I'm Sahar Andrade, MB.BCh, a Neuroleadership Coach and Forbes Coaches Council member.
Direct answer: yes, stress genuinely changes what your brain can access in the moment.
Under sustained pressure, cortisol reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for working memory and complex reasoning.
That's why capable, well-prepared leaders still go blank in the meetings that matter most.
It looks like a confidence problem. It is actually a stress hormone doing its job on the wrong timeline.
In this episode, I break down the mechanism and the fast, practiced way back to clear thinking.
We cover the twenty-minute cortisol curve, why high performers are hit hardest, and the specific rehearsal that shrinks a ten-minute fog down to ten seconds. Register for The Pressure Room, live Thursday, July 30, 11am Pacific: https://www.saharandrade.com/pressure-room
#AIForExecutives #ExecutiveLeadership #NeuroscienceLeadership #AIStrategy #Neuroleadership #AITransformation #LeadershipUnderPressure #HumancenteredAI #thepressureroom #steadybeforestrategy #HRleaderburnout #neuroleadershipcoach #nervoussystemregulationforleaders #CHROleadershipdevelopment #executiveburnout #humancenteredleadership #executivecoaching #AICAFEConversationspodcast #NeuroscienceLeadership #AIStrategy #AITransformation #RegulatedLeadership #Artificialintelligence #executivepresence #neuroscienceinleadership #Futureofwork #AIpodcast #AICaféConversations #AInotechrequired
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● Why can't I think clearly under stress?
● Does stress affect memory?
● What does cortisol do to the brain?
● Can leaders train themselves to think clearly under pressure?
● Why do smart people make bad decisions under pressure?
● Is brain fog under stress permanent?
---
AI Cafe Conversations: Neuroscience-based AI leadership for executives. Hosted by Sahar (The AI Whisperer) | New episodes Wed & Fri
🔗 Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saharandradespeaker/
📧 Work with me: sahar@saharconsulting.com
🌐 Website: https://www.saharconsulting.com/
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:12):
Why can't you think clearly the second it matters
most?
You walk into the room sharp,ten minutes in, some pushes back
on the number, and your mindgoes fuzzy.
Not because you didn't know thematerial, because of what stress
does to one very specific partof the brain, and it's probably
(00:36):
not the part you would guess.
My name is Sahar Andradi.
I am a physician by training,MBBCH, non-practitioner, and I
work as a new leadership coach.
This is AI Cafe ConversationsPodcast, where AI, neuroscience,
and leadership meet, where ourmain idea is leadership under
(01:03):
pressure, and always remembersteady before strategy.
Steady before strategy.
So before we go further, onething I say at the start of
every episode because itmatters.
Everything I share comes from myexperience and my opinion as a
coach.
It's not a diagnosis and it'snot a fact about you.
(01:26):
You decide what fits.
Today we're talking about aquestion I hear in almost every
debrief I run with executives.
Why can't I think clearly understress?
Not why am I anxious, not why Iam tired, but why does my actual
(01:46):
thinking get worse right when Ineed it most?
There is a mechanism behind thatit has an aim.
And once you know it, the fogstops feeling like a personal
failure and starts looking likebiology doing exactly what it
was built to do.
(02:06):
Just at the wrong time.
I want to be specific todaybecause vague neuroscience
content doesn't actually haveanyone in the room where it
counts.
So we're going deep on onemechanism, not five.
And I'm going to give you theactual physiology, not just the
metaphor.
What is the crisis?
So let's talk about what isactually happening.
(02:31):
When the brain perceives athreat, real or symbolic or
perceived, a boardroom challengecounts.
It releases cortisol.
Cortisol is a stress hormone.
In small, short bursts, itsharpens your focus.
That's useful.
That's ABC anatomy andphysiology.
(02:52):
It's not something that Iinvented or I'm diagnosing.
It's why you can suddenlyperform under a deadline.
But when cortisol stayselevated, when the stress
doesn't resolve in minutes butstretches across a meeting, a
quarter, a new organization, itstarts working against the exact
function a leader needs toboost.
(03:15):
Working memory.
Working memory is what lets youhold several pieces of
information in mind at once.
The number from the report, theobjection from the board member,
the three ways you mightrespond.
Cortisol and sustained highlevels measurably reduces
activity in the prefrontalcortex, the part of the brain
(03:37):
responsible for holding thisworking memory or those pieces
working together and reasoningthrough them.
This is not a confidence gap,it's a timing mismatch.
A stress hormone doing its jobon a threat timeline, not a
board rule timeline.
I had a call last month with aVP of sales, big account, bigger
(04:02):
stakes.
She told me she walked into therenewal meeting knowing the
numbers.
20 minutes in, the client askeda question she had answered a
dozen times in problem.
She said the same sentence backthree times, slightly
differently each time, and neverlanded on the actual answer.
(04:22):
She told me, I know that number.
I know it.
I know it.
It just wasn't there.
Repeating three times thequestion was trying to waste
time or gain time till her braincomes back online, but it did
not happen.
This is not a confidenceproblem.
That's a cortisol doing exactlywhat cortisol under sustained
(04:47):
pressure to do.
Prioritizing speed and vigilanceover precision and recall.
The brain was built for a threatyou run from, not a client you
negotiate with.
But it doesn't know thedifference.
It reacts the same way to both.
There is a specific number worthknowing here because it changes
(05:10):
how leaders think aboutrecovery.
Under acute stress, cortisoltypically picks within, let's
say, 20 minutes, and if nothingnew triggers it, starts
declining over the following 20to 30 minutes.
