change and organisational psychology meet: not as separate specialisms, but as one question asked from different directions. What happens to people, individually and together, when conditions shift faster than they can absorb, and what actually helps.

She writes and speaks for readers outside the clinic as much as inside it. Her books are published by Natur & Kultur and Studentlitteratur, and are used by practitioners, teachers, leaders and people trying to make sense of their own reactions to a changing world.

The subjects she works on

Organisational psychology and change leadership

What happens between people at work, and how an organisation actually changes. Senior teams under sustained pressure, the relationships that hold an organisation together, and what gives way when the load rises. This is where resilience stops being a personal matter and becomes a property of a group and how it is led. Change leadership and organisational development sit here too: knowing what needs to change rarely leads on its own to it happening.

Implementation

Making knowledge, methods and decisions work in daily practice, long after the decision has been taken. Kata works on implementing SNAP in social services and schools, and supports organisations through training and practical work on putting evidence, methods and policy into use. The question is rarely whether something is good in itself, but what it takes for it to hold in a service that is already full.

Psychological resilience

Resilience as the capacity to stay standing, adapt and keep moving through difficulty while it is still happening, rather than a trait some people are lucky enough to have. Psykologisk resiliens argues that it is not carried alone: it is built and maintained in the relationships and settings people belong to, and it can be cultivated deliberately in groups and teams as much as in individuals.

Behavioural change

The distance between intention and behaviour, and what closes it. Why information, urgency and moral pressure so often fail to change what people do, and what the research says works instead, both at the level of habit and in an organisation trying to change how it works.

Climate psychology

How the climate crisis registers psychologically, and why knowing about it does not reliably lead to acting on it. Climate psychology examines what happens between the information and the response: the avoidance, the numbing, the sudden alarm, and the conditions under which people stay engaged rather than shut down. Climate emotions belong here too. Grief, worry, anger and hope about the state of the world are information rather than symptoms to be managed away; the psychological question is what makes them bearable enough to act on. Klimatpsykologi, written with Frida Hylander and Kali Andersson, applies this to climate work itself.

Navigating uncertainty

How people decide, lead and function inside a change they did not choose and cannot predict. Prolonged uncertainty is psychologically different from a single crisis: it does not end, and the strategies that carry someone through an acute emergency tend to fail over years.

LÄKA

Psykologisk resiliens is organised around four movements. Their initials spell LÄKA, which is also the Swedish word for to heal.

  1. LyssnaListen. To yourself, and to what your reactions are telling you.
  2. ÄlskaLove. The relationships and attachments that make difficulty survivable.
  3. KollektiviseraCollectivise. Move from carrying it alone to carrying it together.
  4. AgeraAct. Do something, at a scale that is actually available to you.

The argument running through it is that resilience is not endurance. It is not about withstanding more; it is about what people build, and build together, so that less has to be withstood alone.

Books

Four books of her own for Natur & Kultur and Studentlitteratur, on climate psychology, resilience, cognitive behavioural therapy in social work, and climate-aware teaching, plus chapters in edited volumes.

All publications

Speaking

She speaks at conferences, universities, leadership events and public institutions, and works with organisations on resilience, behavioural change and leading through uncertainty.

Speaking topics and enquiries

Organisations and programmes

Alongside her own practice, Kata works through several organisations and programmes. Each has its own focus, but the thread is the same: the psychology of making change actually happen.

  • SHIFT Collective

    Co-founder

    Organisational development and change leadership. This is where the work on how organisations actually change sits.

  • SNAP Sverige

    Co-founder

    Kata works on implementing SNAP (Stop Now And Plan) in Sweden, in social services and in schools. That covers adapting the material to the Swedish context, training and supervising practitioners, and supporting the method so it works and holds over time in practice. SNAP is a programme for children and families aimed at preventing antisocial behaviour. It has been piloted in social services in Malmö, and SNAP i skolan has been introduced in Lerum.

  • Klimatpsykologerna

    Co-founder

    Climate psychology. The collective works on the psychological side of the climate crisis and the transition.

  • Climate Psyched

    Part of the team

    An organisation of licensed psychologists working on climate psychology and behavioural change, through webinars, lectures, workshops and consultation.

Recognition

  • Sweden's 52 foremost climate women

    Klimatklubben

    Klimatpsykologerna, the collective Kata is part of, appears on Klimatklubben's list, published on International Women's Day. Klimatklubben describes the group as licensed psychologists and Sweden's leading experts in climate psychology.

Interviews and coverage

Elsewhere

Professional profiles and where to book her.

All media