What is systemic anxiety?

Anxiety is not the same as fear, though we can use the words interchangeably. Fear has an object: you’re afraid of the presentation on Thursday, the medical results on Friday, the teenager with a new driver’s license. Anxiety is different: it registers threat that is real enough to activate you, to ignite unease and discomfort, but often too uncertain to properly address. Something is wrong, or might be wrong, but you can’t quite locate what, where, or when.

Systemic anxiety doesn’t belong to one person, but circulates through a group, organization, or society. It emerges from a shared sense of uncertainty about survival, status, identity, or existential threat of some sort. Nobody generates it alone, and nobody resolves it alone. It lives in the system like a current running through water, shaping its movement and personality.

Think about what’s circulating in the currents today: ongoing wars devastating human life, a planet slowly degrading by our own actions, financial insecurity fueling layoffs, the threat of AI taking over everything. The anxiety caused by these themes doesn’t belong to any one individual. It’s in the air we breathe, and that air is contagious.

Picture it at work: you’re working for an organization that has just announced it has been acquired by an overseas competitor. All you know is “….more information to come as we work out the details.”

Enter systemic anxiety. It shapes the corridor conversations, who speaks up and who stays quiet, which ideas get surfaced and which get swallowed, and how people interpret information that is entirely neutral. A casual comment from a senior leader becomes “evidence of something.” An ambiguous email gets forwarded and decoded like an intelligence document. Two people having coffee could be conspiring for your job.

What systemic anxiety does to groups

Groups (and we, in general) are terrible at sitting with anxiety. Wilfred Bion, the British psychoanalyst who served as a tank commander in World War One and later worked with traumatized soldiers and clinical groups at London’s Tavistock Clinic, observed that groups under stress become far less rational, falling back on primitive, regressive behaviors.

An anxious group can quickly turn into what my colleagues Anand Narasimhan and Jean-Louis Barsoux call ‘the pack’, instinctively looking for ways to alleviate their anxiety. A few telltale signs that a group is in the grip of its anxiety:

• It regresses behavior: Sophistication in a group’s thinking evaporates. Complex problems get reduced to simple narratives, groups spend countless hours discussing information unrelated to the task.

• It speeds up decisions: Anxious groups accelerate toward quick decisions because sitting with uncertainty is unbearable.

• It narrows thinking: Attention contracts and the group stops scanning broadly, as fixates on a single target that it believes is the cause of its problems.

• It silences individuals: The people most likely to say something useful, those with a dissenting view, or a more complicated read of the situation, will be silenced.

• It exhausts us : Anxiety is metabolically expensive. A group running a chronic low-grade stress response — cortisol up, vigilance up, recovery down — depletes its members.

• It recruits conspirators: Anxiety is contagious. Those who don’t recognize what’s happening in the group will almost certainly get swept into it.

Systemic anxiety finds it’s leader

The most efficient psychological solution for groups is to (unconsciously) find a leader who can help them locate the source of its anxiety - typically somewhere external. Out there, in them and clearly not in ‘us’ (which would be more psychologically painful). A tough compeitor. The other department. “The leadership”. The neighboring country. The immigrants. The elites. The woke.

In finding a face for our unease, we feel relief: they are the reason we feel this way. Once anxiety has a home, it can transform into something much more manageable: outrage, righteous anger, collective purpose, tribal solidarity.

Imagine a CEO standing up in a town hall after a difficult quarter and saying: “I know exactly what’s wrong, and I know exactly how to fix it. The problem is the competition, and here is our plan to beat them.” The systemic anxiety in the room subsides because uncertainty has been replaced with a story, and a compelling one with a villain and a hero. We like this.

Research shows that “dominant” leaders are rated as more competent, even when they demonstrably lack competence. Across five experimental studies, Alzahawi & Flynn found that leaders who express uncertainty are perceived as less effective, less warm, and less competent, regardless of whether that uncertainty was warranted.

Confidence functions as a cognitive shortcut, particularly when the system is anxious. In the absence of evidence, we treat certainty as a proxy for competence. In short: if a leader confidently proclaims to have the answers, even facing evidence that they do not actually have these answers, we’re more likely to believe them. This has drastic consequences for the places we follow them. Ugh.

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Better navigating your team’s systemic anxiety

The challenge in working with systemic anxiety is that it’s rarely labelled that way. Very few teams will acknowledge “we’re anxious and it’s triggering bad behavior.” Instead, anxiety disguises itself as urgency, certainty, blame, conflict, over-analysis, endless meetings, catastrophizing, scapegoating, or a desperate need for answers when there simply aren’t any yet.

So how can we get better at managing the systemic anxiety in the air?

1. Ask yourself: what is the anxiety really about?

Systemic anxiety often attaches itself to the wrong object or person. A heated debate about return-to-office policies may not really be about office attendance. Resistance to a new technology may not really be about the technology. The emotional intensity surrounding an issue can be a clue that something larger is at play, that generalized systemic anxiety is searching for a home.

When people, including yourself, seem disproportionately reactive, pause first and ask: what uncertainty, threat, or sense of loss might be sitting underneath this conversation? Is it just a displacement?

2. Notice your rush to find certainty

Anxiety can be very uncomfortable to sit with, particularly when you can’t locate its source. Certainty feels relieving, and in anxious systems, certainty is more attractive than accuracy. So we’ll search for someone (or something) to tell is it’s ok.

One of the most reliable signs of systemic anxiety surfacing is when individuals or groups become overly attached to simple explanations and quick answers. Suddenly everyone knows exactly who is to blame, exactly what should happen, or exactly why things are going wrong. The CEO becomes the problem. Another department, another generation, another country becomes the problem. AI is the problem. Problem identified, let’s eliminate it.

When you feel an urgent need to reach a conclusion and take a decision, it’s worth asking: are you solving the problem, or escaping the discomfort of not knowing? Sometimes there are genuine problems that need addressing. But when a group’s emotional energy becomes fixated on a single target, or trying to decide ultra quicly, it is worth considering whether that target is carrying more than its fair share of the system’s anxiety.

3. Name what is happening

One of the simplest ways to reduce the grip of systemic anxiety is to make it discussable. A leader might say:

• “We seem to be feeling a lot of uncertainty right now.”

• “We’re trying to make decisions without all the information we’d like.”

• “I wonder if some of our frustration is coming from the ambiguity we’re all facing.”

Naming the dynamic doesn’t eliminate it. But it can help people step back from it, and begin to notice how it’s showing up so it can be better metabolized.

4. A leader’s job: be a container

There is a concept from Bion’s work that is important here: containment. The “container” is the person who can receive another’s raw, unprocessed anxiety, hold it without being overwhelmed (or externalized), and return it in a form that is more manageable. The original model was the mother and infant: the infant projects terror it cannot name, the mother takes it in and reflects back something the infant can begin to tolerate. The nervous system regulates, and the distress becomes bearable.

The same dynamic plays out in organizations, and a leader’s capacity to function as a container is consequential.

Containment is not the “performance of calm”, which people see through immediately, and not to provide “false certainty”, which erodes trust over time. It is the willingness to receive the anxiety in the room, hold it without being destabilised, and reflect something back that is more tolerable than what came in.

In practice it sounds like: “I don’t have all the answers, and I think the uncertainty is making this harder for all of us and we could be jumping to conclusions. Here is what I know, here is what I don’t, and here is how we are going to keep thinking about it together.” It won’t produce the relief of a good villain story. What it will do is keep the group able to think, and keep you credible when it actually counts.The containing leader’s job is not to eliminate systemic anxiety. It is to prevent the group from being run by it

5. Protect your own nervous system

Containment is exhausting work, and you can’t pour from an empty tank. If you’re the one trying to be the calm, steady presence for a group, or even just trying not to get swept up in the pack, your own physiology matters more than you realize. Anxiety spreads partly because it’s contagious at a nervous system level, so if your body is already running hot from your own stress, you have far less capacity to absorb anyone else’s without getting pulled into it.