So the cycle is around an hour.
(05:31):
That's the natural curve.
The problem for most executiveschedules is that nothing ever
waits 30 minutes.
The next meeting starts in 10.
The follow-up email lands in 5.
So the curve never gets tocomplete.
It gets interrupted at the peakagain and again and again across
(05:53):
a single day.
Which is why the fog by 4 in theafternoon often feels heavier
than the fog at 9 in themorning.
It's not that the day getsharder, it's that the recovery
window keeps getting cut offbefore it finishes.
Here is what makes this worsefor executives specifically.
(06:13):
The higher you go, the more yourjob is tagged with stress.
Not one big threat and thenrecovery.
A meeting, then a message, thena hard conversation, then
another meeting, with no gaplong enough for cortisol to come
back down before the next spikestarts.
(06:34):
Recovery time is not a luxury.
It's the mechanism resettingitself.
Without it, you're not operatingfrom a calm baseline that
occasionally spikes.
You're operating from anelevated baseline that never
fully drops.
And every new stressor lands ontop of the last one instead of
(06:54):
starting a fresh one.
And this is the crisis, myfriend.
Not that you're bad underpressure, that your brain is
running a very old, veryeffective survival mechanism or
system on a modern schedule.
It was never built to survive.
(07:15):
I have seen the same pattern ina CFO who ran board decks for 15
years without missing a beat.
And then two years into acompany turnaround, started
stumbling on numbers.
He had built himself.
He told me the strange partwasn't forgetting the number.
It was that he could see italmost like it was one word away
(07:38):
and it would not arrive.
That specific description, thenumber being one word away, is
one of the most common things Ihear from executives once they
trust me enough to say it outloud.
Here is something worth namingdirectly because it changes how
(07:59):
you interpret what you see in aroom.
A leader can look completelycomposed on the outside, voice
steady, posture solid, and stillbe running significantly,
reduced across to working memoryon the inside.
Composure and cognitive accessare not the same system.
(08:22):
That's actually part of why thisgets missed for so long.
Executives are often excellentat managing the outward
performance of calm, which meansthe fog can run four months
before anyone, including theleader themselves, names what's
(08:43):
actually happening underneathit.
And here is the part almostnobody explains.
This is not rare, and it's not asign you are on the wrong seat
or in the wrong seat.
I have sat across from CFOs,hospital administrators, and
university deans who alldescribe the identical
(09:05):
experience in differentlanguages.
One calls it losing the thread.
One calls it going blank for 30seconds.
One just calls it a fog.
Some mechanism, differentvocabulary, same complaint.
I know this material inside out,and in the moment it matters
(09:25):
most, I can't access it.
There is a reason this hits highperformance hardest, and it's
almost cruel in its logic.
The more capable you are, themore you have been rewarded for
pushing through instead ofrecovering.
The more you push throughinstead of recovering, the
(09:47):
longer cortisol stays elevated.
The longer it stays elevated,the more the exact skill that
got you promoted, clear thinkingunder complexity starts to erode
in the moments you need it toshow up.
It's not that success causesthis, it's that the behaviors
(10:10):
that produce success oftenremove the one thing that
protects the brain from this.
This shows up identicallywhether the pressure is a whole
question, a live clientnegotiation, or a hard
conversation with a directreport.
The trigger changes, themechanism does not.
(10:34):
And this is multiplied by 100now that we have AI in our life.
Because we depend on it so muchthat even the training of our
brain and the cognitive part ofour brain don't get exercised
(10:58):
all the time like it used to be.
Because we depend on AI morethan anything else now.
And AI at the same time iscausing pressure because the
board is waiting for results tobe within 90 minutes when we
know the results are not gonnashow up in 90 minutes.
When people that our teams thatwork are already scared of AI,
(11:19):
is it gonna be my demise?
Is it gonna take my job?
And because they are in the samestress circle that you're in
right now and they don't get arecovery period, now it's all
over the place, it's all overthe organization.
And no one can remember anynumber, no one can remember any
fact, and it goes from bad toworse.
(11:40):
And it also is not limited tospeech.
The same mechanism shows up inwriting, just lower.
A leader drafting a hard emailunder sustained pressure will
often produce something longerand less clear than they would
on a calm day.
More hedges, more caveats, lessof the direct line that actually
(12:05):
defines their communication.
Colleagues read that ship aschange in confidence.
It is more accurately a changein what the brain can hold into
long enough to organize into aclean sentence.
Physically, it shows up small, apath that runs a beat too long.
(12:30):
Reaching for a word that wasthere five minutes ago, reading
the same line of an email twicebecause none of it is landing.
None of these are dramatic.
That's exactly why they getdismissed by the leader
experiencing them and byeveryone watching.
Nobody names it in the room.
(12:50):
It just gets absorbed as a badday until it happens enough
times that a leader startswhitely wondering why it keeps
happening.
So, what does this actuallycause beyond the bad 30 seconds
in the meeting?
First, the decision made from afog state tend to be worse
(13:14):
decisions.
Not because the leader is lesscapable, but because fewer
options are available to a brainrunning on threat priority
instead of on access.
And if you're using AI in thatmental state, whatever you enter
in AI is garbage in, garbageout.
(13:35):
Leaders in this state default towhatever felt safe the last
time, not necessarily whateveris right this time.
That's not a discipline problem.
That's a cortisol narrowing inthe field of options the brain
will even consider.
Second, teams notice not themechanism.
They don't know about cortisoland working memory.
(13:57):
They notice the pattern.
