When Stress Shows in the Body: The Signals Leaders Explain Away

Many senior people know the pattern. Through the busiest quarter they feel fine, even sharp. Then the deal closes, the board meeting passes or the holiday begins, and within two days they are in bed with a fever, a migraine or a back that will not straighten. The body seems to have waited for permission.

This is more than folklore. It points to a question worth taking seriously: what happens to the body's signals while a leader is too busy to hear them?

Attention is a narrow channel

In 1980 the psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleague Jeffrey Lightner compared joggers on two kinds of course: laps of a featureless track and a varied cross-country route. On the varied route people ran faster. Pennebaker's explanation has held up: sensations from inside the body compete with information from outside for a limited channel of attention. When the outside world is rich and demanding, the body's messages are crowded out.

A senior role is about as demanding as external information gets. A tight chest, shallow sleep, a stomach unsettled for weeks: these do not disappear. They lose the competition for attention. The capacity to stay with the task while the body protests is often part of what made someone successful. It is also the capacity that keeps the signal from getting through.

Load that does not switch off

Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University called the cumulative cost of adapting to stress allostatic load. The stress response is designed to rise and fall: cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate and blood pressure mobilise for a challenge and then return to baseline. The cost comes when they do not return, when one demand follows another, or when the system stays mobilised in anticipation.

That last point matters for leaders. Jos Brosschot, William Gerin and Julian Thayer proposed the perseverative cognition hypothesis: worry and rumination keep the body physiologically activated long after a stressful event, and even before it happens. The difficult meeting lasts an hour; rehearsing it in the car, in the shower and at three in the morning may last days. To the body, the thought of the event can carry part of the cost of the event itself.

When the guard comes down

The Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets and his colleagues gave the holiday pattern a name: leisure sickness. In a pilot study they described a small group of people who regularly fell ill at weekends or at the start of holidays, a pattern their data linked with high workload, perfectionism and a strong sense of responsibility towards work. The explanations remain tentative. One possibility is that symptoms present all along finally win the competition for attention once work falls silent. A related paradox runs through Burnout at the Top: Why a Holiday Doesn't Fix It.

Noticing is a skill, and an uneven one

Sarah Garfinkel, Hugo Critchley and colleagues at the University of Sussex separated interoceptive accuracy, how precisely a person detects their own heartbeat, from interoceptive awareness, how well their confidence matches that accuracy. The two do not always travel together. Someone can feel certain they read their body well and be measurably wrong. For a leader used to trusting their own judgement, that is an uncomfortable finding.

A systemic view

The body rarely reports alone. Partners, children and assistants often notice the shorter temper or the restless nights before the person does. Organisations tend to reward exactly the endurance that silences the signal. Seen systemically, a symptom is not only a private event. It is information circulating in a system that may have its own reasons not to hear it.

Not every physical symptom comes from stress, and some that feel like stress do not. Chest pain, palpitations, lasting digestive trouble or unexplained changes in weight belong with a doctor first. This essay describes patterns; it does not diagnose them. On which kind of help fits, see When Stress Shows in the Body: The Signals Leaders Explain Away.

These ideas are developed in Michele's book Leadership Coaching with Horses: The Power of Psychometrics and Biofeedback (Routledge, 2025).

Questions worth sitting with

1. Which signal from your body have you been explaining away the longest, and what explanation do you give it?
2. When did you last fall ill just as the pressure lifted, and what had you postponed until then?
3. Who around you notices your strain before you do, and what exactly do they see?
4. If your body is carrying a message your diary has no room for, what might it say?

What the research suggests

Research on attention, allostatic load and perseverative cognition suggests that stress can be present in the body well before it is noticed, and that busy, highly responsible people may be especially well placed to miss it. It does not suggest that every symptom is stress, nor that noticing earlier guarantees a different outcome. It suggests only that the body's signals are information worth weighing, and that a doctor is the right first reader for any that persist.

Sources

• Brosschot, J. F., Gerin, W., & Thayer, J. F. (2006). The perseverative cognition hypothesis: A review of worry, prolonged stress-related physiological activation, and health. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 60(2), 113–124.
• Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., & Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65–74.
• McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179.
• Pennebaker, J. W., & Lightner, J. M. (1980). Competition of internal and external information in an exercise setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(1), 165–174.
• Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M., Van Huijgevoort, M., & Van Heck, G. L. (2002). Leisure sickness: A pilot study on its prevalence, phenomenology, and background. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 71(6), 311–317.

If this is familiar, write to Michele's office in confidence: info@nature-motivation.com. Every enquiry is read by Michele.