All week I have been making the same argument in different rooms. That this work is not woo-woo. The eye-rollers are welcome to keep rolling. There is nothing soft about what eleven years of cortisol does to a prefrontal cortex. This is biochemistry, not belief.
And last Wednesday I left you with a question. Why is your window so short to begin with? Why does the threat part of you fire so fast, and the thinking part arrive so late, even on a Tuesday when nothing is actually wrong?
Here is the answer. You have been running a deficit, and the body keeps the books.
At 3pm on a Tuesday last year, I watched a brilliant founder make a decision I knew she would not have made on a Sunday morning. She signed off on a hire she had doubts about, to make a conversation stop. She told me later it felt like relief. It was not relief. It was a depleted brain choosing the option that cost the least energy in the moment, and billing the cost to next quarter.
And the productivity industry will sell you the exact wrong fix for it. More discipline. More systems. A better morning routine. You cannot routine your way out of a chemistry problem. The thing they sell you as the cure is a symptom of the disease.
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The economy you didn’t know you were running
Cortisol is not the villain. In a real emergency it is the most elegant system you own. It floods you, sharpens you, gets you through the thing, and then, in a body that feels safe, it clears.
The problem is not cortisol. The problem is cortisol with no off switch.
Run eleven years of back-to-back quarters, eleven years of the inbox at 11pm, eleven years of being the one who is not allowed to fall apart, and the system stops spiking and clearing. It just stays up. Low, constant, background. You stop noticing it the way you stop hearing a fridge hum.
And here is the bill. Chronic cortisol borrows from the exact part of you that you are paid for. The prefrontal cortex. Your judgment. Your impulse control. Your ability to hold a long pause and a longer view. It is a high-interest loan against your own discernment, and the repayment comes due at 3pm, in the decisions you make just to make the discomfort stop.
This is why the window is short
Last week we talked about the four hundred milliseconds, the gap between what lands on you and what you do next. Cortisol sets the width of that gap. A resilient nervous system has a wide window. A depleted one has almost none. The threat part fires instantly, and the thinking part, the expensive part, the part that read the books, is simply too tired to make the meeting on time.
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The Sunday test
A managing partner I worked with could not understand why his best decisions and his worst decisions came from the same brain. So we mapped them. Every decision he regretted had been made between 2pm and 5pm, on a skipped lunch and a short night. Every decision he was proud of had been made in the morning, on a weekend, or after a walk.
He was not inconsistent. He was depleted on a schedule.
We did not give him a new decision framework. He had three already. We gave his nervous system a way to clear the load, so the prefrontal cortex he was paying for actually showed up for the afternoon. Within a month, his 3pm decisions started to look like his Sunday ones.
The one practice
Before any decision that matters, ask yourself a single question. Would I make this on a Sunday morning, rested, with nothing chasing me? If the answer is no, you are not making the decision. The cortisol is. Wait for the window, or widen it first.
With Love,
Pauline.
PS. The founder rehired for that role six months later, properly this time, on a Tuesday that happened to feel like a Sunday. The difference was not a better candidate. It was a brain that was finally in the room to choose.
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