The leader who used to be sharpin these meetings now seems to
hesitate or overcorrect bytalking longer to cover the gap
or delegate the hard question tosomeone else in the room without
explaining why.
Teams read inconsistency asinstability, even when the
(14:20):
underlying cause is completelyexplainable.
Trust is built onpredictability.
A leader who is sometimes sharpand sometimes foggy with no
visible pattern to when reads asunpredictable, even when the
real pattern is entirely aboutrecovery time between stressors.
(14:41):
Predictability isn't a softskill on a performance review.
It's the input teams use,consciously or not, to decide
how much risk to bring to aleader directly instead of
managing around them.
Every time that calculation tipstowards routing around instead
(15:03):
of routing through, a leader'sactual influence in the
organization shrinks by exactlythat much.
Whether or not anyone ever saysso out loud.
I think of a marketing senior VPwho told me her team had started
quietly rewriting the agendabefore her Monday meetings,
(15:25):
moving anything generallydifficult to a written pre-read
instead of raising it live.
Nobody told her that's what washappening.
She found out by accident,months later, when a peer
mentioned it in passing.
Her team hasn't lost confidencein her judgment.
They had learned throughrepeated small moments and live,
(15:48):
difficult conversation with herlanded better in writing than in
the wrong.
That is not a team problem tosolve with a better meeting
agenda.
That's Portisol shaping apattern that had nothing to do
with anyone's actual judgment,hers or theirs.
Third, and this is the one thatcompounds quietest, the leader
(16:11):
starts avoiding situations thattriggered it.
Fewer live questions and answersessions, more written responses
where there is time to think,delegating the highest pressure
conversations instead of leadingthem.
On paper, that can look likegood delegation.
Often, it's avoidance dressed asstrategy.
(16:32):
And it slowly shrinks theleader's own range.
Right at the organization needsthe range the most.
(17:05):
Exactly the function Cortisolwas working against in that
room.
He caught it only because acolleague later asked him gently
why he had said yes to somethingthat didn't sound like him.
I think about the CEO turnovernumbers here.
2,221 CEOs left the roles in2024.
(17:30):
A record according toChallenger, Gray, and Christmas.
Wards are not patient anymore.
Perception forms in the room inreal time faster than a portal
of results can correct it.
If the moments that formperception are exactly the
moments cortisol has taken themost from a leader's cognitive
(17:51):
bandwidth.
And that's not a coincidenceworth ignoring.
That's the actual mechanismbehind a lot of leadership
failures that get blamed onstrategy.
When the real failure point was30 seconds of fog in the room
where it counted.
Multiply this across a weekinstead of a day, and the
(18:12):
pattern gets clearer.
A Monday spike that never fullyresolves becomes the baseline of
a Tuesday spike that lands ontop of by Thursday.
A leader is not recovering to acalm Monday morning baseline
between stressors.
They are recovering, if at all,to an already elevated Wednesday
(18:36):
baseline.
The fog by the end of the weekisn't a new problem.
It's the same unresolved problemcompounding.
There is an organizal cost too,and it's less visible than any
single bad meeting.
When a leader operates fromsustained elevated cortisol, the
(18:56):
team below them tends to mirrorthe state, not because of
anything mystical, but becausepeople take behavioral cues from
whoever is running room.
A leader who is short,distracted, or inconsistent
under pressure sets theemotional temperature for
(19:17):
everyone downstream.
Meetings get tighter.
People stop bringing hard newsearly because the room doesn't
feel like it can hold it.
By the time the leader hears thereal problem, it's later and
bigger than it needed to be.
And who knows if it's going tobe taken care of or can be taken
care of.
(19:37):
None of this shows up on aperformance review as a stress
or one problem.
It shows up as communicationissues, or this leader seems
checked out lately, or worse,nothing at all until the
resignation letter or the boldconversation nobody saw coming.
Here is the shift that actuallychanges this, and it's not what
(19:58):
most executives try first.
Most leaders, when they noticethe fog, try to think their way
out of it.
More prep, more notes,rehearsing the answer one more
time, that doesn't work.
Because the problem was neverinformation.
You already knew the number,like in my VP of sales story.
The problem is access.
(20:19):
Access is a state, not aknowledgeable gap.
What actually works is treatingrecovery as part of the job, not
a reward for finishing the job.
That means building in real gapsbetween high-stakes movement,
even five minutes, long enoughfor cortisol to start coming
back down before the next spikelands on top of it.
(20:43):
It means noticing the earlysignal, the path that runs long,
the word that is not there, andtreating it as data instead of
embarrassment.
The leaders who recover fastestare the ones who never spike.
Everyone spikes.
(21:03):
They are the ones who catch itearly and have a fast way back
to baseline instead of pushingthrough and stacking spike on
top of spike until the fogbecomes the whole afternoon.
This is the same territory as mybrain framework, building the
pattern of catching the statebefore it runs the room instead
(21:26):
of only making sense of itafterwards.
B is for behavior.
A is for awareness.
I want to be specific about whata fast way back actually looks
like because vague advice liketake a breath undersells what's
(21:46):
happening biologically.
A slow controlled exhaleactivates a shift in the nervous
system that works against thesame threat priority state
cortisol creates.
It's not a trick.
Physiological level and it'savailable in the same 30 seconds
where the five shoes out.
(22:07):
If a leader has practiced usingit before the high stakes
moment, not during it.
That's the part people skip.
Nobody tries a new tool for thefirst time in the world room.
The leaders who use this wellhave run it enough times in low
stakes moment that's alreadyautomatic by the time high
(22:29):
stakes once arrive.
