Executives spend years learning strategy, finance, and leadership, but a growing body of research suggests we should also learn how to regulate ourselves.
For most of my life, I lived almost entirely in my head. I analyzed, anticipated, solved problems, pushed through, and kept moving. Looking back, I am not even sure I took a breath for the first 45 years of my life.
My longtime friend Brett Casper knew me when I was that person. We met in New York City in the early 2000s, two ambitious young professionals who had arrived from somewhere else with something to prove. We worked hard, played hard, and burned the candle at both ends.
Even then, he challenged the way I thought
Even then, he challenged the way I thought about health and the connection between mind and body. Looking back, it’s no surprise that he is a certified facilitator focused on nervous-system regulation and embodiment.
More than two decades later, we recently found ourselves talking about breathing and what happens when high-performing people spend decades forgetting how to do it. In a recent conversation we had, he shared a dynamic I know well: High performers can become so accustomed to operating under stress that we mistake being activated for being effective.
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Consider when executives make consequential decisions: A major client leaves, revenue drops, a deal unravels, or a crisis erupts. We tend to equate strong leadership with the ability to respond quickly and decisively. But what if the first leadership skill is recognizing the physiological state you are in before you respond?
Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience has shown
Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience has shown that even relatively mild uncontrollable stress can rapidly impair functions of the prefrontal cortex, which is heavily involved in higher-order cognition. Recognizing the connection between health and wellness, the Global Wellness Summit named the rise of neurowellness one of its defining wellness trends for 2026.
Your body may know something before you do
There is a word I wish I had learned earlier: interoception. It is our ability to perceive signals coming from inside our bodies. One study measured how accurately financial traders could detect their own heartbeats. Heartbeat-detection accuracy predicted both relative profitability and how long the traders survived in the financial markets. That does not prove listening to your body will make you money. But it does suggest that what we casually call a gut feeling may contain useful physiological information.
For decades, I lived from the neck up. My brain analyzed, anticipated, and solved. Everything below my neck was something to override, not information to consider. Yet the gut and brain communicate bidirectionally through the gut-brain axis, while interoception continuously provides information about our internal physiological state. Now I wonder how much information I was ignoring.
High performance is not high activation
Business culture rewards people who override themselves
Business culture rewards people who override themselves. We are programmed to say yes, keep going, work later, answer faster, take the meeting, catch the flight, solve the problem, and handle the crisis.
When Brett and I talk about this culture, he describes nervous-system regulation as a way of interrupting that automatic response, creating enough space between stimulus and response to decide rather than simply react.
Breath is one way in. Research has associated breathing practices with brain activity, heart-rate variability, and autonomic regulation. That does not make breathwork an executive-performance miracle cure. In fact, something as simple as stopping to breathe can be remarkably difficult to turn into a consistent practice. I know that from years of trying, stopping, and starting again.
Brett is not the only person I have
Brett is not the only person I have watched arrive here. Another friend, Melissa Agnes, built her career in crisis management and high-stakes leadership. Today, her work has shifted to embodied leadership, guided breathwork, and nervous-system regulation. Through decades of leading in high-stakes leadership, she has learned that a regulated, grounded leader is better able to create trust and have influence when others are in uncertainty and fear.
As I began connecting the dots, the parallels became hard to ignore. Brett arrived through wellness and consciousness, Melissa arrived through crisis preparedness, and the Global Wellness Summit arrived through research into global wellness trends. These different paths arrived at a similar conclusion.
Maybe the interesting story is not that breathwork has become popular. Maybe it is why so many different roads suddenly seem to be leading toward the same idea.
The next optimization may be internal
As executives, we optimize our calendars, teams, technology,
As executives, we optimize our calendars, teams, technology, workouts, sleep, and productivity systems. Perhaps we have optimized almost everything except the person doing the optimizing. Brett met me in my twenties, when I was convinced that going harder was always the answer. More than 25 years later, we are still talking about performance. Today, we just define it differently.
What I’ve learned is to notice my breathing before a difficult conversation, notice what is happening in my body before firing off the email, and acknowledge whether I’m angry, frightened, or exhausted, while making a big decision. Then I breathe before I take the next step.
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