The basics count here. Awareness, sleep, breathwork, movement, mindfulness, and a real detachment from the noise for even twenty minutes a day (see stress recovery articles here and here). Clearly it wont fix the systemic problem, but it will help build your resilience to it and determine whether you show up to the next meeting able to think clearly or already primed to catastrophise along with everyone else.

You can’t control the anxiety in the system. You can control how much of it you’re unintentionally metabolising on any given day, and that starts with treating your own regulation as part of the job.

None of us get to opt out of the anxiety in the air right now. It’s baked into the news cycle, the group chat, the big meeting where leadership says “more to come” and everyone reads ten different meanings into it. What we can control is whether we let it run us or whether we get better at spotting it for what it is, and that starts with something as simple as naming what’s actually going on instead of reaching for the nearest villain or the fastest answer. Systemic anxiety isn’t going anywhere, but it doesn’t have to write the story for you.

This is neither a solid parenting moment (cue: mother-guilt), nor a good example of how life “has to be” after work. It prompted this instalment of my stress recovery series: what can you do to avoid the post-work crashout?

In Part 1, I covered some fundamentals of work stress recovery: what it is, why it matters, and what the research says about restoring your energy outside of work. Things like sleep, relaxation, exercise, detachment, mastery, and a sense of control.

These are things you largely think about outside your working time. Yet by the time you finish work, a lot of the damage is already done. The cognitive and emotional energy tank has been running low since mid-morning, and you’ve been making decisions, fielding requests, dealing with drama, and maintaining composure for hours. The compounding has happened.

To be effective, recovery cannot only be an after-work project. What you do during the workday drastically shapes whether you arrive at 6pm with anything left.

Regulating energy throughout the day: A few tips.

So, what can you do during the day - particularly when in ‘back to backs’, and when time is scarce? Here are a few ideas to get started.

1. Front-load your breaks

Meta analyses confirms that microbreaks (brief voluntary pauses of five to fifteen minutes) taken within the working day, can boost vigor and reduce fatigue.

Most people though, treat breaks as a reward for having suffered long enough: “I’m exhausted I need a break”. You push through the morning, snacking while working, promise yourself a pause after the next meeting, and eventually surface at 3pm feeling like a wrung-out dishcloth. By then, the break is really just damage control.

Research by Hunter and Wu found that breaks taken earlier in the workday replenished significantly more resources like energy, concentration, and satisfaction than breaks taken later. The longer into a shift someone waited, the less a break actually restored. This means that the people who need breaks most urgently are also getting the least value from them, because they’ve waited too long.

I find that personally challenging because the morning feels like the time to push: I’m energised then. While I think It’s when I don’t ‘need it’, the research disagrees.

Tip #1: take micro-breaks early in the day, before you think you need them.

2. Activity choice: match the recovery to the type of depletion

The impact of a micro break impact depends on how well the activity matches both the type of depletion from the previous task and the type of resource needed for the next one ahead.

The starting point is a quick scan of your internal dashboard across four domains: cognitive (am I focused or foggy?), emotional (am I calm or reactive?), physiological (am I energised or sluggish?), and social (am I open or withdrawn?). Each depletes differently and each needs a different kind of reset.

A walk outdoors, or even a 40-second gaze at something green, works via Attention Restoration Theory: natural stimuli give the directed attention system time to recover. A brief breathwork practice can calm your nervous system, refocus scattered attention, or give you a small lift when you've been thinking heavily or making tough decisions. Jotting down three things that went well can boost positive emotions; a coffee and a laugh with a colleague can replenish the social energy that draining interactions tend to consume. Even watching a few funny meme's or short videos (when done in moderation) can ‘take the edge off’ ; laugh can release endorphins into your system.

It all starts by asking ‘what kind of break’ do I need now?

Tip #2: Consider what kind of energy you need and ‘break’ to reset that.

3. Protect your transitions

If you’ve ever been grumpy already at the start of a meeting, you’ll agree that back-to-back meetings carry a cognitive cost. Researcher Sophie Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe what happens when you switch tasks or contexts before the first one is psychologically resolved. Part of your attention stays behind: You arrive at the next meeting technically present but cognitively divided or emotionally loaded and research shows this measurably reduces performance on whatever comes next.

A brief transition ritual can interrupt this residue and signals to the brain that the previous context is closed. Ideas: three slow breaths, a short note capturing what is left unresolved, a brief walk to a different space, a glass of water, a restroom break, a few jumping jacks. A closing ritual gives the brain a clear boundary signal.

I tend to like an ‘opening ritual’ I do in my head before a meeting by simply asking “how do I want to show up now”?

Tip #3: Develop your ‘transition ritual’ that you can enact before your next meeting.

(note: here’s a good podcast episode on end of day rituals).

4. Exercise belongs in the workday

Exercise is one of the most evidence-backed within-day recovery tools available, and its benefits operate on two timescales.

The first is cumulative. Regular physical activity builds capacity over time: tracking employees across ten workdays, one study found that daily physical activity generates resource chains of physical, affective, and cognitive benefits that carry forward into next-day task performance, creative performance, and health. Think of it as raising your baseline, so you start each day with more to draw on. (They have a great HBR piece on this too.)

The second is acute. A single instance of exercise produces a small but reliable improvement in cognitive task performance, particularly reaction times. This can happen though BDNF (brain derived neutrophic factor) : a meta-analysis of 55 studies found that a single bout of exercise significantly elevates this protein in the bloodstream, supporting the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, the regions most responsible for working memory and decision-making. It’s like fertiliser for the brain. The boost is transient, returning toward baseline within 15 to 60 minutes, so timing matters: 20 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise before a high-stakes meeting is worth more than the same walk taken after.

If you - like me - personally draw the line at getting sweaty at the office, what can you do? A review of active microbreaks found that two to three minutes of light-intensity activity every 30 minutes can have positive mental and physical health benefits (without compromising performance). A walk to a different floor, a few flights of stairs, a loop around the building: the threshold for benefit is actually lower than most people assume.

Tip #4: Take several ‘2 minute exercise breaks’ during the day. They add up.

5. The micro-nap

If you can nap, do. A meta-analysis found that a short daytime nap improved cognitive performance, particularly alertness, with benefits lasting up to two hours after waking. The sweet spot, most sleep researchers agree, is 15 to 20 minutes: long enough to restore alertness, short enough to avoid sleep inertia, that groggy, disoriented feeling you get when you wake from deeper sleep.

Whether napping at work feels normal or strange depends largely on where you are. A review of workplace napping found that in Japan, workplace napping is known as inemuri, meaning "sleeping while present," and is considered a sign of dedication rather than laziness, while in China many companies actively encourage a short post-lunch nap to improve afternoon concentration. In Spain, the siesta is cultural common ground.

I have never, ever been able to do this but the research - and those in my class that confirm it works for them! - confirms the power of napping. Napping at work was a big trend a few years ago (confirmed by the WEF here). Just type in ‘workplace napping pods’ and discover a huge array of products that are offered in offices around the world.

Tip #5: If you can micro-nap, do.

All in all, despite our progress in AI, humans remain flesh and blood. Your limited resources deplete in real time, across multiple systems, and waiting until after work to start recovering means you have been running a deficit for most of the day.

You don’t have to overhaul your schedule. Just start with one thing - one tiny new habit: a break before you feel like you need it, two minutes between meetings to take 5 deep controlled breaths, or plan a quick coffee to look forward to with a work friend. Small interventions, applied consistently, will compound. And with any luck, future-you will walk through the door, say hello to the kids, and make a much more considered decision about the wine.