That's rehearsal.
The same as knowing your numbercode, except this rehearsal is
for state, not content.
Noticing is trainable too.
Most leaders don't catch theearly signals because they are
never being taught what to lookfor.
(22:50):
It's really dramatic.
It's the extra half secondbefore a word arrives.
Or reaching for a familiarphrase instead of the specific
one the moment actuallypossible.
Once a leader knows those arethe tells, not something to hide
from, but a signal that therecovery window is open right
(23:13):
now, the whole pattern becomessomething to catch instead of
something to survive.
Let me give you the version ofthis that works because it's
just as concrete as the problem.
A hospital administrator Iworked with started using this
before every executive committeemeeting where she knew a hard
number was coming.
(23:34):
Now during the meeting, before,in the elevator, 30 seconds,
every single time, whether shefelt like needed it or not.
Six weeks in, she told me thestrangest part wasn't the fog
disappeared.
It hadn't.
It was that when it showed upnow.
(23:54):
It lasted 10 seconds instead of10 minutes.
She has built the recoverylevers so consistently in low
stakes moment where she was notin survival mode that her body
reached for it automatically thefirst time a real spike happened
in a real meeting.
(24:15):
Notice shift.
Anchor.
Remember the three steps.
That's the actual target, noteliminating the spike, but
shrinking the recovery windowfrom minutes to seconds through
repetition.
The same way any other skillgets built.
The mechanism doesn't carewhether you are rehearsing a
(24:35):
presentation or rehearsing aphysiological reset.
Repetition is repetition.
The only question is whether wehave chosen what gets rehearsed
or whether you're leaving it towhatever happens by accident
under pressure.
This works outside the boardroomtoo.
I have had leaders use the same30-second reset before a
(24:57):
difficult performanceconversation, before walking
into a room to deliver a layoffdecision, even before opening an
inbox, they held bad news.
The context changes.
The mechanism they are workingwith does not, anywhere the
brain needs a moment ofthreatening enough to spike
cortisol, the same recoverylevel applies.
(25:19):
And the same rule holdspracticed in advance in the low
stakes version, and it will notbe there when the high stakes
version arrives.
In a very short way, you taketwo inhales from your nose, like
(25:41):
and you exhale from your mouthtotally.
Why you do two?
So the intake will actually openup the little cells or anules on
into the lung so it can takemore air, so you can exhale more
of it.
Try it two or three times.
(26:01):
This is your 30 seconds.
This is as simple as that.
There is a single, there is asecond piece, and in surprises
most of the executives I workwith, the goal was never to
eliminate the stress response.
A leader with zero activation ina high stakes moment isn't calm.
They're checked out.
And a rule can tell thedifference immediately.
(26:24):
The goal is a fast return tothis line, not a flat line.
Steadiness is not the absence ofa spike, it's the speed of the
recovery after one.
Steady before strategy.
I have watched this shift happenin real time with leaders who
commit to practicing it.
(26:45):
It doesn't take months, it takesnoticing.
Notice shift anchor.
Early and often, and one smallphysical level used consistently
until it stops requiringconscious effort.
The fog doesn't disappear fromthe word.
Stress does not disappear fromthe job.
What changes is how long the foglasts when it shows up.
(27:09):
And that gap between a 30-seconddip and a stacked day-long haze
is often the entire differencebetween an either when he covers
in the room and one whose teamwatches them lose the threat in
front of the woman.
Now, I can hear some of youalready.
You might be thinking, thissounds soft.
(27:30):
I don't have time to manage mynervous system.
I have PL to run.
Here is the thing (27:34):
you are already managing it.
Every leader is.
The only question is whetheryou're managing it on purpose
with a fast practice way tobaseline or by accident, by
pushing through and hoping thefog clears before anyone
notices.
Pushing through doesn't make thecortisol draft faster.
(27:55):
It just delays when you dealwith it, usually until it's so
compounded across the three moremeetings and you're making real
decisions from a state that'sworked against you for six hours
straight.
The PL doesn't care why adecision was made from a fog
state instead of a clear one.
(28:16):
It only sees the decision.
So the choice isn't betweenmanaging your state and managing
your business.
It's between managing your stateon purpose in five minutes you
control or managing it byaccident in the middle of the
meeting when you can at leastafford it.
There is a second version ofthis pushback, I hear it just as
(28:37):
often.
I have made it so far withoutworrying about my cortisol
levels.
True.
That's true.
And worth taking seriouslyrather than dismissing.
But this far and the next fiveyears are different questions.
The behaviors that got a leaderpromoted, pushing through,
absorbing stress without visiblecracks, AI that wasn't here two
(29:00):
years ago, are frequently theexact behaviors that erod the
mechanism protecting clearthinking under pressure.
What worked to get you in theroom is not automatically what
keeps you sharp once you are init.
If any part of this landed, itis where I headpoint you.
(29:23):
Tomorrow, Thursday, July 30th at11 a.m.
Pacific, I'm running a free livesession called the Pressure
Room.
It's 45 minutes on Zoom, andit's the one place I teach a
full model live instead of justnaming it in a podcast.
Tomorrow's model is calledThermostat versus Thermometer.
And it's built for exactly this: the difference between a leader (29:42):
undefined
who reacts to the temperature inthe room and a leader who sits
in it.
We will go through the model infull and I will run the whole
one protocol live with everyonein the room.
So you leave with something youcan use in your very next high
stakes point.
(30:03):
Not just something you heardabout.
