The Hidden Cost of Leading at a High Level for a Long Time
- Jun 25
- 3 min read
You used to recover over the weekend. A decent Friday night, a slow Saturday morning, and by Sunday you were ready.
Now you need most of Monday just to get back to something close to baseline. Nothing obviously went wrong. You're not doing anything categorically different. You're just not bouncing back the way you used to.
This is not an age thing. It's a load thing. Here's what the research says is driving it.
The higher you rise, the more you carry that has no clear endpoint. What has no endpoint is very hard to put down. |
What changes as seniority increases
A junior professional has tasks. Tasks begin, they end, and when the day closes, the cognitive file closes with it.
A senior leader has responsibility. Responsibility for other people's livelihoods, for decisions that ripple out over months, for the tone and stability of an entire team. Responsibility doesn't have edges. It's present even when nothing is actively happening.
The role follows you home not because what you're carrying doesn't allow a clean separation.
Robert Karasek's research on job demands and control (1979), established that the combination of high demand and high accountability produces sustained physiological activation even outside working hours. Senior leadership sits at the top of that profile.
The biology of accumulated load
In 1993, psycho-biologists Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar introduced the concept of allostatic load, the cumulative physiological cost of adapting to sustained stress over time. Here's what this actually looks like. The body adapts to chronic pressure by re-calibrating its baseline. Cortisol rhythms shift. The nervous system begins treating a higher level of activation as normal.
Recovery no longer returns the system to its original starting point. The baseline has moved. What used to feel like full recovery is now the depleted normal, and most leaders are performing from there without knowing it.
The baseline shifts. Not overnight. Over years of weeks that didn't fully clear. |
The role of mental carryover
For senior leaders, the material available for mental carryover is vast. The staffing decision pending, the board conversation still being processed, the team dynamic being monitored. None of it requires active effort. It just runs in the background, and while it does, the nervous system stays activated.
Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz (2007) found that psychological detachment from work, genuinely not thinking about work during off-hours, is one of the strongest predictors of recovery quality. Among senior leaders, it's also one of the hardest things to actually achieve. The role makes structural disengagement difficult. Many senior leaders carry work in the background even after hours.
When the role becomes the identity
There's a further layer that the occupational health literature points to consistently. When professional identity and role become tightly fused, when who you are and what you do start to feel like the same thing, rest itself becomes cognitively activated.
Stopping feels exposing. Without the role to structure the sense of self, an unease surfaces. The result is that even time designated for rest doesn't produce genuine recovery, because the system never fully disengages.
This tends to be more pronounced in leaders who have built their identity around performance over a long career. The more successful the career, the more likely the fusion. The more pronounced the fusion, the more costly it becomes as demands increase.
What actually helps
Better sleep helps. An earlier bedtime helps. A longer holiday helps. None of them fix the thing that's keeping the system activated in the first place.
What changes the equation is addressing the activation itself. Working with the cognitive patterns that keep the system running after hours. Examining the identity fusion that makes stopping feel unsafe. Building recovery into the week as a structural requirement, not a reward for finishing.
In some cases, it also means looking honestly at whether the load itself is sustainable in its current form, and what structural changes are actually available.
None of this requires stepping back or performing at a lower level. It requires a different relationship with the load. Performance stays. The personal cost of maintaining it comes down.
Ready to lead at your best without the compounding cost? The Leadership Edge is a 90-day coaching experience that helps senior leaders perform sustainably by addressing the patterns driving the cost, not just the symptoms. |
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Tracy Laing, MA, CCC | Executive Coach & Therapist | tracylaing.com | hello@tracylaing.com
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