When participants rated how successful their own attempts at personal change had been, the average score was 57 out of 100. Mostly “sometimes yes, sometimes no.” When they rated their attempts to change someone else, that figure dropped to 45. Only one person out of 400 reported 100% success at changing another person. One.

I am reassured by this, as I too have many of the same answers as above - year after year. This means I’m not uniquely “bad at change”, or lacking in willpower in ways that others are not. Nope, I’m just human, bumping up against the same biology and psychology as everyone else.

Given change is - or at least, can be - hard, it warrants a few posts on the topic. So here I am, starting with today’s tips to get (re)started on your personal change journey, when change feels hard.

1. Be honest about your hidden agendas

An uncomfortable question to ask yourself: what do you unconsciosuly want more than the thing you say you want to change? Of course, we all want to be fit, healthy, to set boundaries, to delegate, be present in our relationships. But secretly, is there something under the surface you are committed to more than what you consciously want to change?

We like to think our change goals and our behaviours are aligned. Often they’re not. Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey identified what they call competing commitments — the covert goals that work directly against the ones we announce to ourselves. Their book on the subject describes it as having one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. You want to go to the gym three times a week. You also want to decompress in the evenings without having to summon more willpower after a long day. Both are real.

If you find yourself repeatedly not following through and confused about what’s happening, it’s worth asking yourself: what am I protecting? What am I not willing to give up? Surfacing and being honest about those hidden commitments won’t automatically dissolve them. But you can’t work with what you can’t access so it’s worth it to do the work.

For those I coach on the topic, blockers often come down to deeply held assumptions and identities. Can’t delegate, though it makes so much sense and you consciously want to? That might be a deep level commitment to feeling important, needed, and in control. It might even threaten an identity you have grown accustomed to (e.g., being ‘the go to’ person). Unconsciously your brain wants to avoid the pain of losing what it clings to.

Being honest about your competing commitments can be very revealing about the real problem you might need to solve.

2. Rejig your context

Our behaviours are shaped far more by our surroundings than we like to admit. Nobel laureate Richard Thaler put it plainly: if you want people to do something, you need to make it easy. The reverse is equally true.

Want to eat better? Put the fruit on the counter and the chocolate at the back of a high shelf. Want to read more? Leave your phone in another room and your book on the pillow. Want to be more present at home after work? Build a physical transition like a short walk, a change of clothes, anything that signals to your brain that the work day is over.

Your social context matters just as much. Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson’s research on emotional contagion shows that we automatically and continuously synchronise with the emotional states of those around us — their moods, their energy, their stress. Christakis and Fowler’s large-scale social network studies found that behaviours including smoking cessation, happiness, and exercise spread through social ties in measurable ways. Their findings remain debated (because it’s hard to disentangle social influence from the fact that similar people tend to cluster together, but the basic point holds: the people around you shape what feels normal, possible, valued and worth doing. If everyone around you is stressed, cynical, or disengaged, swimming against that current takes enormous energy.

In sum: spending more time with people who already embody the behaviour you’re trying to build is one of the more practical levers you have. So to my colleague at work (you know who you are) who is an Iron-Man mega athlete, if you find me following you around…you know why.

3. Expect new habits to feel uncomfortable and a little fake at first

When we try to think or act differently, it can feel wrong at first. Awkward, like you’re pretending to be someone you’re not. That feeling is not a sign the change is wrong for you, but it is a sign your brain is working hard. Research by Wendy Wood and colleagues finds that up to 43% of our daily behaviours are “habitual” — running on well-worn neural pathways that took years to build. New behaviours require new pathways, and those only form through repetition. The discomfort is truly part of the process. I find that many people give up because of that initial hard part where it feels painful.

Note that Wood & Rünger’s research also shows that stress actively pushes us back toward habitual behaviour — under pressure the brain defaults to what it knows best. So the moments when change feels hardest are exactly when old habits are most likely to reassert themselves. I’ll be the first to admit that knowing that doesn’t make it easier, but it does make it less mysterious.

Think about learning a language, or a new sport - you wouldn’t expect to feel like a natural in the first few weeks. We tolerate the awkwardness here because we understand it’s temporary.

There are a few practical tips that can help with new habits. James Clear's Atomic Habits suggest a few ideas (and if you rather like listening to or watching podcasts, try this one, or this one).

1. Make it tiny. The two-minute rule suggests that any new habit should start small enough to take under two minutes — not run three miles, but lace up your running shoes. Showing up consistently matters more than the size of the action.

2. Stack your habits. Attaching a new behaviour to an existing one borrows the cue of a habit you already have. For example, after you make your coffee, you write for ten minutes. After you brush your teeth, you stretch.

3. Be specific about when and where. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 studies found that deciding in advance exactly when and where you will do something (e.g., "I will go to the gym on Monday at 7am" rather than "I will exercise more") had a medium to large positive effect on actually following through. Turning a vague intention into a concrete plan can be helpful in embedding that new habit.

There we have it for today - thanks for reading!

I have a secret list. I should be doing more research. I should have written that book by now. I should be doing more for my team, my students, and should be handling my role with considerably more grace and calm than I currently am. I should be a better mother, a more present partner, a more available friend. Some days the list inspires action; some days it’s agony.

What I have learned, both from the research and from years of running stress workshops with senior executives, is that almost everyone in the room is carrying a list — and that the list tends to be invisible to everyone except its owner. From the outside, these are accomplished, high-functioning, apparently confident people. On the inside, many of them are “shoulding on themselves” from morning to night.

As it came up in our recent research on stress and overwhelm, I thought I’d dive into the topic a little more intentionally.

When standards become stressors

In our recent Overwhelm, paper we collected narrative accounts from around 100 working people about their experience of being overwhelmed at work. When we analysed them, one striking pattern that surfaced (note: maybe more striking to me as I identified so strongly with it) was about “normative significance”: the degree to which people judged themselves against certain standards, and found themselves wanting.

Around a third of our participants described demands that carried heavy value judgments — the belief that they were failing to meet their own internal standards, or standards they perceived others held for them. They said things like it is my job, I am the manager, I am supposed to be able to handle this. I should be able to deal with these requests. Highly successful, powerful, brilliant leaders I work with can detail at length what they (and others) expect them to handle, manage, produce, look like, or be — not only as an employee or leader but as a parent, friend, partner.

Interestingly, many do often question the validity of those expectations, accurately suspecting that they may be their own internal standards projected onto others. Or perhaps they have internalised standards that were never theirs to begin with. The demands of life are really hard enough these days. The should sitting underneath those demands can make them unbearable.

The tyranny of the should

In my subsequent investigations, I discovered that Karen Horney, a great psychoanalytic thinker, saw this clearly long before it became a workplace problem. She coined the phrase tyranny of the should to describe the way people construct an idealised image of themselves (e.g., perfectly competent, always composed, effortlessly excellent) and then drive themselves relentlessly toward it.

The tyranny, she argued, is that this ideal can be more punitive than aspirational. Gaps between the actual self and this idealised self becomes evidence of deep inadequacy rather than ordinary human variation. Many of us do not think I did not meet that standard today and then forgive ourselves for it. Nope, man think I am the kind of person who does not meet standards. Then enters: shame, guilt, self-loathing, anxiety.

The psychologist Albert Ellis (at least it’s attibuted to him) called it “shoulding on yourself” — applying inflexible personal standards to every situation regardless of context. Cognitive-behavioural therapy has since identified should statements as one of the most common thinking traps, particularly in people experiencing anxiety and stress.