You will leave with the model'sname, the two-word handle, and
the live protocol in your ownbody, not just Windows.
It's free, it's recorded if youcan make it live, but the live
protocol is the part thatactually transfers.
So I had rather have you in theroom if your schedule allows.
(30:23):
And I'm inviting only and I'maccepting only like 10 people.
So sign up.
Register in the link below.
And if none of this lands foryou today, that's fine too.
Come back next week.
I'll be here.
Leadership does not fail.
Nervous system do.
Steady before strategy.
(30:48):
Learn with me the neuroscienceof pressure.
Till we meet again.
Show me some love, share, like,comment, subscribe to our
podcast.
You can email me at sohar atsoharconsulting.com.
I'd love to see you on the Zoomtomorrow for the pressure, uh,
the rule pressure or thepressure rule.
(31:09):
And I'm gonna have it every lastThursday of every week live on
Zoom.
You can register if you can makeit live.
I can send you the recording.
Till we meet on Friday, theshort Forbes article like
episode.
Peace out.
Why can't you think clearly the second it matters
most?
You walk into the room sharp,ten minutes in, some pushes back
on the number, and your mindgoes fuzzy.
Not because you didn't know thematerial, because of what stress
does to one very specific partof the brain, and it's probably
(00:36):
not the part you would guess.
My name is Sahar Andradi.
I am a physician by training,MBBCH, non-practitioner, and I
work as a new leadership coach.
This is AI Cafe ConversationsPodcast, where AI, neuroscience,
and leadership meet, where ourmain idea is leadership under
(01:03):
pressure, and always remembersteady before strategy.
Steady before strategy.
So before we go further, onething I say at the start of
every episode because itmatters.
Everything I share comes from myexperience and my opinion as a
coach.
It's not a diagnosis and it'snot a fact about you.
(01:26):
You decide what fits.
Today we're talking about aquestion I hear in almost every
debrief I run with executives.
Why can't I think clearly understress?
Not why am I anxious, not why Iam tired, but why does my actual
(01:46):
thinking get worse right when Ineed it most?
There is a mechanism behind thatit has an aim.
And once you know it, the fogstops feeling like a personal
failure and starts looking likebiology doing exactly what it
was built to do.
(02:06):
Just at the wrong time.
I want to be specific todaybecause vague neuroscience
content doesn't actually haveanyone in the room where it
counts.
So we're going deep on onemechanism, not five.
And I'm going to give you theactual physiology, not just the
metaphor.
What is the crisis?
So let's talk about what isactually happening.
(02:31):
When the brain perceives athreat, real or symbolic or
perceived, a boardroom challengecounts.
It releases cortisol.
Cortisol is a stress hormone.
In small, short bursts, itsharpens your focus.
That's useful.
That's ABC anatomy andphysiology.
(02:52):
It's not something that Iinvented or I'm diagnosing.
It's why you can suddenlyperform under a deadline.
But when cortisol stayselevated, when the stress
doesn't resolve in minutes butstretches across a meeting, a
quarter, a new organization, itstarts working against the exact
function a leader needs toboost.
(03:15):
Working memory.
Working memory is what lets youhold several pieces of
information in mind at once.
The number from the report, theobjection from the board member,
the three ways you mightrespond.
Cortisol and sustained highlevels measurably reduces
activity in the prefrontalcortex, the part of the brain
(03:37):
responsible for holding thisworking memory or those pieces
working together and reasoningthrough them.
This is not a confidence gap,it's a timing mismatch.
A stress hormone doing its jobon a threat timeline, not a
board rule timeline.
I had a call last month with aVP of sales, big account, bigger
(04:02):
stakes.
She told me she walked into therenewal meeting knowing the
numbers.
20 minutes in, the client askeda question she had answered a
dozen times in problem.
She said the same sentence backthree times, slightly
differently each time, and neverlanded on the actual answer.
(04:22):
She told me, I know that number.
I know it.
I know it.
It just wasn't there.
Repeating three times thequestion was trying to waste
time or gain time till her braincomes back online, but it did
not happen.
This is not a confidenceproblem.
That's a cortisol doing exactlywhat cortisol under sustained
(04:47):
pressure to do.
Prioritizing speed and vigilanceover precision and recall.
The brain was built for a threatyou run from, not a client you
negotiate with.
But it doesn't know thedifference.
It reacts the same way to both.
There is a specific number worthknowing here because it changes
(05:10):
how leaders think aboutrecovery.
Under acute stress, cortisoltypically picks within, let's
say, 20 minutes, and if nothingnew triggers it, starts
declining over the following 20to 30 minutes.
So the cycle is around an hour.
(05:31):
That's the natural curve.
The problem for most executiveschedules is that nothing ever
waits 30 minutes.
The next meeting starts in 10.
The follow-up email lands in 5.
So the curve never gets tocomplete.
It gets interrupted at the peakagain and again and again across
(05:53):
a single day.
Which is why the fog by 4 in theafternoon often feels heavier
than the fog at 9 in themorning.
It's not that the day getsharder, it's that the recovery
window keeps getting cut offbefore it finishes.
Here is what makes this worsefor executives specifically.
(06:13):
The higher you go, the more yourjob is tagged with stress.
Not one big threat and thenrecovery.
A meeting, then a message, thena hard conversation, then
another meeting, with no gaplong enough for cortisol to come
back down before the next spikestarts.
(06:34):
Recovery time is not a luxury.
It's the mechanism resettingitself.
Without it, you're not operatingfrom a calm baseline that
occasionally spikes.
