Why Leaders Are Operating in Defence Mode and How to Unlock Optimal Sustainable Performance
- Mar 23
- 8 min read
Dr. Vanessa Harding is a neuroscience-informed performance coach and founder of Ayla Life Performance Coaching. She trains executives to strengthen resilience, decision-making under pressure, and achieve sustainable high performance. Her mission is to cultivate authentic leaders who respond, not react, and prioritise long-term health.
You feel wired even when you should be resting. Your mind keeps working, your body stays alert, and switching off feels almost impossible. Many high-performing leaders recognise this state yet assume it is simply part of success.
For many senior leaders, it has quietly become normal. At the same time, emotional intelligence, one of the most critical capabilities for effective leadership, is diminishing in practice. Research from TalentSmart shows that over 90% of top performers demonstrate high emotional intelligence, yet chronic physiological stress reduces our ability to feel and interpret emotional signals arising from the body.
Leadership today carries constant pressure, decisions, responsibility, performance, and uncertainty. Studies from Gallup show that over 70% of professionals experience burnout at some point, yet in leadership, it often goes unrecognised because it appears as over-functioning rather than breakdown.
The real issue is that most do not feel the early warning signs. Over time, high performers become wired for defence. Their autonomic nervous system operates in a subtle but persistent higher fight-or-flight energy state, one that the body was never designed to sustain continuously. Over time, this leads to the development of burnout, chronic stress disorders and autoimmune dysfunction.
The encouraging news is that this state is not permanent. The autonomic nervous system can be retrained and more simply than most realise. When it is, leaders feel lighter, more energised and free from constant strain. They become emotionally connected, calm under pressure, yet driven by renewed clarity and purpose. From here, sustainable high performance becomes effortless without compromising their health.
Pressure and performance
Leadership demands speed, responsibility and constant output. Most high performers respond by pushing harder, longer hours, more responsibility and continuous mental engagement.
Thoughts such as “I must hold everything together,” “I can’t slow down,” or “mistakes are not acceptable” become internal drivers. Leaders take on too much, struggle to delegate and carry responsibility beyond their role.
Externally, this looks like commitment. Internally, it repeatedly activates a higher fight–or–flight energy state within the autonomic nervous system.
Stress itself is not the problem. Stress is a biological shift in energy to meet demand. When the body needs to perform, metabolic output increases. Heart rate rises, breathing changes and hormones mobilise energy. In short bursts, this is useful. The problem is not stress, it is remaining in this state too often, without full recovery.
Repeated activation trains the autonomic nervous system. As described by neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, “neurons that fire together wire together.” The system becomes more efficient at defence and less efficient at recovery.
The stress baseline shift
The autonomic nervous system regulates energy by moving between higher energy states for action and lower energy states for recovery, repair and long-term health. Healthy performance depends on this flexibility. However, when pressure becomes constant, the baseline shifts upward. Instead of returning to a true lower energy state, the body remains subtly activated, slightly tense, alert and wired. The autonomic nervous system continues to operate closer to a higher fight-or-flight energy state, even at rest.
At this point, something critical happens. It no longer feels like elevated stress. It becomes normal. The system unconsciously adapts to this elevated baseline, and leaders lose reference for what calm actually feels like. At rest, there is little switch off. When performing, energy is tied up in defence physiology. Over time, this reduces capacity for clear thinking, immune regulation, and recovery, contributing to fatigue, anxiety, burnout, and chronic dysfunction.
Conditioning from childhood
From early life, the brain and body, via the autonomic nervous system, are shaped by experience. Childhood conditioning teaches the system how to interpret safety, pressure and emotion. When emotional expression is discouraged, “don’t cry,” “be strong,” “pull yourself together,” the autonomic nervous system learns to override internal signals. At the same time, education systems prioritise logic, performance and behaviour control. Over time, these wires become deeply embedded in thought, emotion, behaviour, and survival patterns.
The way we react as adults is not just based on the present moment. It is driven by a combination of stored feelings from past experiences and instinctive survival responses. As a child, the feeling attached to being told to “be strong” is stored in the body. Later in life, situations trigger those same feelings and without awareness, we override discomfort and push through. As described by polyvagal theory founder Stephen Porges and trauma experts Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté, emotional experiences are stored and expressed through the body.
We begin to see these feelings as weakness, distraction or something to control. So instead of understanding them, we suppress them again. Over time, this creates a growing disconnect between the body and the brain. Emotional signals become harder to recognise, and leaders move further away from truly understanding what they feel.
In modern professional environments, people are trained to analyse emotions intellectually, but not to get a deep sense of them physically. Leaders may feel uncomfortable and automatically distracted by staying busy through work, control, constant thinking, and performance. Leaders are not ignoring stress. They have been conditioned not to feel it.
The vagus nerve and resilience
This is where the autonomic nervous system becomes critical. The vagus nerve plays a central role in regulating the state. It acts as the body’s braking system on the heart rate, helping shift from a higher fight-or-flight energy state into a lower recovery state. As described by Dr. Steve Porges, in the polyvagal theory. When functioning well, it supports both recovery and resilience.