It goes like this: you hold a belief about how you or others should behave. Reality deviates you from this (maybe it was an impossible standard anyway!). Rather than updating the belief, you hold reality responsible. The result is a steady drip of frustration, guilt, shame, and self-doubt and nobody knows it’s happening. What I find with most of the highly successful executives I work with, is that everything on the outside looks completely fine. You’re a role model. When I create space to talk about it with others, it’s cathartic - many of us don’t realise this is quite a common dynamic.

It is also an exhausting way to live.

When a should does (some) good

Of course, high standards are not inherently harmful (note: I definitely hold a few of them myself). The wealth of research on goal-setting is clear that specific, challenging goals can produce better performance. But this also has important caveats. Ordóñez and colleagues argue that the benefits of goal-setting have been systematically overstated, and that specific, challenging goals carry side effects: they narrow focus, distort risk preferences, erode intrinsic motivation, and leave people feeling worse about themselves even when they perform well.

Goals set against a backdrop of depleted resources, or calibrated to outperform others rather than improve oneself, tend to backfire. The should that motivates tends to be self-referenced, realistic given your current capacity, and focused on process (the how, not the outcome). The should that punishes you tends to be the opposite: vague, externally sourced, and outcome-obsessed. Think ‘I should be the kind of leader who never struggles’ vs ‘I want to get better at this specific thing’.

Not every should deserves to be discarded. Sometimes the discomfort a should creates is actually useful data, particularly if seen a signal there is an impending misalignment between your values and your behaviour. I should be more present or I should have said something in that meeting can point toward what genuinely matters to you. The skill is learning to tell the difference: is this should pointing toward a real value that you care about, or just another way to make yourself feel inadequate?

So what do you actually do with a should when it arrives?

Notice it. The first move is simply to catch it when it comes up, and to notice what it does to you. The storm is typically invisible to others, and sometimes unconscious even to yourself. It can become a pattern you have fallen into throughout your life. I should be handling this better. I should be doing more. I should be x, y, z. I should be eating better. Just noticing the word is the starting point.

Get curious. Do not judge yourself in the moment. I should not be using should just compounds it. Instead, sit with the emotion and ask: where did this standard come from? Is it actually mine, or did I absorb it from somewhere? A professional culture or boss, a family script, a version of success I never consciously signed up for? A beauty or parenting standard offered by social media? Is it pointing toward something I genuinely value, or is it just making me feel inadequate?

If it is pointing toward something real and important, something aligned with your values, it is worth keeping. If it is not pointing toward anything real, let it go. This, of course, is easier said than done. I have been trying for years with some of my own. Some shoulds are deeply embedded scripts and unpicking them takes time, and sometimes the support of a good therapist.

Rewrite the narrative. I should be more present with my team can become I want to be more present, and here is one small thing I can do this week. My personal favourite self-inflicted should: I should go for a run can become I would love to build in more healthy habits. How can I do that? Make it something you have choice about. When you try to rewrite I should be constantly available as I choose to be constantly available, the absurdity tends to surface on its own. At the very least, it gives you back some agency. It is, in the end, always a choice.

Check your resources. When the gap between your standards and your current capacity feels heavy, the instinct is to push harder (enter: the recovery paradox). That is usually the moment to ask what you need, not what more you should be doing. The tyranny and internal critic gets loudest when you are most depleted. It may well be a signal that you need to step back and recover, to take the load off for a bit, not double down and push harder.

Should is a small word carries a lot of weight. I know this not just from the research, or from the executives I work with, but from my own ongoing, imperfect attempts identify and rid myself of standards not worth keeping. Or ensuring my standards motivate not punish. A lifelong project!

For more reading, here’s an article that I wrote with my PhD supervisor (the amazing Amanda Sinclair) on a similar topic: How to quiet your inner critic:

• https://www.imd.org/ibyimd/leadership/quieting-the-inner-critic/

• https://www.imd.org/ibyimd/brain-circuits/how-do-you-quiet-your-inner-critic/

Recovery from work is so essential to keeping you energised, engaged, and functioning that I decided to write a mini-series on the topic. This is Part 1: the essentials.

What is Recovery?

The demands of your daily work and life consume your mental, emotional, and physical energy. These resources, despite what you might wish, come in limited supply each day. As they deplete, the body accumulates the symptoms of stress: anxiety, fatigue, elevated cortisol, inflammation. Recovery is the process of restoring your systems back to baseline, so you’re able to take on each new day, and prevent yourself from burning out (and getting sick, etc) over time. Our bodies are wired to seek this kind of balance. Physiologists call it homeostasis: the tendency of biological systems to regulate themselves back to a stable internal state.

Recovering the energy used at work is super important for your overall health, well-being and performance. For example, one large meta-analysis looking at data from nearly 27,000 people, found that how well you recover after work mitigates fatigue and stress, and builds your vigour and positive energy for the next day. Another meta-analysis, confirmed the same pattern: better recovery is consistently linked to better wellbeing, more resources, and stronger job performance.

What is interesting about these analyses is that while your job might be exhausting, what you do after work plays a huge role in whether you show up tomorrow running on empty or ready to go. You have agency in how work affects you.

Pillars of Recovery

Over a series of posts I’ll write on recovery, I’ll cover lots of things things that work, or don’t work. In this piece I’ll focus on what can help you recover outside of your work. There’s a separate and equally interesting story about how to recover during the workdayitself. That will come next.

One consistently supported framework comes from Sonnentag and Fritz, who identified four core recovery experiences: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. These are the underlying psychological experiences, or ingredients that make recovery actually happen, regardless of what you’re doing.

Psychological detachment

Mentally switching off from work, is key. This is not just being physically away from from your work physically, but actually stopping work-related thoughts. It is harder to achieve than it sounds. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself planning tomorrow’s to-do list at the dinner table, or lying awake replaying and ruminating over a tricky conversation you had at work.

Detachment is one of the most powerful experiences for reducing the negative symptoms of work stress. Research consistently links it to lower fatigue, lower anxiety, better sleep, and reduced work-family conflict. It is essentially the off switch for the stress response. What it is less effective at is generating positive energy and work engagement. This is where the other recovery experiences come in.

What works to detach? Everyone will have their own preferences. You might leave your work phone in another room when you get home, develop a consistent end-of-day ritual that signals the workday is over (changing clothes, a short walk, cooking a meal), or do something absorbing enough that there simply is no mental space for work to creep back (e.g., like playing chess, learning a language, or connecting with people you care about).

My personal favorite: In a recent interview with the BBC, The Foo-Fighters recently mentioned that they build Lego sets on their time off to unwind. Dave Grohl says “There is something sort of meditative about the process. You can just turn your brain off and follow the instructions.” Exactly.

Relaxation

That parasympathetic state of low activation: calm, unhurried, unstimulated. Your body has time to ‘rest and digest’. It can come from meditation, a slow walk, gentle yoga, a long bath, reading, or simply sitting outside without an agenda. The body and mind are not being pushed or stimulated, and you are not thinking about work.

Sleep is the ultimate relaxation activity. Better evening relaxation predicts better sleep, and better sleep predicts better energy, mood, and performance the next day. If you are working on your recovery and ignoring your sleep, you are missing the most important lever you have.

Notably, scrolling your phone tends not to qualify. It is low-effort but not low-activation, and research suggests that screen-based activities vary considerably in their recovery value depending on what you are actually doing with them. Using your phone for work during your off hours actively undermines recovery. Using it for leisure is a more complicated picture, which I’ll come back to.

Like detachment, relaxation is primarily restorative rather than energising: it brings you back to baseline rather than lifting you beyond it. Both are what you reach for when you need to unwind. They are necessary, but if you want to feel genuinely energised rather than simply less depleted, you need the next two as well.

