My work in the past often had me sitting in rooms where two or more people were furious with each other. It might have been related to an accident causing harm, a grievance, an error that should never happen, or something much more or less significant. My job, in part, was to hold the room together and keep us on a trajectory toward repair. A steady voice, clear head, factual focus, maintaining equilibrium. While colleagues seemed to find me good at it, I learned that being good at something can feel like a trap, particularly when doing so quietly costs you the most.

On my walk home in the evenings, I found myself re-hashing the scenarios, dialogues and arguments over and over, trying to solve what might have been impossible and in some cases trying to improve how I’d handled part of it. Long after the meeting, I was still in the board room or at the ops site.

If this is sounding somewhat familiar you’ll know that being the one holding a room or a team or a company together has a cost, and sometimes it’s physical.

The actual cost

If you work in a high-stakes environment, whether advising on strategy, carrying a P&L, being the sounding board or the fixer when something goes wrong, you may be feeling this come alive in your system as you’re reading. Agendas that take twice as long because two Directors won’t look at each other. Emails at midnight. Putting out fires literally and figuratively. Doing it all calmly because that’s the job.

The toll it takes is something we tend to keep to ourselves, if acknowledged at all. It’s easier to keep on pushing, ignoring the agitation you’ve grown accustomed to. In my case, I only acknowledged it when I literally wanted to pull out my own hair, when I found myself looking for a way I could feign a sickness or an injury in order to never go back. Could I stab myself in the leg?  It sounds melodramatic, but that was an actual thought I had.

The strain goes unnoticed because from the outside, it doesn’t look like a problem. It looks like competence because we get that good at hiding it, ‘sucking it up’ and ‘getting it done’ at all costs. (Not to mention the badge of honour that sometimes rides shotgun with being flat-out busy and stressed to the Nth degree.)

It’s not personality

I now know how a human being can cope for so long without breaking.  

Your nervous system does what evolution built it to do: ensure survival. (Again, that may sound melodramatic but it’s right there in your physiology.)

Arguably, the requirement to stay alert and ready for the next thing is more prevalent now in the corporate world than it ever was when we had to hunt for our dinner. The indicator is the high levels of cortisol running through the average person’s body. When we hunted for our dinner, cortisol spiked during the hunt, then went down to normal levels. These days, it’s at spike levels more often and more consistently than not.

Physiologists and nervous system science call the overall effect ‘allostatic load’. It’s the accumulated weight of carrying a constant (even if thought to be ‘low-grade’) stress response for longer than the system was designed for.

It has absolutely nothing to do with learning how to delegate, lead change, manage performance or your capability toward any metric.

It’s an adaptive physiological pattern that got you through challenges in the past so frequently, it stayed put and now feels normal. You might not even notice you’re holding your breath, barely breathing, how often your heart races, the impact on your digestive system.  

To make matters worse, your physician might have other explanations for all of that. Diagnoses, pills, better time management, leadership training or any other tactic cannot reach the part of you that’s bracing for the next fire, because that part is buried beneath what it looks like on the surface. 

It’s busy trying to keep you safe; reacting in the same way that has worked in the past.

What somatic work does instead

In my work, I see this pattern most often in people who are highly capable — the ones everyone else leans on. Highly capable and yet, still human. Still with the same physiology that evolved to help us survive. In modern terms, that means surviving in the board room, getting $h*t done no matter what.

In somatic work, we’re less interested in replaying the negotiation or the incident and more interested in what the body is still holding from it. Slowly, and at a pace your nervous system can actually tolerate, the constant readiness gets a chance to settle.

You don’t have to stop being the one who gets it done in order to also set down some of what you’re holding.

If this is sounding familiar and you’re curious, get in touch. No pressure, just a conversation between two people who know what this is.