Vagal tone refers to how efficiently the system returns from a higher energy stress state to a lower one. Where the body can power down effectively and access true recovery. Vagal strength reflects the capacity to experience higher stress without being pushed into a less tolerable defensive state. When leaders spend prolonged periods in a higher energy state, both begin to decline.
The autonomic nervous system becomes less efficient at returning to calm, meaning recovery is incomplete. At the same time, the capacity to handle pressure without entering defence reduces. Over time, resilience diminishes. Leaders cope with less, and situations that were once manageable begin to feel overwhelming, not because the demands have increased, but because the system regulating them has weakened, and this is a subtle shift over time.
Stress, energy and the brain
The brain is one of the most energy-demanding systems in the body. When the autonomic nervous system is locked in a defensive higher energy state, resources are directed toward survival processes, including increased heart rate, muscle tension, and reactive thinking. Less energy is available for creativity, strategic thinking and complex decision-making. Leaders pushing harder often access less of their true cognitive capability.
Importantly, the brain does not operate in isolation. Signals originate in the body and are interpreted by the brain. The autonomic nervous system informs the brain, and the brain predicts whether we are safe or under threat. As described by Physicians Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E Tanzi, authors of Super Brain, the brain is not a fixed entity, but an active process continuously being shaped by these signals.
Training smarter performance
Sustainable performance requires retraining the whole autonomic nervous system, that is, the brain and the body. Modern environments and early conditioning lead to the brain prioritising logical, risk-averse thinking. While important, high-level leadership requires integration of creativity, emotional awareness, motivation, and intuitive insight alongside logic.
This can be developed. By reverse engineering thought, emotion, and behaviour patterns, leaders can understand how responses are formed right from the feeling in the body to the corresponding thought and behavioural process and begin to rewire them. Neuroscientists such as Dr. Tara Swart, author of The Source and Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions are Made, show that the more precisely we differentiate internal processes, logical reasoning, emotion, motivation and behaviour, the more effectively the brain can change. This strengthens emotional resilience and expands cognitive flexibility.
Relearning how to feel
Relearning how to feel is not about becoming more emotional. It is about becoming more aware. At present, many leaders are not responding to what is really happening in front of them. They are unconsciously responding to internal projections, patterns of stored feelings triggered by sensory input.
When the autonomic nervous system is regulated and patterns are retuned, this projection reduces. Leaders begin to experience situations more clearly with awareness of their feelings at that moment, rather than through the lens of past conditioning. This changes behaviour. Responses become more measured, less reactive and more aligned to the actual situation rather than the internal emotional residue. As this shift occurs, stress reduces naturally because the body and brain no longer react to perceived threats that are not truly present.
At the same time, energy becomes available. Leaders feel less drained, more in control and more stable under pressure. There is a sense of clarity, lightness and greater freedom from internal burden. With this comes a deeper connection to purpose. Thinking expands, decisions align more clearly and action follows a more authentic vision.
Breaking patterns and rewiring require energy and repetition, known as neuroplasticity. As with any skill, practice is the key. This is why the process must begin with the body. When energy is no longer tied up in a subtle higher fight-or-flight state, the brain has the capacity to change efficiently, quicker, and it’s sustainable. Leaders experience higher stress too often and it far outweighs any attempt at relaxing wellness days, retreats. The energy required to effectively change a mindset in workshops or therapy, whilst the energy is tied up in physiology, is simply not enough to achieve sustainable change.
A smarter path forward
Leadership will always involve pressure. But high performance does not require living in a constant state of defence and burnout. When the autonomic nervous system is retrained, rewiring habitual patterns, emotional awareness is restored, and lateral thinking is retrained, leaders change their behaviours naturally.
They are no longer driven by pressure or reactivity, but by clarity, intuition and grounded control. They think more clearly, respond with greater precision and sustain performance without sacrificing their health. There is less internal strain and more available energy. Decisions feel more aligned. Interactions become more composed and effective. And perhaps most importantly, leaders regain a deep sense of calm under pressure, confident in their emotional wisdom, intuitively clear and reconnected to a renewed sense of energy, purpose, and excitement in how they lead and perform.
Ready to move out of defence?
If you recognise yourself in this, you are not alone and more importantly, this is something you can change. The key is not more mindset work or pushing harder.
It starts with retraining your autonomic nervous system, then rewiring the patterns that drive your thinking, behaviour and performance. This is the foundation of my Ayla approach, a neuroscience-backed method designed to help high performers move out of defence, regain control, unlock their super lateral thinking and experience real, sustainable high performance.
If you want to explore how this applies to you, you can start with a conversation here: Ayla Life Performance Coaching.
Read more from Dr. Vanessa Harding
Dr. Vanessa Harding, Mental and Physical Performance Coach
Dr. Vanessa Harding is a neuroscience-based performance coach who trains business leaders and sports professionals to shift into calm, think clearly, and perform at their best under pressure while sustaining long-term high performance. With a PhD in Materials Science and two decades of corporate leadership, she blends scientific expertise with human-centred insight. She specialises in neural rewiring to break limiting thought-emotion-behaviour patterns, strengthening stress regulation, confidence and cognitive resilience. Through her mentoring programmes and signature AYLA method, she integrates brain training and nervous system optimisation to elevate mental and physical capacity while securing long-term health.