Mastery Experiences

Master refers to the experience of growth and achievement in a non-work context: taking on a positive challenge, learning something new, getting better at something. Learning an instrument, training for a race, taking a pottery class, gardening, volunteering, picking up a language. These might sounds effortful, they are, but the research consistently shows that mastery experiences predict next-morning vigour, work engagement, and job performance.

The reason is that mastery builds resources: a challenging hobby generates new skills, a sense of competence, and self-efficacy that carry over directly into how you show up at work. This meta-analysis found mastery to be one of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes including engagement, creativity, and life satisfaction. This means that if you want recovery to genuinely energise your (rather than just help you become less exhausted) mastery is where to focus.

A Sense of Control

Control could be the most underrated of the four. Control isn’t an activity in itself, but an enabler of all recovery activities. This refers to having genuine autonomy over how you spend your non-work time: the sense that you are choosing what you do, rather than having it chosen for you. This can be as simple as protecting an evening from obligations, deciding how you want to spend a lunch break, or saying no to a social commitment you didn’t actually want. Setting your boundaries and sticking to them.

For example, one study found that workers who chose to socialise at lunch recovered well, while those who did so because of peer pressure or workplace norms ended up more depleted by end of day. The principle extends further: recovery activities that feel obligatory tend to work less well than those you chose freely. This is why blanket wellness programmes so often underdeliver. Recovery is personal, and the sense of agency over your own time is itself part of what makes it work.

Control is consistently linked to higher vigour and greater life satisfaction. It also shapes the effectiveness of every other recovery experience: the same activity will restore you more if you chose it freely than if you felt obliged to do it.

This one I struggled with enormously when I had a demanding job and very young children. Recovery time for working parents is often anything but restorative, particularly when your time simply is not your own. Those days W\when you need to negotiate 5 minutes for a shower. I personally found that things do get better as children get older, though I’ll note that this study suggests mothers with middle-schoolers are among the most stressed. I am right in the thick of that now.

Recovery is not some kind of “reward” for finishing everything on your list - for when you’re already totally depleted. Like any good athlete, you should treat recovery as key to the game: it enables you to manage stress, stay positive, and perform at your best (day after day). What you do in your non-work hours really shapes how you think, feel, and perform the next day. You need enough detachment to actually leave work behind, enough relaxation to calm your nervous system, enough mastery to remind yourself you are growing, and enough control to make (at least some of) your time genuinely yours. Start small, find your own mix, and treat recovery with the same seriousness you bring to everything else. To be continued in part 2!

Thanks for reading!

ps. Here is a link to our (a great team, with Nele, Bonnie, Franciska and me!) HBR article on the topic: How to Recover, According to Science

On a good day, I barely notice. I’m thinking about where I’m going, and grateful to be traveling at all. On a bad day, delayed and already irritable, that walk through first class feels like an editorial comment on my life choices.

Every single time this happens to me it reminds me of one of my favourite research studies by Katy Decelles (University of Toronto) and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School) from 2016 that unpacks this experience. Spoiler: they found walking through first class on your way back to your seat in economy is related to a whole host of ‘anti social behavior’ like air rage.

In their study, they obtained a database of all disruptive passenger incidents from a large international airline, covering several years and between one and five million flights. They looked at correlations between air rage and possible triggers: legroom, seat width, flight delays, flight length and cabin space. They compared flights with separate first and economy classes to those with a single cabin, and flights that boarded from the front with those that boarded from the centre.

The strongest predictor, by far, was class divide. The chances of an economy cabin incident were 3.84 times higher when first class was present — equivalent to the effect of an additional 9.5 hour flight delay. Legroom, what I had assumed would be a big deal (especially for me at 180cm), barely registered. When economy passengers boarded from the front, walking through first class to reach their seats, the odds of a cabin incident more than doubled, an effect equivalent to an additional six-hour delay.

The results ran in both directions. Front boarding predicted 11.86 greater odds of a first class air rage incident than boarding from the middle.

The disruptions were different across cabins. In first class, incidents were more likely to involve anger and belligerence. In economy, uncontrolled emotional outbursts related to anxiety, frustration and panic were more common. That moment when you want to scream while ramming your carry on bag into a space that doesn’t fit. The researchers note this fits a broader pattern in the literature: higher status tends to be associated with displays of anger, lower status with reduced self-control.

Sadly, rather than triggering sympathy, seeing economy passengers trudge through didn’t make first-class passengers more sympathetic. It made them worse. The paper explains why: when making downward social comparisons to the disadvantaged, research shows that higher social class individuals “are more selfish, entitled, and scornful, psychological states that foster antisocial behavior”. Ugh.

In an interview about the research, DeCelles mentions that removing inequality on flights is an unlikely solution (airlines indeed need that revenue). The more likely approach to reducing air rage based on cabin class divide is by managing inequality so it grates less: a curtain between cabins, separate boarding doors, careful design to keep the two groups from having to directly witness each other’s experience, and not announcing that economy passengers aren’t welcome in first-class washroom. As she put it, making inequality very apparent “can be upsetting for people who are in the lower class, but can also trigger entitled behaviour among people who are in the upper social class.”

This research is a decade old, but the conditions it describes have only deepened since then. Wealth inequality is growing in most countries, and social media has made it relentlessly visible. New research finds that when the wealthy are more visible, dissatisfaction and political division increase. Comparison, as one Dr Milena Tsvetkova put it, “is the thief of joy”. The airplane cabin is a useful lens because it's so contained: a few hours, a physical aisle, an inequality you can't escape. Outside the cabin, the same mechanism plays out at a much larger scale, with much less chance of the curtain being drawn.

So, next time you’re boarding, take a deep breath and notice. You’ll think of this work now, just like me!

To read more:

• Physical and situational inequality on airplanes predicts air rage

• Travelweek article with Decelles interview: https://www.travelweek.ca/news/economy-first-class-study-shows-seat-sections-biggest-predictor-air-rage/

• Social networks affect redistribution decisions and polarization

• Seeing the rich makes people favour redistribution, but also increases political division

Has this ever happened to you? You make it through weeks of deadlines without a sniffle. Then vacation starts, and suddenly you’re congested, exhausted, or flat-out sick. I swear this happens to me, so often, that I thought I’d investigate how real this actually is.

Turns out, Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets et al. coined the term "leisure sickness" in 2002 after surveying nearly 1,900 people and finding that around 3% regularly fell ill on weekends or at the start of holidays. The most common culprits: headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, and colds.

Note that "leisure sickness" is not a formally recognised medical condition. More of an observed phenomenon. The research base is thin — but still interesting, and a common experience among many of us.

So why do we experience leisure sickness?

1) The “let-down effect”

During periods of sustained stress - when you’re ‘always on’, and in high excitement/anxiety/overwhelm mode - your body produces higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline, among other things. These hormones help you stay alert, stay focused, keep up your energy, and they even reduce pain. In the short term, they also give your immune system a boost: your body is in high alert, anti-threat mode. It cannot afford to get sick just now. That can keep symptoms from showing up even if your body is already fighting something.

When the stress ends, those hormone levels drop. This pattern has been called the let-down effect. A 2014 study published in Neurology by Lipton et al. at the Montefiore Headache Center followed 17 migraine sufferers (note, that’s a small sample, but still interesting) with daily electronic diaries over three months, generating over 2,000 diary entries. They found that a reduction in stress from one day to the next can be associated with migraine onset the following day (see: PubMed).

Not only that, but after weeks of being on high alert, it is not that you are not tired — it is that you are not allowing yourself to know (or feel) it. You are in necessary denial. The adrenaline, the to-do list and the next deadline keeps the exhaustion at bay. Day one of vacation is often the first moment of stillness you have had in weeks, and that is precisely when it hits you. Your denial subsides and you suddenly you notice how heavy everything feels, how much sleep you actually need, how long it has been since you genuinely switched off. Symptoms of exhaustion or illness that were held in check now find their moment of glory.

