You Can't Outperform a Dysregulated Nervous System
In the last piece, I described mind and body as collaborators; here we go a layer deeper.
For most of my life, I have had a recurring dream. In the dream, I am somewhere unfamiliar, and something is wrong. The details change, but what happens next never does. I know I need to run, to escape whatever is closing in, but I just can’t. Know-how isn’t the problem. Movement is. My legs move slowly, like I’m running through water or honey. There simply isn’t enough force or momentum, no matter how hard I push. I try with everything I have, but I’m left with the sensation of falling farther behind.
Have you ever had a recurring dream like this? One that you felt certain was evidence that your unconscious mind was trying to convey something to your conscious mind? When I finally sat with it long enough, what surfaced was uncomfortably precise: I have the responsibility to deliver. I have the ability to act. But what I don’t have is the capacity to move.
Responsibility, Ability, & Capacity
That is the bind that so many highly capable people are living inside, and rarely say out loud. The effort we are demanding of ourselves has outrun what our physical system can supply. We assume that if we care enough, we should be able to perform when it matters most, but the nervous system has a different opinion. It cares about or rather is governed by sleep, recovery, grief, uncertainty, aging, cognitive load, and the emotional weight we are carrying. When those go unaccounted for, it revokes the capacity we were counting on.
We think of the brain as being machine-like. In some ways, the comparison is fair, but ultimately, the brain is not a machine; it is tissue, unexempt from the laws that govern every other physical system. It runs on glucose, requires sleep to consolidate memory and clear metabolic waste, and is profoundly sensitive to stress hormones, inflammation, what you eat, how often you move, and whether you have processed certain emotions. It ages. And it can be damaged.
But here’s the most important part: it also adapts. Yet most of us treat it as fixed infrastructure, assume it will keep working, push harder when performance drops, and wait for a crisis before taking maintenance seriously.
Remember, you are not responsible for the raw materials you started with: your biology, biochemistry, conditioning, and the ways your nervous system learned to survive. But you are responsible for learning the operating conditions of the biological system you live inside. Without that understanding, what we call discipline can become a sophisticated form of denial.
The State We Can't Escape
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that senior leaders describe to me. Sleep doesn’t fully resolve it and vacation doesn’t touch it. No amount of efficiency or optimization seems to fix it. They are often still operating at a high level, but the kind of thinking that used to come easily now takes more effort. Somewhere underneath it all, it feels like something is breaking apart.
What they are describing is linked to chronic activation and dysregulation. Like a system that has been switched on for so long it has forgotten how to switch off. Every decision, every context switch, every unresolved uncertainty, is also a biological event. Each one comes with a small surge of activation: cortisol, inflammatory markers, the body bracing for a threat. In a regulated system, the surge rises and then resolves, and the system returns to rest. Under chronic load, the surges never resolve. And they start to stack up.
Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called this “allostatic load,” the slow accumulating cost of a system that never fully stands down. The baseline creeps upward until activation is no longer the response to a threat. It becomes the resting state.
This is why the leader who is “just a little tired” and pushing through is often making worse decisions than they realize. They don’t lack discipline or intelligence, but the instrument they are relying on is stuck in a state of alarm, and alarm narrows everything, from your judgment and perspective to your capacity for discernment and deep thinking. This is the gap made visible: the mind still issuing the same demands, the system no longer able to meet them. You can’t strategize your way out, and you can’t think clearly inside a system that is convinced it needs to run.
The way through is to learn how to regulate. That looks like restoring the system’s ability to shift states, come down from activation, and return to rest. This is what elite athletes have understood for decades and the rest of us have been stubbornly slow to adopt: the capacity to recover isn’t separate from the capacity to perform. Regulation and recovery are where capacity comes from.
Regulation as a Kind of Performance Architecture
The word “recovery” can get softened into something optional like a massage or a long weekend. But what I mean is the daily, non-negotiable practice of returning the nervous system to baseline so it can do its job. It is less about refueling an empty tank than restoring a system that has forgotten how to return to rest.
1. Sleep.
Not as a luxury but as the single most important cognitive performance variable available to you, the one during which memory consolidates, emotional regulation restores, and the brain clears the metabolic waste of the day’s thinking.
2. Movement.
Not just as fitness but as what Emily and Amelia Nagoski call completing the stress cycle. Activation is a physical event, meant to be discharged through the body; when it never is, it has nowhere to go but inward. Movement metabolizes the stress hormones and signals to the system that the threat has passed and it is safe to come down.
3. Nutrition
Not as control, but as stability. The brain consumes roughly twenty percent of the body’s energy and is incredibly sensitive to what it runs on. Blood sugar that spikes and crashes is its own small form of dysregulation, the system lurching between states all day long.
4. Processing Emotional Residue
Not as therapy in the clinical sense, though that has its place, but the practice of letting activation resolve instead of accumulate. Unprocessed emotional residue doesn’t disappear. This is the heart of what Bessel van der Kolk means when he says the body keeps the score. It resurfaces through body and behavior as the mind keeps trying to manage what was never resolved. Often it’s as simple as giving the feeling a way out.
A few minutes of honest journaling can move something that’s been stuck, or saying it out loud to someone you trust. A little venting—the kind that discharges rather than dwells—is genuinely good for us. Breathe through it, or walk it off in nature. I’m not suggesting you wallow, but try to let the feeling move instead of stagnating in the background, draining your capacity.
You Can't Think Your Way Out of Having a Body
For years I treated my recurring dream as a message from my body to my brain, or from my brain to my body, as though those were two rooms with a door between them. But they were never separate. The brain isn’t some metaphorical control tower perched above the body, issuing orders. No, it is literal tissue that runs on the same glucose, floods with the same cortisol, and gets stuck in the same states as everything I was trying to rise above. There is no higher floor to escape to, because the brain is the body. It’s just the body at its most intricate.
That leaves the mind, one part of all this we still can’t fully explain. But whatever consciousness ultimately is, we seem to access it through our body. And a body stuck in alarm is a poor instrument for receiving anything clearly. In my dream, the legs that won’t move are my nervous system showing me the exact state it is in: activated, braced, unable to discharge. The dream was never asking me to try harder. It was asking a different question entirely: what if the problem was never your competence, but that you keep demanding more of an exhausted system?
Instead of seeing regulation and recovery as a wellness practice you fit in around the real work, start thinking of it as the ground the real work stands on. A dysregulated system cannot lead, make choices, or stay present, no matter how brilliant the mind inside may be.
