I had a conversation last week that I can't stop thinking about.
A client of mine, a regional sales director for a pharmaceutical company, sat across from me and said, "I thrive under pressure. Always have. It's what makes me good at what I do."
I've heard some version of this from almost every high performer I've worked with. And for a long time, I believed it too. Some people just handle stress better, right? Some people are built for it.
Except here's the thing. This particular client hadn't taken a day off in seven months. He was averaging five hours of sleep. His wife had told him the week before that she felt like she was living with a stranger. And when I asked him how he was doing, really doing, he paused for about ten seconds and said, "I honestly don't know."
That pause told me more than anything else he said that day.
We have this story we tell ourselves about stress. It goes something like: stress is fuel. The best people run on it. If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. And there's a grain of truth in there. Short bursts of stress can sharpen focus and boost performance. That's real. The science supports it. Your body releases adrenaline, your senses heighten, you perform.
But that's acute stress. A presentation. A deadline. A tough negotiation. Your body spikes, you perform, and then you come back down.
What I keep seeing in my practice is something completely different. It's not a spike. It's a flatline at high altitude. The stress never stops. There's no "coming back down." The body just stays up there, running hot, burning through resources it was never designed to burn through continuously.
And the lie is that this feels normal after a while.
I've been reading about something called allostatic load. It's a concept from neuroscience that describes the cumulative wear and tear on the body from chronic stress. Think of it like this: your car is designed to hit high RPMs when you need to pass someone on the highway. But if you drove everywhere at redline, your engine would burn out in a matter of weeks. That's what chronic stress does to the human body. You're redlining, all day, every day, and calling it "thriving."
The tricky part is that high performers are really, really good at masking this. They've built their entire identity around being the person who can handle it. Admitting that the stress is getting to them feels like admitting weakness. And in most corporate cultures, weakness is career suicide.
So they push. And they tell themselves the story. "I thrive under pressure."
I don't have a neat solution for this yet. I'm still early in understanding how deep this goes. But I wanted to write about it because I think the first step is just being honest about what's happening. If you're someone who "thrives under pressure," I'd ask you one question.
When was the last time you felt genuinely relaxed? Not on vacation. Not after a glass of wine. I mean truly, deeply at ease in your own body.
If you can't remember, that's worth paying attention to.