Dr. Amanda Helman

What incredible skills are not happening for you as a woman leader due to unknown brain and body dysregulation?

Shockingly, you can be highly successful and still be operating from a dysregulated brain.

But there are easy and practical ways to help shift this for you.

Research by Robert Sapolsky on stress and leadership performance shows that chronic stress impacts not only the body but also decision-making, emotional regulation, and social behavior.

In other words, chronic stress and its impact on emotional regulation affect how you lead.

A dysregulated brain reduces your ability to:

• Read situations accurately
• Respond instead of react
• Communicate with clarity and care

It increases:

• Emotional reactivity
• Cognitive rigidity
• Mental fatigue that compounds over time

This happens because prolonged stress affects the relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The brain becomes more reactive and less strategic.

Research also shows that leaders under high stress are more likely to default to short-term decisions, struggle with complex problem-solving, and experience decreased empathy.

This is not a character issue, but a neurological and neurophysiological issue.

As your emotions and body regulate, true, genuine capacity begins to emerge, and creativity, productivity, and capacity begin to increase. Things get done with greater ease and flow.

When your brain is regulated, you access higher-level thinking, lead with clarity and steadiness, and sustain performance without burnout.

Your leadership is not just about what you do; it is about how your brain is functioning while you are in action.

Here are three simple tips to begin regulating your brain and body:

1. Do a brain dump in the morning without worrying about whether it makes sense. What is bothering you? What’s on your mind? What are your to-dos?
2. Give yourself a brain break every 30–45 minutes with an easy task that distracts your brain from the complex task. For example: watch a funny video, listen to your favorite song, or walk for five minutes.
3. Begin the day by lightly touching each side of your face with the fingers of your left and right hands. Allow yourself to take a few deep breaths out and then in. Repeat at least three to five times before beginning a task.

Connect with me to explore how nervous system regulation can transform the way you lead, decide, and sustain performance over time.

The Small Things That Quietly Steal Your Focus

Have you ever needed to focus on an urgent project, proposal, budget, or management task, but something small diverted your attention?

Let me explain what happens with a quick example.

Imagine you accidentally eat something and, despite your best efforts, a little dot of food gets on your clothing. If you're out in public, you reach for a napkin and some water to try to get the stain out. If you're über-prepared, you have a stain-remover pen on hand.

Let's focus on the scenario where you don't.

What happens when something doesn't go as planned? Your brain starts circling back to the same thought: the stain. No matter how hard you try to look past it, use the good old "mindset matters" tips, or attempt to reframe the situation, the thought doesn't budge. In that moment, both your conscious and subconscious mind are involuntarily focused on that small stain.

Even if 15 to 60 thoughts occur, your brain is spending energy processing those mental scripts in nanoseconds.

This is what happens throughout the day whenever something unplanned occurs.

Every one of these small five- or ten-minute events draws on your brain's energy and can impact executive functioning.

Take 15 minutes today and write down the small things that happened—things that seemed minuscule. How did your attention divert in each moment?

Let's talk business. You can be the most task-focused person and still have these mental scripts affecting your efficiency, time management, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility.

What Needs to Happen to Stay on Track?

• Acknowledge the event, both in your brain and your body. In this scenario, acknowledge the stain.
• Identify the script. For example: "Oh no, what if people see it?" Let that script play out and complete.
• Brain-dump it. Write it down to help release it.
• Breathe. Take one deep breath out, followed by one deep breath in.
• Ask: What's the next step? This helps regulate the brain and body and close the loop. Otherwise, that stain can keep replaying its script, like a record stuck on repeat, until you acknowledge it, lift the needle, and press stop.

How Does This Impact Your Business?

• It frees up mental space, both consciously and unconsciously, before, during, and after events.
• Acknowledging the thoughts tied to a distraction, contrary to popular belief, can help your brain release them more quickly and restore executive function so you can return to the task at hand.

Notice how many "little things" pile up and quietly cost you efficiency, time, and creativity.

A Few Ways to Reclaim Brain Power

• Walk for a few minutes, especially after an event or when you feel nervous.
• Tap the left and right sides of the top of a table, alternating sides, to help release the stress of what just happened.
• Take a few deep breaths out.

When you attend to what happened and acknowledge it, you create an opportunity to restore the mental capacity you need for focus, creativity, and clear decision-making.

I have sat across from women leaders in university, education, and business boardrooms who command the room and still admit, in a lowered voice, that they have not felt rested in months. They lead teams, companies, and communities. Yet many of them carry a private truth they have not felt safe enough to say out loud: their brains are in survival mode—not because something is wrong with them, but because no one ever taught them how to recognize chronic cognitive overload or that there is a way out of it.

The Silence Beneath the Strength

Mental health conversations remain rare in most workplaces, and the silence runs deepest around the people expected to hold everything together. For women leaders, that expectation is doubled. They are expected to project composure while absorbing the emotional weight of their teams, their families, and their own ambitions, often without a single space where they can speak honestly about what is happening in their own minds and bodies.

This is not a personal failing. It is a communication gap. Around the world, workplaces still lack the basic capacity to recognize the signs of chronic cognitive overload in the people leading them. A widely cited global survey found that fewer than half of employers had proficient policies in place to support mental health. In many regions, the ratio of trained mental health professionals to the population also remains far below what is needed. When leaders themselves have never been given the language to describe what they are carrying, the silence simply moves up the chain.

What Genuine Capacity Requires

Restoring genuine capacity within a team starts with the leader at the front of the room. Women leaders who invest in meaningful training—whether through mental health literacy programs, trauma-informed leadership education, or professional coaching—gain far more than information. They gain the vocabulary to respond when someone discloses something serious, the judgment to know when a conversation requires a higher level of care, and the self-awareness to recognize cognitive overload in themselves before it becomes a crisis.

This kind of literacy changes what is possible in a workplace. A leader who can recognize the early signs of chronic cognitive overload, in herself or in someone on her team, can respond with a plan instead of a shrug. She can build policies that create space for conversations before they become emergencies rather than scrambling to react after a crisis has already occurred.

Healthy Communication Beyond the Workplace Walls

Addressing cognitive overload at the individual level is only part of the work. Women leaders who want lasting change also build bridges beyond their organizations by connecting with community resources, universities, and other organizations that share the same commitment. Regular conversations across these sectors—whether through monthly roundtables or informal peer networks—create the kind of collective intelligence that no single leader can build alone.

These conversations matter because the stigma surrounding mental health rarely disappears from within a single organization. It begins to fade when leaders across sectors agree, both publicly and through policy, that seeking help is a strength, not a liability—for women, for men, and for the next generation of leaders watching how this generation responds.

From Silence to Strength

The workplaces that will lead the next decade are the ones willing to start the conversation first. Women leaders are uniquely positioned to model this—not because they carry every burden perfectly, but because they have spent their careers proving that strength and honesty are not opposites.

Releasing cognitive overload, restoring genuine capacity, and redefining what leadership sounds like when it tells the truth—this is the work in front of us.

Sources

World Health Organization. Mental Health Atlas 2014. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2015.

Willis Towers Watson. 2019/2020 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey.