Episode 1: What Stress Does to Decision-Making

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Episode 1: What Stress Does to Decision-Making

Lauren explores how stress impacts leadership and how nervous system regulation restores clarity and trust.

Lauren starts a new series on leading under pressure, looking at how chronic stress shifts the way leaders think, decide, and lead. She explains how dysregulation narrows perspective and pushes people into urgency, control, and short term thinking.

This episode reframes those patterns through a nervous system lens and shows how small moments of regulation can bring leaders back to clarity and trust.

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Transcript:

Lauren Spigelmyer: I'm excited! We are starting with a new series, because it is a new year, so perfect timing! This series is about and how to lead under pressure. So, at Five Ives, we work with trauma-facing fields, or, like, high secondary trauma-based positions. So, this could be education, this could be nonprofits, this could be medical, this could be policing, really anyone who's working with a population who are either have trauma exposure, or are just highly or chronically stressed, which is in most fields anymore, but honestly, any of this would apply to any type of leadership position in general. But we are going to talk about how to, or how, really… leaders who are regulated, emotionally regulated, make better decisions in high-stress systems. Most leadership positions anymore are high-stress, but especially high stress when you are working with populations and serving people and guiding staff who are working in trauma-facing fields. So, in this episode what I'm going to talk about is what stress does to decision making, so how does stress impact decision making for leaders, so I will help you, as a leader, understand why good… good people, maybe good leaders, it depends what kind of leadership background you have and experience, but why good people, even good leaders, are making poor decisions, because they are under chronic stress, and how, when you find and learn ways to move from a, like, an anchored, regulated place, how that really… restores clarity, how it improves ethics, effectiveness, productivity, problem solving, creativity, just about everything that your thinking brain needs access to. And not only just, like, individually, as a leader, but also it starts to impact the systems level as well, so everyone that you are serving and working with. So, quite important. So, the main thing I want you to know is that leaders aren't making, whether you're a leader, or you are someone who is… is… beneath a leader, or being served by a leader, these mistakes that are made are not often due to incompetence, and definitely not to bad… like, because of bad intent. They're typically because they are made in chronically stressed-out states. And with this nervous system energy exists dysregulation. When it's under threat, when the nervous system is under threat decision-making is impaired, and we don't really consciously realize that, because we don't have a depth of understanding of the nervous system and how it impacts our ability to use our thinking brain and make decisions.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, this episode is not about blame in any way. It's about biology, it's about systems, both, like, the systems that we live in, our bodies and our minds, and then the systems that we serve, not personality flaws. And if you understand this from a nervous system standpoint. If, from a regulated standpoint, you can begin to interrupt it in a positive way. Okay, so, big idea, your stress really narrows your perception. It shortens timelines. And… it… requires you to prioritize survival, because you're putting out fires over a thinking strategy long-term and things that could actually solve the problems. It causes a lot of pressure, and when the pressure is constant leaders aren't making bad decisions so much as they are making protective ones. And the protective ones aren't always out of logic and reason, they're out of emotion because they are emotionally dysregulated. So, these decisions often come at the expense of trust, of sustainability, of achieving long-term outcomes. So, if you're, year after year, setting these targets, and you're not hitting these targets, it could have a lot to do with multi-levels of leadership that are acting from an emotional or unanchored place.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, so let's talk about what does stress do to the brain? That's my favorite, or the body, even, favorite topic to talk about. Nervous system stress, how does it impact us, the nervous system, the brain, the body, all the things? Because I think this is something that every… I think, this is something that every single individual is dealing with, whether they're in a high-stress position or not, like, the world is stressful. So, let's talk about what stress does to the brain. Okay, so under stress, under chronic stress, especially under traumatic stress, and this applies to, like, people that we're serving to, the nervous system, it prioritizes speed over nuance. Like, think about this. If you are dysregulated, you may be a person who goes up to the upper tier of the nervous system, that's the sympathetic side. When you're in the sympathetic side, your body is, like, tense, tight, defensive, and you're kind of running fast. Like, here are signs that you're in the sympathetic side of the nervous system. You talk really fast. That is me. Sometimes