The Cost of Leaving the Optimal Zone

Welcome back to Core+Clarity.

My goal is simple: help you build a nervous system that can meet the demands of modern leadership without running yourself into the ground.

This is part 2 of a 9-week series exploring the relationship between nervous system regulation and leadership performance. Each week I'll share research, stories, and practical tools that have shaped both my professional career and personal practice.

Last week, we introduced the Optimal Zone. This week, we'll explore what happens when we leave it.

You've probably sent an email you regretted within seconds of hitting send. Or made a call in a meeting that felt urgent in the moment, and wrong by the time you got home.

Those moments aren't random.

They happen in a specific, predictable physiological state.

Your decisions don't just suffer because you're tired. They suffer when your nervous system is outside its Optimal Zone.

The Optimal Zone is the regulated state where you're calm, clear, focused, and able to access your best thinking.

Above it is the Overactive Zone: stressed, anxious, reactive, and unfocused. That's where many leaders operate for much of the day without realizing it.

And in a world of relentless information flow, where decisions that once took weeks are now expected in hours, the Overactive Zone has become the default setting for many leaders. The pace and demands of modern work make it easy to stay there.

You can still perform there. But you can't sustain it.

Recognizing what zone you’re in is the first step. Understanding how that state affects your thinking is the next.

Here's what the physiology looks like when you're stuck there.

When cortisol remains elevated from sustained pressure without adequate recovery, the prefrontal cortex becomes less effective. Cognitive resources shift toward faster, survival-oriented responses at the expense of reflection and nuance.

You become faster to react and slower to reflect.

You favor short-term certainty over long-term complexity. You're more likely to default to habit, aggression, or avoidance. You're less able to read a room accurately or regulate your own emotional state in real time.

In rooms where the stakes were very high, negotiations, board presentations, deals that had been years in the making, and one-on-one performance meetings, I've felt the pressure to decide immediately when what the situation really needed was another five minutes of clear thinking.

My urgency wasn't coming from the situation. It was coming from a nervous system running on high cortisol, stuck above the Optimal Zone, with no tools to come back down.

A 2009 study published in Psychological Science helps explain why. Participants with elevated cortisol showed impaired working memory and greater reliance on habitual response patterns.

When you're stressed and depleted, you stop thinking and start reacting.

In a stable world, habitual reactions can carry you.

In a world changing as fast as this one, they can't.

Adaptability requires access to the prefrontal cortex: the capacity for nuance, pattern recognition, and considered judgment. That access doesn't disappear when you leave the Optimal Zone. It gradually declines the longer you stay outside it, often so slowly you don't notice until the cost is significant.

The best leaders I've observed aren't necessarily the smartest or the most experienced. They're the ones who've learned to recognize when they've left their Optimal Zone and know how to return.

That's not a personality trait.

It's a trainable skill.

What tells you you've left your Optimal Zone?

What are the first signs that your thinking, communication, or judgment has started to shift?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Simply hit reply.

I read every response.

What Navy SEALs discovered about performing under extreme pressure, and why it applies just as much in the boardroom.

- Steven Baillargeon

Founder, Core+Clarity

Regulate your system. Perform with clarity.