The Physical Toll Of Leadership Stress

Chronic stress is defined as “a consistent sense of feeling pressured and overwhelmed over a long period of time.” Sound familiar?

So many social impact leaders experience chronic stress. As empathetic caregivers—many of whom are women socialized to prioritize others' needs—we often try to power through the warning signs.

Our Bodies Keep The Score

Our bodies frequently signal distress before our minds are ready to acknowledge it. These physical manifestations are data points telling us something needs to change.

These warning signs could show up as changes in appetite or weight. You develop a pattern of forgetting to eat, surviving entire days on granola bars and coffee while your body's hunger signals fade into background noise.

Sleep becomes disrupted as you toss and turn worrying late at night. Even when you are so exhausted that you finally crash, your sleep is fragmented and you have anxiety dreams.

Your immune system gets compromised leading to frequent colds and slower healing. Yet the pressure to maintain productivity means you work through illness, refusing to rest. That two-day cold stretches into two weeks of lingering symptoms as you power through meetings while medicated.

Perhaps most insidiously, persistent stress begins feeling normal. Your racing heart, shallow breathing, and constant shoulder tension becomes your baseline state.

Basic Self-Maintenance

A former therapist told me she prefers the term” self-maintenance” to “self-care” because things like sleeping, eating, and moving our bodies aren't luxuries, they are basic requirements for human functioning.

We've become so disconnected from these fundamental needs that we often don’t even hear our bodies’ signals anymore. When we don’t listen, our bodies escalate by making us sick, having panic attacks, or worse just to capture our attention.

A Reframe

In moments of suffering you likely tell yourself “it’s not important how I feel, there are so many people suffering far worse.” I invite you to challenge that way of thinking.

We are human beings not machines!

Getting healthy extends beyond each of our individual well-being. Our collective success depends on breaking free from systems that perpetuate burnout and depletion for any of us.

By nurturing ourselves, we become more effective champions for the just world we're working to create. Caring for our bodies and our minds is a way of insisting in the present that we are worthy, and modeling for others that they are as well.

Our wellbeing and the wellbeing of those we serve are not in competition with one another. They are intertwined.

Citations

“Chronic Stress > Fact Sheets.” Yale Medicine, https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/stress-disorder. Accessed 2 July 2025.