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A Deloitte study of global leaders found 82% have experienced exhaustion indicative of burnout and nearly every one of those leaders said their mental health had declined. Stress and burnout are ubiquitous among our most senior leaders.
This is not only affecting people’s home lives, it is almost certainly impacting performance at work. In fact, in one scientific study found that higher stress scores are associated significantly with lower productivity scores[1]. Not only that, but a correlation has been identified between workplace stress and CEO mortality. A Wharton finance professor looked at the impact of work-related stressors on CEOs and their lifespans. The paper, titled “CEO Stress, Aging and Death,” found that the average CEO’s lifespan increased by two years when anti-takeover laws insulated them from corporate raiders and decreased by 1.5 years when faced with an industry-wide downturn.
Evidently stress is not only impacting the lives of CEOs, but also their performance, the performance of their organisations and even their life expectancy.
This level of burnout is unacceptable. It is also something we can do something about … today.
As Dr Alan Watkins explored in his book, Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership, published 10 years ago this month, the stress hormone, cortisol, has been implicated in most of the common diseases we face today – heart disease, diabetes, depression and senile dementia included.
Dr Watkins goes on to explain that it’s not only our health that is impacted by stress and pressure. Under pressure most people don’t think straight. Most of us can remember a time when we feel stressed and our brain kind of shuts down – we experience a DIY lobotomy.
This reaction to pressure was once a life saver for human beings. In an emergency – facing a lion that’s about to attack us – you need the clever parts of your brain to shut down so we can ‘fight or flight’ or play dead. In the face of real danger, our brain goes binary to save our life.
The problem is today we need our brains to be smart and switched on. If we can’t think clearly, we can’t make good decisions and we make mistakes. And that can cost, big time.
The results of a DIY lobotomy on CEOs can be seen in poor decisions, delayed decisions, risk taking that may even be hidden, an inability to hear the views and opinions of others, poor relationships and unempathetic responses.
Creating coherence
Coherence is an answer to CEO stress. It stops our brains shutting down and it reduces the cortisol that can do so much damage to our health. So how do you create coherence?
BREATHE
Think of your body as an interconnected system, where functions like hormone regulation, digestion, temperature control, blood pressure, immunity, and heart rate work in harmony. This system can be influenced in remarkable ways by one simple, often overlooked process: breathing.
Breathing is something our bodies do subconsciously, which is why we rarely give it much thought. Yet, as part of this interconnected system, breathing has a direct impact on heart rate and, in turn, our heart rate variability (HRV). Try this now: breathe in for 5 seconds and out for 5 seconds, repeating five times. You might notice a sense of ease or feel your heart relaxing. This is because rhythmic breathing promotes a coherent HRV signal—a pattern we refer to as cardiac coherence.
Cardiac coherence is the state where your heart rhythm becomes smoother and more stable, helping create a synergy between body and mind. Higher levels of cardiac coherence often indicate a resilient heart and improved emotional and mental balance, helping you feel more in control.
In total, there are 12 aspects of breathing that influence coherence, with the first three—rhythmicity, smoothness, and focused attention—being foundational. For more on this, see Coherence by Alan Watkins (page 66), which includes practical exercises, or find guidance on the Complete app to start developing your cardiac coherence today.
Be more complete
Stress and burnout don’t have to be an inevitability of life at the top. It doesn’t ‘go with the territory’. You can be more complete as a leader if you develop coherence. It will not only help your personal wellbeing and your physical and emotional health, it will also enable you to make better decisions, be more innovative and a much more effective leader.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7889069/
