Breaking the Control Cycle – Why High Performers Burn Out Trying to Stay in Control
- Brainz Magazine
- Jan 21
- 9 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Written by Kate Adey, Business Founder
Kate Adey is described as wise, insightful, and pragmatic, creating immediate safety for transformation. A mother of three with a Master's in Leadership, she's the author of The Other Way, which distils 20 years working with professional women through transitions and leaders creating cultures where excellence and wholeness aren't in opposition.
Working 70-hour weeks. Checking emails at 11 pm. Always available, never switching off. High performers often adopt these behaviours to maintain control and achieve peak results. Yet, what if these very actions are not proof of control, but clear signs that control has slipped away? The relentless push is depleting your body, straining relationships, and reducing your effectiveness. This article argues that real high performance comes not from overexertion, but from working with your natural rhythms. You will learn why the control cycle traps high achievers, what research really shows about exhaustion and performance, and how to trade depletion for sustainable success.
What is the control paradox?
Many high-performing leaders believe that working longer, being constantly available, and ignoring personal well being deliver better results. Their reasoning is that having more control should lead to more achievement. However, this pursuit of control backfires, creating what is known as the control paradox, where more control leads to less real effectiveness.
But here is the uncomfortable truth. These behaviours are not evidence of control, they signal its absence. Losing control can hide behind the appearance of relentless effort.
While working 70+ hour weeks, your sleep quality deteriorates. When you are always available, your relationships become strained. When you never switch off, physical tension and health symptoms emerge. When you neglect your personal needs, your team experiences higher burnout rates. This is the control paradox. The belief that “it’s all up to me” creates the very depletion and breakdown you are trying to prevent.
When pressure mounts, you tighten control and sacrifice rest and well being. It works briefly, until your body forces a stop through illness or exhaustion. Then the cycle repeats.
What the research reveals about exhaustion’s impact
The data tells a clear story about what happens when we ignore our body’s signals and push through depletion.
Stanford research shows 70-hour workweeks yield no more output than 55 focused hours. Productivity drops after 55 hours, and extra effort adds no value while draining your energy.
Sleep deprivation results in a 20% drop in decision-making accuracy. Think about that. One-fifth of your decision-making capacity is lost when you do not get proper rest. For leaders making critical choices that affect teams, budgets, and strategy, this is not a minor inconvenience, it is a fundamental impairment.
Teams led by “always on” leaders burn out 35% more. Constant availability creates a culture of overwork and pressure, harming both performance and well being.
This is not about working less. Now is the time to take stock of your own cycles. Notice when you are pushing against your natural energy and commit to making one small adjustment this week. Sustainable performance starts with tuning in to your body’s messages.
Why January is the worst time to demand growth
Every January, the pressure arrives. Set goals now. Reinvent yourself. Launch that new product. Rebrand your company. New year, new you.
But here is what is happening. Your body is in Winter. Biologically, seasonally, energetically, you are in a period designed for rest, composting, and clarity. Not forced harvest.
We have built our working lives around the Gregorian calendar, a linear, solar, transactional system created in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. It was designed for production, not regeneration. It made time measurable and monetizable, turning humans into what historian E.P. Thompson called “time discipline machines.”
Before this linear approach to time, humans lived by natural, circular rhythms connected to moon cycles and growing seasons. Four distinct phases, light and dark, fallow and bloom. Winter was not a failure to be productive, it was essential preparation for Spring’s growth.
When you demand growth from yourself in January, you are asking a seed buried in frozen ground to bloom. It is not a lack of discipline that makes this hard. It is that you are working against your biology.
The other way is to work with your energy, not against it. To recognise that sustainable high performance requires honouring natural cycles of action and rest, visibility and composting, blooming and integration.
Understanding your four anchor points
Breaking the control cycle requires honest assessment across four critical areas of your life. These are not separate compartments, they are interconnected anchor points that either reinforce sustainable performance or accelerate depletion.
Work and career: This reveals how you are managing your workload, setting boundaries, and believing that everything depends on you. Are you working excessive hours? Checking email late at night? Finding it difficult to disconnect? These are not signs of dedication, they are symptoms of the control paradox in action.
Health and physical well-being: Your body keeps the score. Physical tension, deteriorating sleep quality, and persistent health symptoms are your nervous system’s way of signalling that something needs to change. When work pressure increases, this is precisely when physical wellbeing matters most, not when you can afford to abandon it.
Relationships and family: Limited quality time with family. Being physically present but mentally elsewhere. Relationships feel strained despite your professional success. Connection requires presence, and presence requires the capacity to be there, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
Self-care and rest: This is not about spa days or luxury holidays. It is about basic resourcing. Do you have time for activities that restore you? Can you rest without guilt? Are you treating yourself with the same care you would offer someone you are responsible for? Self-care is not selfish, it is the foundation that makes everything else possible.
Your highest score across these four areas reveals where the control cycle is costing you most. Identify this area and choose one tangible action you can take today to begin breaking the cycle.
What you can influence but cannot control
Here is something your body does without your conscious effort such as breathing, heartbeat, nail growth, and cellular regeneration. These automatic processes continue whether you are paying attention or not. Your body knows how to regulate itself.
Yet we have convinced ourselves that we must control everything manually. We override tiredness with caffeine. We push through pain. We ignore signals that our system is overloaded. And then we are surprised when things break down.
The shift is not about adding more control. It is about understanding what you can influence. You cannot control outcomes, other people’s responses, or external circumstances. But you can influence your nervous system, your breath, your response to pressure, and your capacity to be present.
This is where working with natural rhythms becomes practical. Humans are rhythmic creatures. We have ultradian cycles, 90-minute rhythms of focus and rest, circadian cycles, 24-hour patterns of alertness and sleep, and infradian cycles, monthly and seasonal fluctuations.
When you work with these rhythms, taking breaks during ultradian dips, honouring your need for sleep during circadian low points, and recognising seasonal energy shifts, you improve focus, creativity, and wellbeing. When you ignore your chronobiology, you increase cortisol levels, raise your risk of burnout, and exhaust yourself to the point of being no good to anyone, including yourself.
Your nervous system is your superpower
Here is what makes the nervous system work differently from everything else you do. It compounds.
Think about email. You clear your inbox, but tomorrow it fills again. You complete a project, and another one arrives. Most work is routine maintenance, necessary, but not cumulative.
Nervous system regulation is different. Training your body to remember that it is safe is cumulative. The work you do today becomes the floor from which you start tomorrow. Each time you practice regulating your response to stress, you are building capacity that remains available to you.
The bridge between your control patterns and a more sustainable approach is your breath. Breathing is the only automatic bodily function that you can also consciously control. It is your access point to shifting from a stressed, reactive state to a grounded, responsive one.
Light, slow, deep breathing, LSD breathing, calms the mind and optimises physical health by enhancing oxygen delivery, which is vital for cellular function and energy production. This is not woo woo. It is physiology.
Three practices that build sustainable performance
These three practices regulate your nervous system and ground you in your body. Pick one practice now and commit to doing it this week. Even brief, consistent practice will make a difference as you break the control cycle.
Following the breath: Sit comfortably. Notice your natural breath without changing it. Follow the path as it enters and leaves your body. Silently say “in” as you breathe in, “out” as you breathe out. Continue for a few minutes. This simple practice anchors you in the present moment, calming the mind and relaxing the body.
Awareness of body: Sit comfortably. Start from the top of your head and move slowly down to your toes. Notice any sensations in each part of your body. Acknowledge tension or discomfort without judgment. Gently invite those areas to relax. This body scan helps you reconnect with your physical form and recognise where you are holding stress.
Releasing tension: Breathe in and bring awareness to any area of tension in your body. Breathe out and imagine that tension dissolving, leaving your body with the breath. Repeat this process with different areas. With each exhale, consciously release the tightness and stress you are holding.
Building your daily toolkit
Integration matters more than intensity. A three-minute practice done daily has more impact than an hour-long session done occasionally. Here is how to anchor these practices into your day:
Morning (5 to 10 minutes): Start your day with one of the three practices. Before you check your email or engage with demands, resource yourself first. Choose body scan, following the breath, or releasing tension, whichever feels most needed.
Midday reset (2 to 3 minutes): When energy dips or tension rises, interrupt the pattern. LSD breathing, following the breath, or a quick body scan brings you back to your body instead of pushing through on adrenaline.
End of day (5 minutes): Before you transition home or into the evening, release the day. This prevents carrying work tension into your personal time. Choose releasing tension, body scan, or LSD breathing.
Remember, the nervous system works in compounds. The work you do today becomes the floor you start from tomorrow. This is not about perfection. It is about consistency.
The daily self-check that changes everything
At the end of each day, ask yourself three questions:
Did I honour my four anchors today? (Work, Relationships, Health, Self-care).
If no, what got in the way? The pattern reveals the belief. When you consistently abandon self-care under pressure, that is the “it’s all up to me” belief in action.
How committed am I to these anchors tomorrow? Rate yourself one to ten. This is not about judgment. It is about an honest assessment of where you are and what support you might need.
Pair this with your daily toolkit. The breathing practices regulate your nervous system. The self-check reveals your patterns. Together, they interrupt the control cycle before it pulls you back into depletion.
The control cycle will try to reassert itself. That is normal. Old patterns do not disappear just because you have recognised them. Notice when it happens. Use your breathing practice to interrupt it. Come back to your anchors.
What makes this approach sustainable
Most approaches to high performance ask you to add more, more discipline, more systems, more control. This approach asks you to align differently. Instead of forcing harvest in Winter, you compost and clarify. Instead of powering through ultradian dips, you take strategic breaks. Instead of overriding your body’s signals, you listen and respond. Instead of believing “it’s all up to me,” you recognise what you can influence and release what you cannot control.
Sustainability comes from working with your natural rhythms, not against them. From building nervous system capacity that compounds over time. Protecting your four anchor points so that performance does not require depletion as the price increases.
This is not about working less. It is about deep roots rather than brittle, hard work. It is about shifting from doing to being. It is about recognising that you cannot control your way out of a control cycle. You can only interrupt it by choosing a different way.
Start your journey today
The control cycle thrives in isolation, the belief that you must figure everything out alone, that asking for support means weakness, that it is all down to you.
But sustainable high performance is not built in isolation. It is cultivated through honest recognition of patterns, practical tools that work with your biology, and support structures that hold you accountable to real change.
If you are ready to break the control cycle and shift from depletion to sustainable performance, I work with senior business leaders who are tired of paying for success with their health and relationships. My approach integrates nervous system regulation, natural rhythms, and practical frameworks to help shift from “it’s all up to me” to aligned, sustainable leadership.
Visit kateadey.co.uk to learn more about working together or connect with me to explore how “The Other Way Method” could support you on your leadership path.
If you are experiencing one or all of these transitions, motherhood, career, and perimenopause or menopause, then do check out my new book, The Other Way: Re-discover wisdom, power, and flow in motherhood, menopause, and career transitions. Re-discover how these transitions reveal the wholeness that was there before conditioning covered it up.
Read more from Kate Adey
Kate Adey, Business Founder
Kate Adey works with professional women navigating motherhood, career shifts, and menopause, and with leaders creating cultures where excellence and wholeness aren't in opposition. She spent years in management consulting, thinking her way through problems, until a hypnobirthing course during pregnancy connected her to her body and the signals she'd been ignoring. Everything shifted.
Her curiosity led her to the teachings of non-duality. She created The Other Way Method™ and the Triskele Framework, MotherWise, CareerFlow, and MenoPower from twenty years of this work. Her book The Other Way shows how these transitions reveal the wholeness that was there before conditioning covered it up.
