You Can’t Build a Regenerative Business from a Dysregulated Body
I didn’t recognize myself in the video.
It was Easter morning, and we were in the living room—my two boys running around on a plastic egg hunt, squealing with delight. My husband had pulled up an old video, and I'd leaned in, expecting a little nostalgia.
But instead… I felt a quiet kind of panic.
There I was on screen—following my boys around as they hunted, in a navy and white striped full skirted dress, remarkably put together for 7 a.m. A curated holiday moment, complete with baskets and bunny ears and whatever magic I’d pulled together the night before.
But watching it back? It felt like watching someone else’s life.
I had no memory of it. None.
I turned to my husband and said, “I don’t remember this at all.”
Not in a “wow, time flies” kind of way. In a “who is that woman?” kind of way.
That was one year after my second son was born. I wasn’t in the fog of new motherhood. I was just… gone.
Still functioning. Still achieving. Still performing like everything was fine.
I looked competent. Credible. Composed.
That spring, I was having panic attacks nearly every day. I’d google heart attack symptoms and lay on the floor while my husband handed me a different supplement every morning, hoping something—anything—would help.
And the whole time, I kept performing capacity I didn’t actually have.
I didn’t know it then, but my nervous system had already tapped out. The only thing keeping me going was muscle memory and obligation.
We tell ourselves we’re managing. That we’re fine. That it’s just a season.
But the truth is: high-functioning burnout doesn’t look like collapse. It looks like competence. It looks like striped dresses and curated holidays and a leader who still delivers.
But inside? You’re gone.
And the worst part is—this version of leadership works. It gets praised, promoted, funded, and followed.
So we keep going. Until something cracks.
And something did crack.
Not all at once. Not in a dramatic collapse. But in a series of quiet withdrawals: From friendships. From my own body. From the parts of my life I used to be able to feel.
And it didn’t feel like a breakdown. It felt like responsibility. Like leadership. Like doing what had to be done.
High-achievers are trained to do hard things: stay calm in crisis, tighten up when it unravels, hold everyone and everything together—never admitting the weight. We get praised for it, told we’re “different from everyone else.” That compliment quietly implies our differentness is the price of success.
So we keep marching.
We’re not taught how to be in our bodies and in our power at the same time.
But the body remembers what we try to forget.
The panic attacks weren’t a flaw in my system. They were my system trying to speak out against the system I was operating in. That I wasn’t okay. That speed had become my identity. That exhaustion had become my worth. And that none of what I was working on felt as important as the way the world was falling down all around me.
Business-as-usual stopped making sense, but I kept white-knuckling forward while the bigger machine clawed at whatever scraps of power it could still grip—every system trying to outrun its own collapse, all of us waking up to the obvious: this isn’t working.
Even as I type, Los Angeles is still reeling from ICE’s pre-dawn raid on 16 June 2025—plain-clothes agents dragging dozens of immigrants, and even one U.S. citizen, into unmarked vans. The L.A. City Council is calling it “an unconstitutional dragnet,” but the damage is done. Across the globe, Israel ↔ Iran tensions keep spiraling—missile strikes, evacuation orders in Tehran, and a Gaza death toll that’s now past 55,000 Palestinian lives—many of which are women and children.
The world’s balancing on a knife-edge, yet we’re expected to clock 40-plus hours (minimum), create “magical memories,” sweep the crumbs, and pretend the leaders playing Monopoly-meets-Battleship with our tax dollars are somehow looking out for us. Absolutely not.
My body figured it out before my mind could: success that demands constant self-abandonment is no success at all—and it refused to perform that charade any longer. My mind simply needed to catch up to the party my body was throwing… in the form of panic attacks and dissociation.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear: this isn’t a pep talk about boundaries or better habits. It’s about what happens when your nervous system becomes the cost of staying credible. It’s about the toll of building a business—or a life—around performance instead of presence. And what it means to stop, wake up to what really matters to each of us, and make a change.
