When your CFO tells you the numbers are off, your heart rate spikes. Your chest tightens. Your thoughts race between damage control and worst case scenarios. You’re sitting in a conference room, but your body is preparing to fight or flee. Here’s what most business leaders don’t realize: your nervous system can’t distinguish between a physical threat and a financial one. To your autonomic nervous system, a bad quarter and a bear are identical.
This isn’t a metaphor. It’s biology.
You think the problem is that you can’t delegate well. That you’re too controlling. That you need better systems or a stronger team. But what I’ve seen in 15 years of clinical practice is this: the real issue isn’t your leadership ability. It’s that your nervous system is stuck in threat detection mode, treating strategic challenges like survival emergencies. When you’re operating from this heightened state, the part of your brain responsible for deep-thinking, long-term planning, and relational awareness shuts down. What remains is cortisol driven decision making that is reactive and defensive.
This is survival mode. And you can’t think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system.
The good news? Once you understand the biology, you can interrupt the pattern. Here’s how I help business owners move from reactive to regulated leadership.
The Regulation Before Strategy Framework
First: Notice the activation. Most leaders bypass the physical signs entirely. But regulation starts with awareness. Are your shoulders tensed? Is your breathing shallow? Are you toggling between twelve tabs while mentally drafting a response to an email that hasn’t arrived yet? These aren’t productivity problems. They’re nervous system signals.
Second: Create a somatic pause. Before the next decision, the next meeting, the next message, give your system 90 seconds to reset. This isn’t meditation. It’s physiology. Lengthen your exhale. Feel your feet on the ground. Let your jaw unclench. You’re not calming down. You’re bringing your prefrontal cortex back online.
Third: Distinguish between actual threat and perceived threat. Your body will respond to both identically, but your leadership shouldn’t. Ask: Is this a problem to solve or a sensation to regulate? Most of what feels urgent is your nervous system amplifying normal business friction into crisis.
Fourth: Make decisions from regulation, not relief. When you’re dysregulated, every decision is aimed at reducing discomfort now. That’s why you say yes when you mean no. Why you micromanage when you could trust. Why you avoid hard conversations until they become emergencies. Regulated leaders can tolerate temporary discomfort because they’re not interpreting it as danger.
I worked with a founder who’d built a seven figure company but couldn’t take a full day off without her phone. She thought it was responsibility. In our third session, I asked her to notice what happened in her body when she imagined being unreachable for four hours. “It feels like something terrible will happen,” she said. This wasn’t a choice; it was a fear of being left behind and a belief that stopping was dangerous. Once she could name the activation, she could begin to regulate it. Six months later, she took her first weeklong vacation in nine years. Not because her business changed. Because her biology did.
Here’s what I want you to notice this week: When you feel the urgency to act, to fix, to control, pause long enough to ask yourself one question.
Am I leading from clarity, or am I leading from cortisol? Because the answer will tell you everything you need to know about whether you’re building something sustainable or just trying to survive the next quarter.
Jonathan Riley is a Survival Mode Specialist for founders and executives who have achieved external success but internally feel reactive, exhausted, and stuck. Drawing on 15 years of psychology experience, he helps leaders reset their nervous system and lead from clarity instead of cortisol. Book a Survival Mode Diagnostic at mypracticeleaders.com.au