You're operating from anelevated baseline that never
fully drops.
And every new stressor lands ontop of the last one instead of
(06:54):
starting a fresh one.
And this is the crisis, myfriend.
Not that you're bad underpressure, that your brain is
running a very old, veryeffective survival mechanism or
system on a modern schedule.
It was never built to survive.
(07:15):
I have seen the same pattern ina CFO who ran board decks for 15
years without missing a beat.
And then two years into acompany turnaround, started
stumbling on numbers.
He had built himself.
He told me the strange partwasn't forgetting the number.
It was that he could see italmost like it was one word away
(07:38):
and it would not arrive.
That specific description, thenumber being one word away, is
one of the most common things Ihear from executives once they
trust me enough to say it outloud.
Here is something worth namingdirectly because it changes how
(07:59):
you interpret what you see in aroom.
A leader can look completelycomposed on the outside, voice
steady, posture solid, and stillbe running significantly,
reduced across to working memoryon the inside.
Composure and cognitive accessare not the same system.
(08:22):
That's actually part of why thisgets missed for so long.
Executives are often excellentat managing the outward
performance of calm, which meansthe fog can run four months
before anyone, including theleader themselves, names what's
(08:43):
actually happening underneathit.
And here is the part almostnobody explains.
This is not rare, and it's not asign you are on the wrong seat
or in the wrong seat.
I have sat across from CFOs,hospital administrators, and
university deans who alldescribe the identical
(09:05):
experience in differentlanguages.
One calls it losing the thread.
One calls it going blank for 30seconds.
One just calls it a fog.
Some mechanism, differentvocabulary, same complaint.
I know this material inside out,and in the moment it matters
(09:25):
most, I can't access it.
There is a reason this hits highperformance hardest, and it's
almost cruel in its logic.
The more capable you are, themore you have been rewarded for
pushing through instead ofrecovering.
The more you push throughinstead of recovering, the
(09:47):
longer cortisol stays elevated.
The longer it stays elevated,the more the exact skill that
got you promoted, clear thinkingunder complexity starts to erode
in the moments you need it toshow up.
It's not that success causesthis, it's that the behaviors
(10:10):
that produce success oftenremove the one thing that
protects the brain from this.
This shows up identicallywhether the pressure is a whole
question, a live clientnegotiation, or a hard
conversation with a directreport.
The trigger changes, themechanism does not.
(10:34):
And this is multiplied by 100now that we have AI in our life.
Because we depend on it so muchthat even the training of our
brain and the cognitive part ofour brain don't get exercised
(10:58):
all the time like it used to be.
Because we depend on AI morethan anything else now.
And AI at the same time iscausing pressure because the
board is waiting for results tobe within 90 minutes when we
know the results are not gonnashow up in 90 minutes.
When people that our teams thatwork are already scared of AI,
(11:19):
is it gonna be my demise?
Is it gonna take my job?
And because they are in the samestress circle that you're in
right now and they don't get arecovery period, now it's all
over the place, it's all overthe organization.
And no one can remember anynumber, no one can remember any
fact, and it goes from bad toworse.
(11:40):
And it also is not limited tospeech.
The same mechanism shows up inwriting, just lower.
A leader drafting a hard emailunder sustained pressure will
often produce something longerand less clear than they would
on a calm day.
More hedges, more caveats, lessof the direct line that actually
(12:05):
defines their communication.
Colleagues read that ship aschange in confidence.
It is more accurately a changein what the brain can hold into
long enough to organize into aclean sentence.
Physically, it shows up small, apath that runs a beat too long.
(12:30):
Reaching for a word that wasthere five minutes ago, reading
the same line of an email twicebecause none of it is landing.
None of these are dramatic.
That's exactly why they getdismissed by the leader
experiencing them and byeveryone watching.
Nobody names it in the room.
(12:50):
It just gets absorbed as a badday until it happens enough
times that a leader startswhitely wondering why it keeps
happening.
So, what does this actuallycause beyond the bad 30 seconds
in the meeting?
First, the decision made from afog state tend to be worse
(13:14):
decisions.
Not because the leader is lesscapable, but because fewer
options are available to a brainrunning on threat priority
instead of on access.
And if you're using AI in thatmental state, whatever you enter
in AI is garbage in, garbageout.
(13:35):
Leaders in this state default towhatever felt safe the last
time, not necessarily whateveris right this time.
That's not a discipline problem.
That's a cortisol narrowing inthe field of options the brain
will even consider.
Second, teams notice not themechanism.
They don't know about cortisoland working memory.
(13:57):
They notice the pattern.
The leader who used to be sharpin these meetings now seems to
hesitate or overcorrect bytalking longer to cover the gap
or delegate the hard question tosomeone else in the room without
explaining why.
Teams read inconsistency asinstability, even when the
(14:20):
underlying cause is completelyexplainable.
Trust is built onpredictability.
A leader who is sometimes sharpand sometimes foggy with no
visible pattern to when reads asunpredictable, even when the
real pattern is entirely aboutrecovery time between stressors.
(14:41):
Predictability isn't a softskill on a performance review.
It's the input teams use,consciously or not, to decide
how much risk to bring to aleader directly instead of
managing around them.
Every time that calculation tipstowards routing around instead
(15:03):
of routing through, a leader'sactual influence in the
organization shrinks by exactlythat much.
Whether or not anyone ever saysso out loud.
I think of a marketing senior VPwho told me her team had started
quietly rewriting the agendabefore her Monday meetings,
(15:25):
moving anything generallydifficult to a written pre-read
instead of raising it live.