I'm in that side. Sometimes I'm high-functioning survival. I'm in the sympathetic side. I recognize that. Am I driving in the left-hand lane? Am I speeding up when I see a yellow light? Like, these are all signs that you are in this, like, fast-paced state. And when you're there that speed psychologically is prioritized over nuance. But we need to pay attention to the nuances, because the nuances are what drive our work and help our team to function well. So, your brain really shifts away from all the, like, thinking skills that live here, and you can't see me, but, like, I'm touching the front of my head. So, it's shifting away from perspective-taking, compassion, understanding, grace. It's shifting away from impulse control and it's becoming impulsive. It's shifting away from, like, ethical reasoning, and what you end up shifting into is threat detection, and control, and micromanagement, and things that come from a more… reactive place, from a more dysregulated place, from a more emotional place, and the… the… subconscious and mind is trying to regain control and power and kind of organize things quickly so that it doesn't feel threatened anymore. But we don't function well from that place of the nervous system and the brain, we function best from our… thinking brain being online.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, so… what I need leaders to hear is, like, when you're stressed out, It might seem like… to staff that you're making careless decisions, they're not careless, they're just based in stress, and sometimes stress-based decisions aren't always the best decisions because they're made with speed. It also means that you're acting, running meetings from, sending messages from, like, a very certain, a very urgent, and like a very… let's say, less curious place. Certain may sound good, like certainty, because we know clarity is good, but I wouldn't say certain in this circumstance is good. Urgent doesn't feel good. Less curious, less open, doesn't feel good. That type of existence breeds distrust, and we want trust in our organization so our employees don't leave. The whole point of this is we don't want people to turn over, we want people to sustain, and love coming to work, and work well, and be productive, so that the mission is met. So… The more pressure the system is under, the more it confuses speed with leadership. Haste makes waste. I don't know who said that, but somebody said that, and it was good. There's also… Jim Quick, I believe, said this one, too much, too fast, won't last. And I think about this all the time. Sometimes, I talk fast because I'm really excited, but excited can be dysregulated, too. Like, if I don't get myself into a neutralized place. Even these episodes, I start off kind of fast, I'm really excited, but I have to, throughout the recording, slow myself down, because I don't want people to miss the message.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, let's talk about how stress shows up in leadership decisions. So here are some common stress-based decision patterns. So we're looking for patterns here, and what we want to do is we want to disrupt the patterns. That's the goal. But you can't disrupt the patterns if you don't even recognize they exist in the first place. So… Number one, urgency B, urgency bias. Everything…feels like it must be done right now. I mean, even when I create to-do lists, and they're, like, miles long, I get paralyzed from the decision-making, because everything feels urgent, and everything feels like it's due now. That's not true. So, I need to kind of separate the list into, like, what is actually urgent, what actually doesn't happen now, and what, you know, can I move on to next, and what do I do last? When I worked with educators, we would do, like, must-do, can-do. Like, what is something that you… or things that you must do today, or must get done right now, and what are some things that you can do if you have time? And the reality is, you can't fit everything on the must-do list. You have to put some things on the can-do list. So, when you're acting from a place of urgency, you're… you're planning base wins, you're planning Based. Windows. shrink. Your… creativity shrinks. Your, like, forward future thinking shrinks, because you're acting from such a place of chaos that it's, like, sporadic and disorganized, and you're jumping from thing to thing to thing instead of staying in one thing, staying in one thing, finishing it, so your time is reduced. Your availability is reduced. And decisions are often made without getting feedback or consultation. They're just made, sent, and moving on. And sometimes some of these things have to happen. Like, some things are urgent, and sometimes we do have to hop around from thing to thing very quickly. And sometimes we do have to make decisions without consultation, but we don't want that to be our… norm.