You’re at a friend’s holiday gathering. Your phone is in your pocket. But your mind is running through the client email you haven’t answered, the proposal that’s sitting in draft, the decision you need to make by Monday morning.
You tell yourself to be present. You mentally scold yourself for thinking about work. And then, predictably, you feel guilty for not being fully there.
Later that evening, after bedtime stories and tucking everyone in, you open your laptop. You tell yourself you’ll just handle a few things so tomorrow feels less overwhelming. But now you’re thinking about the moment you missed when your kid looked for you in the crowd. You’re wondering if they noticed you weren’t really there. And the guilt floods in again.
You’re caught in what I call the Holiday Guilt Loop. Working feels wrong because you should be with family. Being with family feels wrong because you should be working. So you split yourself in half, delivering a diminished version of yourself to both, and feeling like you’re failing everywhere.
Most business owners think this is a time management problem. Or a boundary problem. Or evidence that they’re somehow not capable of handling what they’ve built.
It’s none of those things.
What’s Actually Happening in Your Nervous System
After 15 years of clinical work with business owners, I can tell you this: the Holiday Guilt Loop isn’t a character issue. It’s a dysregulated nervous system that has categorized both scenarios as threats.
When you’re with family but thinking about work, your sympathetic nervous system is activated because unfinished business registers as danger. Your body is responding to perceived threat (the undone work, the unanswered email, the looming deadline) with a biological stress response. You’re not weak for feeling pulled back to work. You’re experiencing a nervous system that has been conditioned to interpret “not working” as risky.
When you’re working but thinking about family, the same system activates around a different perceived threat: missing important moments, being unavailable, failing the people who matter most. Your cortisol rises. Your body tenses. You’re in survival mode while trying to focus on strategic work.
Here’s what makes this particularly insidious: guilt itself becomes another stressor. Your body keeps reacting to stress from work, then stress from family, then stress about feeling guilty, and all of this piles up until you can’t really be present anywhere.
You can’t guilt yourself into regulation. Shame has never calmed a nervous system. What you’re experiencing isn’t a motivation deficit or a values misalignment. It’s a biological state that requires a clinical approach, not another productivity framework.
Recognition Patterns: Where Survival Mode Shows Up During the Holidays
If you want to understand whether you’re operating from a dysregulated nervous system rather than poor time management, look for these patterns:
The split screen phenomenon. You’re in one place, but your mind is somewhere else. You’re thinking through what you need to do later or trying to solve a problem that isn’t happening right now. This split happens on its own, not because you chose it. This isn’t distraction. This is a nervous system scanning for threats across multiple domains simultaneously because it doesn’t feel safe enough to fully land anywhere.
The inability to transition. You close your laptop to join the family for dinner, but your heart rate stays elevated. Your jaw stays tight. You’re physically out of work mode but biologically still in it. Or you sit down to work after everyone’s asleep, but you can’t focus because your mind keeps returning to the interaction you had earlier. Regulated nervous systems can shift states. Dysregulated ones get stuck between them.
The hypervigilance around both domains. You’re monitoring your phone during family time, not because you’re undisciplined, but because your nervous system has learned that missing something creates consequences you can’t afford. And you’re monitoring your family’s satisfaction while working, scanning for signs of disappointment or resentment. You’re in a state of perpetual threat assessment.
The apology spiral. You find yourself repeatedly apologizing to your family for working and mentally apologizing to your business for not working enough. The apologies aren’t just social niceties. They’re nervous system attempts to discharge the discomfort of perceived failure on both fronts.
The fantasy of “after.” You tell yourself things will be different after this project, after this quarter, after this launch. But when you get there, the dysregulation persists because the pattern isn’t about circumstances. It’s about a nervous system that hasn’t learned how to exist in non-threat states, even when the external pressure temporarily decreases.
These aren’t signs you’re doing something wrong. They’re diagnostic indicators of a nervous system operating from sympathetic dominance. In clinical work like The Survival Mode Exit Method, we address these patterns at the physiological level, not through behavior modification alone.
What Regulation Actually Looks Like
I worked with a founder last year who described his holiday season as “performing presence badly in both places.” Successful company. Loving family. But he spent December feeling like an imposter everywhere.
What shifted wasn’t his schedule. It wasn’t his boundaries. It was his nervous system’s capacity to actually land in the present moment without the biological alarm system running in the background.
After our work together, he described it this way: “I’m not thinking about work when I’m with my kids because I finally trust that I’ve created a business that can run without me. And I’m not thinking about my kids when I’m working because I finally trust that being unavailable for two focused hours doesn’t make me a bad parent. The guilt just… dissolved. Not because I tried to get rid of it, but because my body stopped interpreting both scenarios as threats.”
That’s what nervous system regulation creates. Not perfect balance. Not elimination of tension. But a biological state where you can be where you are without your system screaming at you to be somewhere else.
The Question You Need to Ask Yourself
Right now, in this moment, can you identify where you are on this continuum: Are you making decisions from a regulated state, or are you operating from a dysregulated nervous system that has categorized both work and family presence as potential failures?
If you can’t tell the difference, that’s information. If you can tell the difference but can’t shift out of the dysregulated state through willpower or intention alone, that’s also information.
Nervous system regulation isn’t something you think your way into. It requires clinical methodology, not another time blocking system or boundary setting workshop. The business owners who successfully exit the Holiday Guilt Loop do so by addressing the biology underneath the behavior, with specialized support that understands the difference between reactive leadership and regulated leadership.
You’re not failing. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do when it perceives multiple threats. The work is teaching it a different response.
Jonathan Riley is a Leadership Strategist and Business Advisor whose work combines psychology, business insight, and systems thinking to shape effective and sustainable leadership. Author of The Boundaries Bible, The Antidote to Burnout, and A Leader’s Way, he helps small to medium business owners and leaders master performance, balance, and purpose through his advisory work and Mastermind Groups. Learn more at mypracticeleaders.com.au