TL;DR: Your most driven people often run on a reactive, depleted state and call it discipline. It works, until it caps out. Chronic stress narrows thinking and erodes adaptability, building a hard ceiling under your best performers. This piece explains the neuroscience of high-performer rigidity, why the "if it got me here, why change it" logic fails, and what people-ops leaders can do to develop range instead of just grip.
There is a rhythm a lot of high performers fall into. Travel a week. Get sick a week. Repeat. Armor on the road, insides out at home.
It looks like dedication. From the outside it reads as someone who delivers no matter what. Inside, it is a body stuck in sympathetic overdrive. The nervous system never fully stands down. Sustained stress of this kind suppresses immune function and keeps the body in a low-grade threat state. [1]
The tell is not the long hours. It is the operating tone underneath them. Reactive. Tired. Anxious. On edge. You can travel very far in that state. Most senior leaders have. But it carries a cost that does not show up until later.
High performers ask a fair question. If this way of operating got me here, why would I change it? The honest answer is that "working" is hiding a lot.
Operating from chronic stress does produce output. It also quietly narrows the range of thinking available to you. Under sustained threat, the brain favors familiar, automatic responses and suppresses the flexible, exploratory thinking that solves new problems. [2] This is why your sharpest people can become rigid exactly when stakes rise. The pressure that demands creativity is the same pressure shutting it down.
Hold onto anything too tightly and you build incredible grip strength. You also lose range. No adaptability. No access to better thinking when it matters most. Psychological flexibility, the capacity to stay open and adjust under pressure, is one of the stronger predictors of long-term performance and wellbeing. [3] Rigidity is not the price of excellence. It is the ceiling on it.
This matters for retention, not just performance. The people most prone to this pattern are often the ones you least want to lose. Burnout among high performers is consistently tied to misalignment and sustained strain, not raw workload. [4] When their range collapses, they either plateau or leave.
Letting go is not losing your edge. It is expanding it. More options. More clarity. More ways to show up when the room is hard. The job of a people-ops leader is to make that expansion possible instead of accidentally rewarding the armor.
Start by naming the pattern out loud. Many high performers cannot see their own grip because it has always been praised. Normalize the idea that adaptability is a skill, not a softness. Build it into how you talk about senior performance.
Then change what you reward. If recognition only flows to the person who pushes through while sick, you are training rigidity. Notice and name the leader who delegates, who changes course on better information, who recovers well. Make recovery visible at the top, because teams copy what leaders model, not what policies say.
Finally, give people structured room to practice range before a crisis forces it. Protect real recovery time. Create low-stakes moments where changing your mind is the win, not the failure. The goal is simple. Help your best people loosen the grip just enough to get their range back. That is where the real upside lives.