2) Chronic stress weakens your defences

Cortisol has a dual effect. While short bursts of stress can temporarily enhance immune activity, ongoing chronic stress does the opposite. Over time, elevated cortisol (and other stress related substances) significantly impacts the immune system, reducing the effectiveness of immune cells and making it harder for the body to control virus and infection. In short: with ongoing chronic stress that’s not managed, you’ll weaken your immune system and become a great target for viruses.

By the time vacation starts, your system then may already be strained. You were functioning, from short term burst to burst, but at decreasing strength: you’ve been pushing mind over matter. The ‘matter’ ultimately wins. When your weakened system is exposed to a fresh virus, symptoms appear quickly. (For the more nerdy of us, see an interesting review of stress and immunology here)

3) Travel exposes you to more pathogens at the worst moment

The first day of vacation often includes airports, trains, crowds, and new environments. Studies of air travel have shown how easily respiratory infections can spread in those conditions. You are also encountering unfamiliar microbes in food, water, and air that can shock your immune system (which might already be depleted). That combination increases the odds that a small exposure turns into a noticeable illness right away. Yay!

You can prevent vacation sickness

Preventing leisure sickness starts long before you pack your bags. The problem is built up over weeks and months, so the solution has to be too. It starts with managing your chronic stress on a day-to-day basis rather than saving everything up and hoping vacation will sort it out. Prevention is critical to not only feel better about your life, but keeps your immune system in check so it still has some power when the cortisol wears off. (I’ll post about that soon.)

Also, you cannot sprint to the finish line at work on Friday and expect your body to gracefully shift into recovery mode by Saturday morning. Weeks of high alert, high output, high cortisol and then some we expect….overnight, recovered! The body will process the backlog on its own schedule, and that schedule often starts around day one of your holiday.

I’ll write a full post on the practical side of managing stress soon — and highlight what the research actually says about stress recovery, sleep, and keeping your immune system in decent shape when life is relentlessly full. Stay tuned.

Like many of us, I have a complicated relationship with my phone. I teach about wellbeing and phone use, I write about topic, I follow the academic research obsessively, and I still pick the darn thing up, without meaning to, approximately fifty times a day.

That gap between knowing and doing is, I think, what most of us are actually dealing with when it comes to our well-being in general, and our phones more specifically. So this piece is my attempt to lay out my thoughts and research about where the line is, what happens when you step back from the phone, and what seems to help.

When normal becomes “problematic”

Most of us secretly know when our phone use has started to cross an invisible line. Precious hours disappear, too often, to addictive short-video scrolling? Just one more…50 videos later.

Addiction is the extreme. Clinically it involves loss of control, tolerance, withdrawal, and continued use despite clear harm, and despite genuine intentions to stop. Gambling disorder is currently the only non-substance behavioural pattern formally classified this way in the DSM, and its diagnostic framework requires several of these criteria to be present simultaneously. Most heavy phone users don't meet all of them

What most of us do experience is more relatable: unconscious compulsive checking, a low-grade anxiety when the phone is out of reach or the battery is low, the inability to let a notification sit unanswered, or something close to panic when separated from it for too long. In our research, it is this compulsive behavior that is most linked to stress and decreased well-being, not the actual hours spent on the device objective phone use (total hours).

The same professionals in our study were interrupted by their phones on average every 13 minutes of their waking day, 65 notifications and 72 pick-ups daily. For younger workers, an interruption arrived roughly every 9.5 minutes. Other studies show an even worse picture.

Here are some signs that use has shifted from functional to problematic:

• Loss of control: Reaching for the phone habitually with no particular purpose: at a pause in conversation, waking up before getting out of bed, in any moment of low stimulation. The behaviour precedes the intention. I know that a few times I have clicked on the same application two times in a row before realising I was even doing it!

• Withdrawal. Anxiety, irritability, or difficulty concentrating when the phone is unavailable or out of reach. Genuine distress, disproportionate to the situation.

• Emotional costs and coping. Do you often feel worse after or during using your phone? Sad, depressed, grumpy, triggered? (see ’s important work on anxiety & social media for some reasons why!) Or are you using the phone as your default (and only) response to any emotional discomfort like boredom, mild anxiety, stress, conversational awkwardness?

• Cognitive costs. Difficulty sustaining focus. A 2023 Scientific Reports study found that the mere physical presence of a smartphone, face down and switched off, measurably reduces available cognitive capacity.

• Continued use despite harm. Knowing that phone use is disrupting sleep, focus, or relationships and being unable to change the pattern. Awareness without agency is the hallmark of compulsive behaviour.

In our research using established cyber-addiction / problematic use scales, roughly 50% of the professionals we studied met criteria as “at-risk” or “problematic” users. Interestingly, when I ask a classroom “who thinks they belong to the problematic group?” most people think they do.

What happens when you actually stop?

I read some interesting recent evidence on this question, in randomised controlled trial published in PNAS Nexus in February 2025. Researchers at the University of Alberta, Georgetown, and UT Austin recruited 467 American and Canadian smartphone users and asked half to block all mobile internet access from their phones for two weeks, while retaining the ability to make calls and send texts and access the internet from other devices. The other half acted as a control group before undergoing the same intervention. Some results:

↑ Mental health improved significantly. 71% of participants reported better mental health after the two weeks than before.

↑ Sustained attention recovered measurably. Using an objective performance task rather than self-report, attention improved by an amount the researchers estimated as equivalent to reversing approximately 10 years of age-related cognitive decline. 59% of participants showed improvement.

↑ Subjective wellbeing increased. 73% of participants reported higher wellbeing after the intervention. Mood improved progressively over the two weeks, cumulatively, day by day.

Improvements in wellbeing and mental health were explained by changes in how people spent their time: more in-person socialising, more exercise, more time in nature, and better sleep. The attention improvements could not be explained by these factors, suggesting a more direct effect of reduced distraction on cognitive functioning.

A caveat worth passing on: the sample skewed toward people already motivated to reduce their phone use, with 83% rating their motivation to change at 5 or higher on a 7-point scale. Whether the same effects would appear in an unmotivated sample is an unknown. As the researchers note, half of smartphone users already report worrying they use their device too much, so the sample may be less unusual than it sounds.

Reducing your (phone) consumption: a few ideas

I’m not here to tell you to ‘ditch the smartphone’ as I cant even promise to do that myself (though, ‘dumb’ phones are certainly making a comeback!) For me, the benefits outweigh the costs (unfortunately….I say that about my chocolate habit too). That said, too much of a good thing will not only have diminishing returns, but end up being bad for your health. So the game becomes about is recovering intentional agency over when and how you engage with it. Protect the benefits, limit the costs.

START WITH OBSERVATION

Spend a few days noticing when you reach for the phone and what preceded it. Boredom? A lull in a conversation? A flicker of anxiety? A notification? The behaviour is usually doing something, managing a feeling or filling a gap. Understanding what it’s doing for you tends to be more useful than immediately trying to stop it. You can do this by tracking your use as well (e.g., screentime tracking) and discover that the results are shocking.

In a program I ran a few years ago, I asked participants to surrender their phones for one evening and collect them the next morning. Many noticed compulsive reaching and disproportionate anxiety when separated from their device, alongside a sense of relief and presence they had not anticipated. Trying an experiment like this can be a wake-up call.

