There is a particular kind of leader I keep meeting. Sharp, strategic, respected. The person everyone assumes has it together. They have built careers on staying composed under fire, delivering results when the stakes are high, and pushing through stress that would flatten most people. And yet, behind closed doors, something is fraying. They snap at a colleague over a minor disagreement. They go rigid when someone challenges their thinking. Their spouse has stopped trying to talk to them about the things that matter. If you asked their team how they are doing, you would get a careful pause before a diplomatic answer.
After a decade of working with senior leaders and high performers, I have come to see a pattern that runs counter to how we think about leadership capability. The most driven people in the room – those who built their success on resilience, stamina, and an extraordinary tolerance for pressure – are often the ones whose emotional regulation has quietly narrowed over time. This is not a character flaw. It is a predictable consequence of environments that reward output over inner awareness, and that never taught nervous system literacy as a leadership skill. Nobody warned them that pushing through without processing creates a debt the body will eventually collect.
The neuroscience supports this. Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whose research on trauma and the body has reshaped how we understand stress, describes how chronic fight-or-flight activation rewires the brain’s alarm system. The body stops distinguishing between a genuine threat and a Tuesday morning board meeting. Over time, what looks like composure is actually a nervous system locked in overdrive, running on cortisol and adrenaline with nowhere to discharge. Researchers Dr Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski put it plainly in their work on burnout: Stress is not the problem. The problem is that we do not complete the stress cycle. We absorb pressure, perform through it, and move on to the next crisis without giving the body a chance to process what happened.
The most driven people in the room – those who built their success on resilience, stamina, and an extraordinary tolerance for pressure – are often the ones whose emotional regulation has quietly narrowed over time.
After a decade of working with senior leaders and high performers, I have come to see a pattern that runs counter to how we think about leadership capability. The most driven people in the room – those who built their success on resilience, stamina, and an extraordinary tolerance for pressure – are often the ones whose emotional regulation has quietly narrowed over time. This is not a character flaw. It is a predictable consequence of environments that reward output over inner awareness, and that never taught nervous system literacy as a leadership skill. Nobody warned them that pushing through without processing creates a debt the body will eventually collect.
The neuroscience supports this. Dr Bessel van der Kolk, whose research on trauma and the body has reshaped how we understand stress, describes how chronic fight-or-flight activation rewires the brain’s alarm system. The body stops distinguishing between a genuine threat and a Tuesday morning board meeting. Over time, what looks like composure is actually a nervous system locked in overdrive, running on cortisol and adrenaline with nowhere to discharge. Researchers Dr Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski put it plainly in their work on burnout: Stress is not the problem. The problem is that we do not complete the stress cycle. We absorb pressure, perform through it, and move on to the next crisis without giving the body a chance to process what happened.
I see this in my practice regularly. A leader managing a punishing workload – navigating a health crisis alongside a promotion, sleeping four hours a night, holding everything together through sheer will – gets referred to me because HR has flagged concerns about their “anger management issues.” When we dig in, the reactivity is not the root issue. It is the last signal the body has left to send. Take away sleep, take away recovery, pile on relentless demand, and what you get is not a behavioural problem. It is a physiological one.
Another pattern: A leader so adapted to chronic pressure that they have unknowingly recalibrated their baseline. They function at a stress level that feels normal to them, but is overwhelming for everyone around them. Their team is so burned out that they lose the capacity to make decisions. Creativity dries up. Good people leave – not because the work is hard, but because the environment has become something their nervous systems can no longer tolerate.
I recognise this pattern because I have lived it. There was a period in my career where I stopped recognising myself. I was reacting rather than responding. The love I had for my work was quietly dying. My body was giving way – not dramatically, but steadily, in the way that chronic depletion erodes you from the inside and eats away at your soul. By most external measures, I was performing. Internally, I was running on fumes and mistaking it for fuel.
What shifted was not a single breakthrough, but a slow, deliberate practice of learning to stay with what I was feeling instead of overriding it.
This capacity to be present with difficult feelings rather than being driven by them is described as emotional agility, says Harvard psychologist Susan David. In high-performance cultures, the opposite gets reinforced – a narrowing of emotional range where only composure and forward momentum are acceptable. But the ability to sit with discomfort, name what you feel, and choose your response rather than react from depletion is not a soft skill. It is the capacity that separates leaders who endure from leaders who sustain.
This matters more now than it used to. In a world where AI is rapidly levelling technical advantage, the qualities that cannot be automated – reading a room, holding complexity without shutting down, building trust that makes people want to stay – are becoming the real differentiators. That requires emotional range – not just composure and drive, but the fuller human repertoire. The leaders who will thrive are not those who can outwork a machine. They are the ones who can access the parts of themselves they have spent years overriding.
So if you are reading this and something in it feels uncomfortably familiar – the tightness in your chest that you have learned to ignore, the relationships you keep meaning to repair, the creeping sense that you are holding it together, but only just – consider that the problem might not be that you need to try harder. It might be that you have been trying too hard for too long, and your body is keeping a tab you have not looked at yet. The strongest thing you can do is not to power through as per usual. It is to pause long enough to feel what is actually there.
Dr Katrina Gisbert-Tay became a parent at 22 while still in medical school, an experience that would quietly shape the way she later understood leadership, wellbeing, and human behaviour. With a career spanning medicine, psychology and executive coaching, she integrates science, systems thinking and human development in her work with leaders, teams and parents. She’s spent the past decade working with senior leaders and organisations across Asia, Europe and North America, including C-suite executives from companies such as Google, Shell, PETRONAS, and Prudential. She now hosts the podcast, Unpolished Wisdom.
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