Nobody told her that's what washappening.
She found out by accident,months later, when a peer
mentioned it in passing.
Her team hasn't lost confidencein her judgment.
They had learned throughrepeated small moments and live,
(15:48):
difficult conversation with herlanded better in writing than in
the wrong.
That is not a team problem tosolve with a better meeting
agenda.
That's Portisol shaping apattern that had nothing to do
with anyone's actual judgment,hers or theirs.
Third, and this is the one thatcompounds quietest, the leader
(16:11):
starts avoiding situations thattriggered it.
Fewer live questions and answersessions, more written responses
where there is time to think,delegating the highest pressure
conversations instead of leadingthem.
On paper, that can look likegood delegation.
Often, it's avoidance dressed asstrategy.
(16:32):
And it slowly shrinks theleader's own range.
Right at the organization needsthe range the most.
(17:05):
Exactly the function Cortisolwas working against in that
room.
He caught it only because acolleague later asked him gently
why he had said yes to somethingthat didn't sound like him.
I think about the CEO turnovernumbers here.
2,221 CEOs left the roles in2024.
(17:30):
A record according toChallenger, Gray, and Christmas.
Wards are not patient anymore.
Perception forms in the room inreal time faster than a portal
of results can correct it.
If the moments that formperception are exactly the
moments cortisol has taken themost from a leader's cognitive
(17:51):
bandwidth.
And that's not a coincidenceworth ignoring.
That's the actual mechanismbehind a lot of leadership
failures that get blamed onstrategy.
When the real failure point was30 seconds of fog in the room
where it counted.
Multiply this across a weekinstead of a day, and the
(18:12):
pattern gets clearer.
A Monday spike that never fullyresolves becomes the baseline of
a Tuesday spike that lands ontop of by Thursday.
A leader is not recovering to acalm Monday morning baseline
between stressors.
They are recovering, if at all,to an already elevated Wednesday
(18:36):
baseline.
The fog by the end of the weekisn't a new problem.
It's the same unresolved problemcompounding.
There is an organizal cost too,and it's less visible than any
single bad meeting.
When a leader operates fromsustained elevated cortisol, the
(18:56):
team below them tends to mirrorthe state, not because of
anything mystical, but becausepeople take behavioral cues from
whoever is running room.
A leader who is short,distracted, or inconsistent
under pressure sets theemotional temperature for
(19:17):
everyone downstream.
Meetings get tighter.
People stop bringing hard newsearly because the room doesn't
feel like it can hold it.
By the time the leader hears thereal problem, it's later and
bigger than it needed to be.
And who knows if it's going tobe taken care of or can be taken
care of.
(19:37):
None of this shows up on aperformance review as a stress
or one problem.
It shows up as communicationissues, or this leader seems
checked out lately, or worse,nothing at all until the
resignation letter or the boldconversation nobody saw coming.
Here is the shift that actuallychanges this, and it's not what
(19:58):
most executives try first.
Most leaders, when they noticethe fog, try to think their way
out of it.
More prep, more notes,rehearsing the answer one more
time, that doesn't work.
Because the problem was neverinformation.
You already knew the number,like in my VP of sales story.
The problem is access.
(20:19):
Access is a state, not aknowledgeable gap.
What actually works is treatingrecovery as part of the job, not
a reward for finishing the job.
That means building in real gapsbetween high-stakes movement,
even five minutes, long enoughfor cortisol to start coming
back down before the next spikelands on top of it.
(20:43):
It means noticing the earlysignal, the path that runs long,
the word that is not there, andtreating it as data instead of
embarrassment.
The leaders who recover fastestare the ones who never spike.
Everyone spikes.
(21:03):
They are the ones who catch itearly and have a fast way back
to baseline instead of pushingthrough and stacking spike on
top of spike until the fogbecomes the whole afternoon.
This is the same territory as mybrain framework, building the
pattern of catching the statebefore it runs the room instead
(21:26):
of only making sense of itafterwards.
B is for behavior.
A is for awareness.
I want to be specific about whata fast way back actually looks
like because vague advice liketake a breath undersells what's
(21:46):
happening biologically.
A slow controlled exhaleactivates a shift in the nervous
system that works against thesame threat priority state
cortisol creates.
It's not a trick.
Physiological level and it'savailable in the same 30 seconds
where the five shoes out.
(22:07):
If a leader has practiced usingit before the high stakes
moment, not during it.
That's the part people skip.
Nobody tries a new tool for thefirst time in the world room.
The leaders who use this wellhave run it enough times in low
stakes moment that's alreadyautomatic by the time high
(22:29):
stakes once arrive.
That's rehearsal.
The same as knowing your numbercode, except this rehearsal is
for state, not content.
Noticing is trainable too.
Most leaders don't catch theearly signals because they are
never being taught what to lookfor.
(22:50):
It's really dramatic.
It's the extra half secondbefore a word arrives.
Or reaching for a familiarphrase instead of the specific
one the moment actuallypossible.
Once a leader knows those arethe tells, not something to hide
from, but a signal that therecovery window is open right
(23:13):
now, the whole pattern becomessomething to catch instead of
something to survive.
Let me give you the version ofthis that works because it's
just as concrete as the problem.
A hospital administrator Iworked with started using this
before every executive committeemeeting where she knew a hard
number was coming.
(23:34):
Now during the meeting, before,in the elevator, 30 seconds,
every single time, whether shefelt like needed it or not.
Six weeks in, she told me thestrangest part wasn't the fog
disappeared.
It hadn't.
It was that when it showed upnow.