LOCK IT AWAY

The Scientific Reports finding on mere presence is relevant: a phone on the desk competes unconsciously with your thinking whether you use it or not. Physical distance, a different room during focused work or out of the bedroom at night, is more reliable than self-control (this goes for chocolate too). Structural rules like keeping the phone away during meals or in bed, locking it away when focus is needed (e.g., in a Yondr pouch - my favourite, or Brick to temporarily block certain apps) or delaying the first check of the morning by storing your phone outside your room require no ongoing effort once established.

An extreme form of ‘locking it away’ could be a digital detox - week away. Increasingly, tech-dependent folks are paying for someone to ban their phone for a week. Cold turkey. This can help you break the habit and boost your well-being. But when you go home, if your environment remains the same, it’s easy to fall back into hold habit.

MAKE IT LESS FUN & EASY

Switch your phone display to greyscale — colour is a significant part of what makes apps visually rewarding, and a grey screen is a less compelling object to pick up. Move social media and news apps off your home screen, or delete them and access them only via a browser, which adds enough friction to interrupt the automatic reach-and-open sequence. Turn off all non-essential notifications. The phone’s design has been optimised for effortless access; reversing some of that optimisation tilts the odds back in your favour without requiring any willpower at all. None of these changes prevent deliberate use. They just make accidental use harder, by building in some friction, forcing you to be a bit more intentional.

More boring to look at:

TREAT EVENING USE AS A SEPARATE PROBLEM

Research consistently links compulsive or work-driven evening phone use to impaired psychological recovery. This is where cumulative depletion tends to accumulate. Cutting evening use is has higher returns than equivalent reductions at other times of day.

DISCOVER THE UNDERLYING NEED AND FILL IT (with something else)

If the phone has been functioning as emotional regulation, managing boredom, deferring discomfort, filling dead time, removing it without an alternative leaves the underlying need unaddressed. The PNAS study I mentioned above found that improvements in wellbeing were mediated by what people did instead: in-person socialising, exercise, time in nature, sleep. They sound simple but are surprisingly very effective.

IF THE PATTERN FEELS BEYOND ORDINARY, TAKE THAT SERIOUSLY

If you feel you have a true problem that’s having negative consequences for your life (see above), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with someone who specialises in behavioural addiction has a solid evidence base. The social normalisation of heavy phone use makes it easy to dismiss what might genuinely warrant professional support, the same dynamic that operates with other behavioural compulsions.

There you have it. With every article I try to close my knowing-doing gap. Here’s to the journey!

A few interesting sources

Meister, A. & Dael, N. (2024). Do you have a phone addiction? Harvard Business Review, February 12. hbr.org

Castelo, N., Kushlev, K., Ward, A.F., Esterman, M., & Reiner, P.B. (2025). Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being. PNAS Nexus, 4(2), pgaf017. doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017

Skowronek, J., Seifert, A., & Lindberg, S. (2023). The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance. Scientific Reports, 13, 9363. nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

I’ve had conversations about leadership with international executives for quite some time now. And there’s a moment that happens in almost every classroom that tells you everything about why leadership is so poorly understood, and why the topic can be so divisive.

I typically ask the room to name the world’s greatest leaders.

For a minute or two, the answers come easily. Gandhi. Mandela. Tubman. Churchill. Ardern. Lincoln. Thatcher. The room is comfortable, in general agreement.

Then a few other names are thrown into the mix: Trump. Musk. Thiel. Zuckerberg. Altman. Lula. Meloni.

At this point, the room heat up.

Some lean forward ready to prosecute the now “othered side”. Some lean back, arms crossed, defensive. What started as an academic exercise has become something that looks like the very thing we were supposed to be analyzing: people splitting into factions, attributing motives, talking past each other, getting louder.

What are we actually arguing about? The answer, almost always, is that we are not arguing about the same thing at all.

The Conflation Problem

The tension arises because we use the words “good” and “bad” leadership in completely different ways, without noticing.

One way considers the functional elements: did the leader accomplish the goal? Did the army win the war, did the company survive the crisis, did the movement change the law? This is relatively objective. Either the goals are achieved or they aren’t. Good, or bad.

The second way is the moral element: how was the goal achieved, and at what cost? This is where the argument (and the emotion) lives, and where good and bad get considerably more complex.

Philosophers have wrestled with what morality means for millennia without arriving at a clean consensus. Kant argued that moral behavior means treating people as ends in themselves, never merely as means. Fromm distinguished between authoritarian conscience — doing what you’re told, conforming, obeying — and humanistic conscience, an inner voice that grapples with whether your actions are making the world more or less human. Kohlberg mapped moral development from pure self-interest at one end to internalized universal principles at the other.

What these thinkers share: moral behavior implies an awareness (and care for) of the consequences of your actions on others and on the systems around you. The challenge is that there is no universally agreed upon standard for what those consequences should look like, or whose experience of them counts most.

Morality is socially constructed by groups, communities, and cultures over time. What one group experiences as moral leadership, another experiences as existential threat. What one generation considers an acceptable use of power, the next considers a crime. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein observed that the most primitive form of human psychology splits the world into purely good and purely bad objects. The heated classroom debate is, in part, exactly that split playing out in real time — each side certain that their moral reading is the correct one.

This does not mean consequences don’t matter. Of course they do. But when we argue about whether a leader is good or bad, we are almost always arguing from within our own moral framework, without acknowledging that the person across the table is arguing from within theirs.

The Moral-Effectiveness Framework

Cross these two axes and you get four ways we evaluate leadership. Each triggers different emotions and energy in followers. Crucially, where any given leader falls depends entirely on who is doing the judging.

Integral Leadership — perceived as morally aligned with the group’s values, and achieves the objective. Experienced as legitimate, trustworthy, competent. We admire these leaders. We authorize and follow them. They give us security and pride, and crucially, they leave our own moral agency intact.

Ineffectual Leadership — perceived as morally aligned, yet fails to achieve the objective. Their intentions are not in question, but they cannot deliver. We feel pity, disappointment, frustration, and a creeping guilt for doubting someone we still believe in. They eventually lose the group’s authorization.

Shadow Leadership — achieves the objective, but through methods experienced as misaligned with deeply held values. Their own morally-aligned base may experience them as Integral. Those outside that base experience them as Shadow, triggering moral outrage: how can objectives be achieved so brutally? For the in-group, the shadow leader offers something more intoxicating: permission to feel and act on emotions that social norms usually suppress.

Dark Leadership — methods experienced as misaligned even within their own group, and they fail to achieve the objective. Authorization collapses from all sides. What takes hold is not just anger but dread, diffuse and destabilizing, with nowhere to go. And beneath the dread, something quieter: shame. The shame of complicity, of having enabled something, of what the group has become. The group implodes.

This is why the classroom erupts. Trump can be squarely placed in Shadow by one half of the room, while is placed in Integral by the other; not because one side is right and the other wrong, but because they are evaluating moral alignment against entirely different value systems. Of course, both are ‘the right ones’.

The framework helps depict why the disagreement about leaders feels so intractable, and why tensions will never be settled by marshalling more facts.

What the Framework Reveals

The most important thing this framework does is reframe the question.

Instead of asking “is this a good or bad leader?” (a question that smuggles in your own moral framework as the universal standard) it asks two cleaner questions: did they achieve the objective, and for whom is their conduct morally aligned?

Those are questions you can discuss without the conversation collapsing into a values war. They separate what can be assessed with some objectivity from what is inherently perspectival, and they make the nature of moral judgement visible rather than hidden.

The framework also explains why followers of leaders that others find deeply troubling are not simply deluded or malicious. They are operating from a different moral framework, one in which their leader has high alignment. Understanding that is not the same as endorsing it. But it is the beginning of understanding how leadership actually works.

