All week I’ve been posting about the whole of you, mind and body. This is the part leaders miss most.
Your body has been keeping a record your calendar can’t see.
For a long time I confused endurance with virtue.
I got home at 2am and set the alarm for 5am, because the fish market doesn’t wait. I swept floors that would be dirty again in six hours. I cleaned toilets, not because there was no one else, but because the standard I was building had to start with me.
And then one morning my hair started coming out in patches. Alopecia. My body doing what bodies do when you ask them to produce and never replenish.
I received the signal. And I kept moving, because in the world I grew up in, there was no other option.
I don’t tell you that for sympathy. I tell you because I meet this exact pattern in the highest-functioning people I coach, and they always call it something else. They call it busy.
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The bill always comes
The clenched jaw. The shallow breath. The 3am wake-up with your heart going for no reason you can name. We file it under stress and push through.
It isn’t stress you’re managing. It’s a bill your body is sending for everything you’ve been over-functioning through.
A client of mine, Jayne, ran on positivity so thorough that she had lost contact with her own body entirely. She could tell you everything about her children, her husband, her household, and nothing about herself. At thirty-five her body forced the conversation the only way it had left. Organ failure. She is alive and thriving today, in her own words, because she finally learned to listen to it.
Most of us never get an ultimatum that loud. We get years of small signals we’ve trained ourselves to ignore.
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Why it wrecks your decisions
A dysregulated nervous system doesn’t just feel bad. It makes worse calls, faster, and reads threat where there is none. You negotiate from fear. You over-control. You mistake urgency for importance. None of it shows up in the moment as “I was dysregulated.” It shows up as a rushed yes, a bad hire, a relationship you strained.
The body speaks first. We’re just trained not to listen.
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One practice, tonight
The physiological sigh. Two sharp and deep breaths in through the nose, one long breath out through the mouth and sigh out loud. Three rounds. It’s the fastest way we know to drop the body out of alarm. Do it before your next hard conversation and watch how differently you show up.
With Love, Pauline
PS. The patches in my hair grew back. I didn’t get the lesson until years later. Your body isn’t betraying you. It’s the only one in the building telling you the truth.
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