This is what high-functioning burnout looks like. Not chaos. Not collapse. But polished, practiced, quiet disappearance.
I’ll say it again for the folks in the back of the room: It’s not just a personal crisis. It’s a cultural one. A systems one.
Because under capitalism, our worth gets measured in output. And for leaders—especially women, femmes, and folks with historically undervalued identities—there’s no room to fall apart. No permission to say: I’m not okay.
We just keep going. Until something breaks.
What’s really driving our burnout isn’t just workload. It’s social conditioning and the systems that require performance of that conditioning.
We are taught—especially as high-achieving women, femmes, and folks socialized to over-function—that to be a good leader, we must be the most regulated person in the room. That we must manage everyone else’s emotions before tending to our own. That our bodies are either irrelevant—or in the way.
But, and I think logically we all know this: chronic disconnection isn’t leadership. It’s survival. And nervous system survival modes—fight, flight, fawn, freeze, flop—don’t just show up in trauma responses. They show up in how we perform professionalism. They show up in how we tolerate misalignment. They show up in the way we smile through egg hunts we can’t even feel.
We don’t think we’re chronically disconnected when this is happening; we think we’re doing what’s necessary. We think we’re just tired. But we’re actually trained to abandon ourselves in the name of being useful.
You can’t build a regenerative business from a dysregulated body.
And yet that’s what so many of us are trying to do. We’re trying to create conscious companies while overriding our own signals. We’re trying to build cultures of care without knowing what care feels like in our own bodies.
This isn’t a personal failure. This is a structural pattern. One that rewards urgency, worships overwork, and punishes presence.
It’s why we praise the founder who powers through—and question the one who pauses. It’s also why so many of us feel like we’re disappearing. Because we were never taught how to lead without self-abandonment.
And the truth is: none of us are doing this in isolation.
We are operating inside systems—be it companies, cultures, or ecosystems—that benefit from those who "hold it all."
A system that praises resilience but never questions the load. That rewards reliability but never resources regulation. That celebrates capacity—but only the kind that doesn’t have needs.
Urgency is baked into the bones. There is always another client to wow. Another launch to pull off. Another fire to put out.
And because we can do it, we keep doing it. Because the system sure as heck isn't going to stop us.
It needs us to keep going.
Until we can't.
And when you finally started naming what you need—the system may push back harder. Because you're asking for reciprocal accountability. For shared responsibility. For a culture that doesn't just say “people over profit”—but actually knows how to live that.
Burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a structural response to systems that only work when someone disappears inside them.
The data backs this up.
53% of women leaders report being burned out, compared to 41% of men at the same level (Lean In, 2023). 46% of women leaders say they’ve been expected to work more or be available more than men in the same role (Lean In, 2023). And only 38% of employees say their company has systems in place to help prevent burnout (Aflac, 2023).
But what if leadership didn’t mean holding it all?
What if we stopped seeing regulation as a reward—and started treating it as a right? What if we stopped collapsing wellness into self-optimization—and reclaimed it as self-remembrance? What if we stopped asking, “How do I keep going?” And started asking, “What would it feel like to come home to myself?”
Not as a weekend treat. But as the foundation of how we lead.
That’s exactly what I asked Tamu Thomas in Episode 5 of COO-fessions: Hustle Won't Save You: Redefining Success from the Nervous System Out.
Tamu is a somatic coach, social worker, and founder of Live Three Sixty. She works with high-achieving women who are done with urgency—and ready to reconnect to themselves in leadership.
In this episode, we explore:
Why nervous system regulation isn’t a luxury—it’s a leadership imperative
How urgency culture disguises itself as excellence
What it actually takes to build a business from wholeness—not just hustle
If you’ve ever looked at a photo or video of yourself and thought, I was there, but I wasn’t there—this one’s for you.
Come listen. Then share this with a leader who holds everything together but can’t feel their own heartbeat.
xo,
Brittany