And this itself raises an important question: if moral alignment is always relative to the perceiving group, what happens when a leader’s methods produce consequences that fall on people outside that group — people who never authorized the leadership and whose experience of it is one of harm, degradation, and cruelty? While the framework does not resolve this, it helps to surface and name it and the emotions it engenders.

The Follower Problem

Followers are not passive recipients of leadership. Rather, they are active participants in its creation.

The systems psychodynamic tradition, drawing on the work of Wilfred Bion and the Tavistock group, argues that leaders do not simply impose themselves on groups. They are, in large part, unconsciously recruited by them.

Bion observed that groups manage existential anxiety by finding a leader who transforms vague dread into specific fear of a concrete other: an outgroup, an enemy, a scapegoat. Once that happens, followers can feel a sense of moral certainty. The inner conflict is externalized, given a form and a face. The leader provides relief. And the group’s moral framework hardens around that relief, becoming increasingly resistant to challenge from outside.

This implicates all of us. The shadow leader who redirects collective anxiety onto an outgroup did not manufacture that anxiety from nothing. It was already there, in the group, looking for somewhere to go. The dark leader who eventually loses all authorization did not do so alone. They were enabled, step by step, by followers who looked the other way, laughed nervously, or told themselves it wasn’t that bad….yet.

When we argue about whether a leader is good or bad, we are also, without usually realizing it, arguing about ourselves. About what we have authorized, and what we have allowed. The framework does not let followers off the hook.

The Classroom Argument

The reason the argument about Trump or Musk or any other contemporary leader never resolves is that the two sides are applying different moral frameworks and calling them both universal. Each side experiences the other’s leader as not just wrong but incomprehensible — which is precisely what happens when moral alignment breaks down at a societal level.

I wish I could teach ‘good leadership’ with a set of “dos and donts”. On the contrary - learning leadership is about identity, anxiety, and the deeply human need to have one's values reflected and affirmed in one's leaders. About shaping and representing the values (and containing the anxiety of) our followers. People do not evaluate leaders from a position of detached objectivity. They evaluate them from inside a moral framework that feels, from the inside, like simple “common sense”.

The framework does not tell you which moral framework is correct (though, I certainly have my thoughts on this!). What it does is make the structure of the disagreement visible, and in doing so, opens the possibility of a more honest conversation about what we are actually arguing about.

The classroom debate will continue. The names will change. But understanding why it erupts — and what it reveals about the relationship between leaders, followers, values, and power — is sometimes useful than taking sides.

In my research (with Nele Dael and Franciska Krings), we asked around 100 working people to describe, in their own words, what being overwhelmed feels like, and what works (or doesn’t) to help to navigate it.

We found that Overwhelm isn’t just “a lot of stress.” Many of us can deal with a lot of stress and not feel overwhelmed. The state of overwhelm is crossing a threshold: that point where the demands that surround you (e.g., emails, tasks, requests, errands, screaming child, loud and repetitive sounds) tip over your ability to cope. One participant described it precisely: “Being overwhelmed is the first degree of loss of control.”

What makes it hard to catch is that it hides. On the outside, many people look completely fine. They’re meeting deadlines, running meetings, holding it together. But inside? As one participant put it: “I was holding it together on the outside, yet inside, I felt like I was screaming.”

Living overwhelmed is being physiologically in a state of threat, or ‘survival-mode’. What our research showed that surprised us, is that overwhelm has a paradoxical physical signature. Your body is simultaneously exhausted and on high alert. You can’t sleep, but you can’t rest either. You feel urgency and paralysis at the same time.

‘Being overwhelmed comes on as a physical and mental panic. My breathing gets shallow and fast, I have all sorts of pent-up energy in my body driving the feeling of ‘I have to do something, right now’ while at the same time, my brain is unable to hold on to a single thought before flitting to the next.’

What overwhelm feels like

When we asked people to describe their experience, some patterns emerged that felt almost universal.

1. Your mind goes blank — but it’s also racing. One participant described it as having “too many tabs open” in their brain. Another said: “I don’t know where to begin.” Tasks that are normally automatic suddenly feel impossible. The flooding inbox keeps rising no matter how fast you respond.

2. Your body sends signals you might be ignoring. Muscle tension. A racing heart. Shallow breathing. A heaviness in the chest. More than just stress symptoms they can be your system telling you something has tipped.

3. You suppress it. Remarkably, most people said they hid their overwhelm almost completely. “I put on a brave face.” “I just shoved it down so I could get my work done.” The suppression is exhausting in itself, and it means the people around you usually have no idea. Wait long enough and eventually an eruption will come: whether that’s you screaming at a colleague (or your child), getting a migraine, kicking the printer, or binging on the free office muffins to escape.

4. You fantasise about escape. While you’re often unable to actually make a decision at the time - or sometimes - to even move, you fantasise about escape as it can irrationally feel like the only option available.

   “It very nearly got to the point of me cancelling the whole wedding as I didn’t feel it was worth the stress I was being caused. I needed out.

5. You - try to - work harder. When overwhelmed, most people’s instinct is to push through — work longer, move faster, try to power through the task list. But our findings showed this strategy is mostly unsustainable. The effort further depletes the very resources you need to recover, making the next tipping point come sooner.

   

What actually helps

The most effective coping strategy described was also the simplest, and the one people were most reluctant to use: reaching out.

Regulate your body: breathe. When you’re physically and emotionally overhwhelmed, first you must change your state. In this state your nervous system is on high alert, and your body is releasing what it think is a life saving cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline. In this state can stop breathing properly, reinforcing that your body is in threat. You must regulate your nervous system. One of the quickest ways to do this is through breath. Forcing in air deeply can help to regulate your state immediately. In this article with my colleague Susan Goldsworthy we offer some strategies. Breath work for better work (if you cannot access it, email me and I’ll send you a copy!). In a future post I’ll outline more nervous system regulation strategies.

Get help. Asking a colleague or your partner for help, finding someone who could simply take some of the weight in the moment — was a strategy that participants described as genuinely working. Unfortunately, for many high performers, asking for help is a huge part of the battle (and likewise, a contribution to the problem).

My husband helped enormously, we were like a tag team, one would rest when the other looked after the children.. as the days and weeks went on, and a good routine was in place, things settled and life became very joyful.

Find some control: start small. One big cause of overwhelm is the loss of a sense of control: everything is too much, at the same time, now. This can lead to mental paralysis. So once you’ve taken a second to breathe, start small with one thing. Just ONE small task that will move you forward: an email, a paragraph, a shelf in the closet, one bite, one step. Starting very small can help you feel micro-rewards and a sense of some accomplishment in a storm. It can also help get the ball rolling again.

Recovery strategies can help immensely - like resting or sleeping, journaling, seeking out nature, physical exercise, or meditation. Funnily enough, when overwhelmed, you don’t want engage in recovery as you’re typically (and irrationally) powering through. It’s called the recovery paradox. Our data showed that people who kept problem-solving (e.g., doing more tasks, faster) without pausing to recover first made things worse, not better. So have your go-to-routine when overwhelm strike. As you’ll irrationally not want to, make it something you do without question.

And perhaps most importantly: name it. Overwhelm thrives in silence. The moment you can say “I’m at capacity right now” — to yourself or to someone else — this can be a trigger to get help, or to step back, ground yourself and get some perspective.

If you recognise yourself in any of this: you’re not weak, you’re not failing, and you’re far from alone. In our sample, 89% of participants had experienced overwhelm in the past 30 days (!). This is the daily life of modern work for most people. Learning to live (and thrive) in the age of overwhelm is a critical life skill. A daily battle for me too!

This post draws on our peer-reviewed research Reaching Point Break: Understanding the Lived Experience of Being Overwhelmed published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology

And on the accompanying piece in Harvard Business Review: Do You Know If Your Team Is Overwhelmed?