(23:54):
It lasted 10 seconds instead of10 minutes.
She has built the recoverylevers so consistently in low
stakes moment where she was notin survival mode that her body
reached for it automatically thefirst time a real spike happened
in a real meeting.
(24:15):
Notice shift.
Anchor.
Remember the three steps.
That's the actual target, noteliminating the spike, but
shrinking the recovery windowfrom minutes to seconds through
repetition.
The same way any other skillgets built.
The mechanism doesn't carewhether you are rehearsing a
(24:35):
presentation or rehearsing aphysiological reset.
Repetition is repetition.
The only question is whether wehave chosen what gets rehearsed
or whether you're leaving it towhatever happens by accident
under pressure.
This works outside the boardroomtoo.
I have had leaders use the same30-second reset before a
(24:57):
difficult performanceconversation, before walking
into a room to deliver a layoffdecision, even before opening an
inbox, they held bad news.
The context changes.
The mechanism they are workingwith does not, anywhere the
brain needs a moment ofthreatening enough to spike
cortisol, the same recoverylevel applies.
(25:19):
And the same rule holdspracticed in advance in the low
stakes version, and it will notbe there when the high stakes
version arrives.
In a very short way, you taketwo inhales from your nose, like
(25:41):
and you exhale from your mouthtotally.
Why you do two?
So the intake will actually openup the little cells or anules on
into the lung so it can takemore air, so you can exhale more
of it.
Try it two or three times.
(26:01):
This is your 30 seconds.
This is as simple as that.
There is a single, there is asecond piece, and in surprises
most of the executives I workwith, the goal was never to
eliminate the stress response.
A leader with zero activation ina high stakes moment isn't calm.
They're checked out.
And a rule can tell thedifference immediately.
(26:24):
The goal is a fast return tothis line, not a flat line.
Steadiness is not the absence ofa spike, it's the speed of the
recovery after one.
Steady before strategy.
I have watched this shift happenin real time with leaders who
commit to practicing it.
(26:45):
It doesn't take months, it takesnoticing.
Notice shift anchor.
Early and often, and one smallphysical level used consistently
until it stops requiringconscious effort.
The fog doesn't disappear fromthe word.
Stress does not disappear fromthe job.
What changes is how long the foglasts when it shows up.
(27:09):
And that gap between a 30-seconddip and a stacked day-long haze
is often the entire differencebetween an either when he covers
in the room and one whose teamwatches them lose the threat in
front of the woman.
Now, I can hear some of youalready.
You might be thinking, thissounds soft.
(27:30):
I don't have time to manage mynervous system.
I have PL to run.
Here is the thing (27:34):
you are already managing it.
Every leader is.
The only question is whetheryou're managing it on purpose
with a fast practice way tobaseline or by accident, by
pushing through and hoping thefog clears before anyone
notices.
Pushing through doesn't make thecortisol draft faster.
(27:55):
It just delays when you dealwith it, usually until it's so
compounded across the three moremeetings and you're making real
decisions from a state that'sworked against you for six hours
straight.
The PL doesn't care why adecision was made from a fog
state instead of a clear one.
(28:16):
It only sees the decision.
So the choice isn't betweenmanaging your state and managing
your business.
It's between managing your stateon purpose in five minutes you
control or managing it byaccident in the middle of the
meeting when you can at leastafford it.
There is a second version ofthis pushback, I hear it just as
(28:37):
often.
I have made it so far withoutworrying about my cortisol
levels.
True.
That's true.
And worth taking seriouslyrather than dismissing.
But this far and the next fiveyears are different questions.
The behaviors that got a leaderpromoted, pushing through,
absorbing stress without visiblecracks, AI that wasn't here two
(29:00):
years ago, are frequently theexact behaviors that erod the
mechanism protecting clearthinking under pressure.
What worked to get you in theroom is not automatically what
keeps you sharp once you are init.
If any part of this landed, itis where I headpoint you.
(29:23):
Tomorrow, Thursday, July 30th at11 a.m.
Pacific, I'm running a free livesession called the Pressure
Room.
It's 45 minutes on Zoom, andit's the one place I teach a
full model live instead of justnaming it in a podcast.
Tomorrow's model is calledThermostat versus Thermometer.
And it's built for exactly this: the difference between a leader (29:42):
undefined
who reacts to the temperature inthe room and a leader who sits
in it.
We will go through the model infull and I will run the whole
one protocol live with everyonein the room.
So you leave with something youcan use in your very next high
stakes point.
(30:03):
Not just something you heardabout.
You will leave with the model'sname, the two-word handle, and
the live protocol in your ownbody, not just Windows.
It's free, it's recorded if youcan make it live, but the live
protocol is the part thatactually transfers.
So I had rather have you in theroom if your schedule allows.
(30:23):
And I'm inviting only and I'maccepting only like 10 people.
So sign up.
Register in the link below.
And if none of this lands foryou today, that's fine too.
Come back next week.
I'll be here.
Leadership does not fail.
Nervous system do.
Steady before strategy.
(30:48):
Learn with me the neuroscienceof pressure.
Till we meet again.
Show me some love, share, like,comment, subscribe to our
podcast.
You can email me at sohar atsoharconsulting.com.
I'd love to see you on the Zoomtomorrow for the pressure, uh,
the rule pressure or thepressure rule.
(31:09):
And I'm gonna have it every lastThursday of every week live on
Zoom.
You can register if you can makeit live.
I can send you the recording.
Till we meet on Friday, theshort Forbes article like
episode.
Peace out.
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