How to Shift the Curve on Leadership Stress

Stop trying to manage your stress; instead, shift your stress curve.

When we started exploring how pressure is impacting leaders, we came across a seeming paradox. On the one hand, levels of stress today are chronic, and we think they’re undermining the ability of leaders to make good decisions under fire. On the other hand, plenty of leaders tell us that stress can be energising and sharpens their thinking. What’s going on?

The answer was drawn on a napkin by the brilliant clinical psychologist, Dr. Mary Miller[1] –  and it’s called the Yerkes-Dodson Law: simply put, performance follows an inverted U-shape in relation to stress. Too little and you're unfocused, sluggish, under-engaged. Too much and cognitive function degrades, decisions narrow, creativity collapses. There's a sweet spot in between — an optimal zone of activation — where performance peaks.

In our stressed-out world, the conclusion that’s usually drawn from this curve is straightforward: that we need to reduce levels of stress in order to perform at our best. Breathe more. Sleep better. Meditate. Delegate.

All good advice – but quietly demoralising for anyone in a leadership role. Of course they’ve tried to reduce their stress levels! But in reality, the volume of pressure is not, in fact, going to come down.

But if there’s another way. What if, instead of trying to move back along the curve, we move the curve? What if the shape and position of your curve – where your peak sits, how wide your optimal zone is, how steeply you fall off at high arousal – are not innate properties of your nervous system? What if they are trainable capabilities?

There is growing evidence that this is the case. And the good news: this research is actionable for leaders.

1.  Stop Trying to Calm Down

A counterintuitive insight comes from Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks, whose research asked a simple question: when you're anxious before a high-stakes performance, is it better to try to calm down, or to tell yourself you're excited?

The answer was unambiguous. Participants who said "I am excited" aloud before giving a speech, performing a maths task, or singing karaoke performed measurably better than those who tried to suppress or reduce their anxiety – and better than a control group who said nothing at all.

Physiologically, anxiety and excitement are nearly identical: elevated heart rate, heightened cortisol, quickened breathing. The difference is cognitive framing. Trying to calm down asks your body to move from a high-arousal state to a low-arousal one – which rarely works. Reappraising anxiety as excitement keeps you in the high-arousal state but shifts it from threat to opportunity. You stay activated; the activation becomes useful.

Jeremy Jamieson at the University of Rochester extended this to higher-stakes contexts. In studies where participants were told before their GRE that elevated stress response was beneficial to performance, they scored higher — not just self-reported feeling better, but higher scores on the actual exam. The reframe changed the result.

The practical implication for leaders: during a high-stakes moment, a challenging conversation, or a crisis response, don't try to calm yourself down. Instead, notice the arousal and name it as readiness.

2. Build a Stress Inoculation Practice

Another way to shift the curve is exposure. The military has known for decades that the gap between training performance and operational performance closes dramatically when training conditions match operational stress levels. This is the basis of stress inoculation training: controlled, repeated exposure to stressors acclimatises the nervous system to high-arousal states.

This is known as Stress Inoculation Training (SIT), developed originally by Donald Meichenbaum and used in the military, aviation, emergency medicine, and elite sports. It results in the same level of physiological arousal becoming less cognitively disruptive; in other words, the curve shifts. 

This is related to a biological concept called hormesis – the idea that moderate stress exposure increases future resilience. Examples are intense exercise or fasting. Heat or cold exposure – a sauna, an ice plunge – can also help the organism to become optimized for higher-stress environments.

In reality, there are few things that can prepare you for the intense pressure of being the final decision-maker in truly high-stakes moments. But stress inoculation practices can help, alongside some tough leadership development coaching – red-team challenges, presenting to “hostile” audiences, difficult simulations and compressed timelines can familiarise the nervous system with performing under pressure. You don't become less stressed; you become less impaired by stress.

3. Train Recovery, Not Just Resilience

In today’s atmosphere of permacrisis, recovery matters more than ever. As one leader in our research told us, “Leadership is an endurance sport… you’re expected to run sprint after sprint after sprint, and there’s no space for the recovery.”

Increasingly, the leaders who will sustain high performance over time aren't necessarily better at withstanding stress in the moment, but at recovering faster between peaks.

Once again there’s a biological basis here. This time it’s heart rate variability (HRV) – the variation in time between heartbeats, which reflects the nervous system's ability to shift between activation and recovery. High HRV is consistently associated with better executive function under pressure, greater cognitive flexibility, and faster return to baseline after stressors. Research by Rollin McCraty at the HeartMath Institute, as well as broader work on vagal tone and prefrontal regulation, points to HRV as a trainable marker of stress resilience.

There’s a practical nervous system intervention here: a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth. This is the fastest known way to downregulate the autonomic nervous system acutely. Andrew Huberman's lab at Stanford has published on how this shifts the balance from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation within one or two breath cycles.

But the bigger lever is structural. Chronic moderate stress — the ambient, always-on, low-grade pressure of modern leadership — is more damaging to your performance ceiling than acute high stress with genuine recovery. It keeps cortisol elevated persistently, which narrows the optimal zone over time. The leaders who protect deep recovery periods — real disconnection, not passive scrolling — aren't being indulgent. They're preserving the width of their curve.

4. Check Your Stress Mindset

Stanford psychologist Alia Crum has published research showing that your beliefs about stress itself — whether you see it as inherently debilitating or potentially enhancing — predict measurable physiological outcomes including cortisol recovery curves and performance on cognitive tasks. People who hold a "stress-is-enhancing" mindset don't just feel better; they recover faster and perform better under load. The belief changes the biology.

Conversely, if you walk into a high-pressure situation afraid that your stress may overwhelm you, then you'll spend cognitive resources monitoring yourself rather than doing the task. And so the anxiety becomes self-confirming. Crum's insight is that this loop runs the other direction just as reliably: treat the activation as readiness, and you free up cognitive bandwidth. So the shape of the curve is partly a product of the story you tell about stress.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Leaders’ response to stress is not a fixed property of their nervous system. It can be shaped by their stress intelligence: training, beliefs, recovery habits, and the cognitive framing they bring to high-pressure moments. That's not a fixed personality trait. It's a practice.

[1] Disclosure: Dr. Mary Miller, Clinical Psychologist and author of Fierce Compassion, is Jon’s sister.