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Control escalation is number two, and this is where… this is what I probably see the most. A lot of micromanagement. But the problem is, I don't think people… know, see, or understand what actually is micromanagement. And I did an episode a couple weeks ago on micromanagement, so if you didn't listen to that, I'd go back and just find that episode, because I talk about what are some examples of micromanagement, and how is it hurting your team. So, your micromanagement increases, because control escalates, because things feel out of control, so naturally the subconscious is like, okay, everything's just out of control, I gotta get control. And then we tighten up policies, which can feel really restricting, and again, sometimes these things are needed. But because we take our power and control away from our employees, or the people that we're serving, or the people that we're leading, and we micromanage them, and it feels like, to them, we're saying, I don't trust you, and honestly, that is what we're saying. We're saying, I can do better, you do it my way, instead of getting their feedback and asking for their input. And when all of this happens, trust decreases. Even if people still perform highly because there are high performers that can distrust and work out of a survival-based state, they will eventually burn out, and eventually probably leave. Even if you're giving them a lot of money, they probably will still leave because they feel terrible.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay. What ends up happening next is, number 3, we start to focus more on short-term relief over long-term impact. So, we will focus on decisions that Kind of… Calm down whenever's on fire for the moment, but the cost is the future. So, that might mean we're increasing workloads for people that don't have the capacity to take more on. It might mean that we're avoiding hard conversations, because we don't even have the mental capacity, or brain space, or time in our calendar, or whatever it is to have the hard conversation. And we definitely don't spend time thinking about how today's decisions impact us weeks, months, years down the road. So, it really impacts long-term longevity of the organization, because we are just so stuck in… putting off fires short-term. And we don't want to get stuck in that state, because it's going to keep us in a dysregulated state. And then we go into this, like, black-white binary thinking. So that's number four. Like, right versus wrong. Compliant versus problematic. Loyal versus difficult, and everything is not so clear like that. There's so much nuance, and I said earlier, speed over nuance. It's the nuance that kind of leads us out of this binary thinking, and allows us to be more open and understanding and grace-filled. And then we can move people into growth. There's a session that Jessica and I do called Trauma Informed Accountability, where you talk about you must have grace and compassion for people. You must, or you'll break the trust. But you can't have grace and compassion and no expectations. You can't always let people off the hook. You have to move them into growth.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, we talk about what does it look like to move with grace and still promote growth, instead of… this, like… patience without progress, trap. So, we've gotta find… we've gotta find a happy… happy medial ground and we have to make sure that we're paying attention to the nuanced things, because sometimes they're telling signs of things that are happening, like, in people's personal lives that they didn't share with us, which is their job, but, like. Still, if we're regulated, we can see through some of these things and have the hard conversations and learn what's going on. Okay. Here's why this is also a problem. Stress is contagious. When you're frazzled, and you're frantic, and you're making decisions quickly, and you're leading people, you are kind of a mirror to the organization, so they are going to mirror back to you how you are showing up. So, if you are acting frantically, that dysregulation is going to spread. Stress is… really relational, and as much as we don't want it to, we do mirror it to others, and then others pick up and kind of, like, reflect back to us, and we don't want them to pick up on our stress and start acting stressed because we're stressed, even if they're not stressed. And they will ultimately become stressed if our stress is that loud. You don't really just experience it yourself, you really transmit it. And that's for a lot of emotions, but especially big, heavy, hard ones, like chronic overloaded stress. It could even be… Like, a sharp tone in your email. And what that does is really hypersensitive, hypervigilant people will pick up on that, and it'll increase their anxiety, and there are a lot of people that function from that state. You might also find yourself putting out fires, which causes constant pivoting, and that causes a lack of stability. And then you'll see people just go silent, because they know that the control is being taken away from them, they're being micromanaged, and their opinions don't matter anymore. So… what people are reacting to is the dysregulated nervous system that is leading them, and they start to become dysregulated, and they start to do all of these things themselves, and they eventually burn out, and then they leave, so we don't want that. We've got to find ways, as leaders, to get regulated, and I did a whole bunch of episodes on this recently, on how to embed micro-practices into your role as a leader to help regulate yourself and to help regulate the organization. So, I highly recommend you go back and listen to those episodes, too, because we don't have time to talk about everything here. But, some good stuff in there that are just tiny, teeny tiny little practices that you could integrate to get yourself more regulated, so the, the energy you're reflecting out is more regulated, which means your staff stay more regulated.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay why… smart, values-driven leaders tend to be the most at risk for experiencing this and kind of outputting this. One, I laugh, because I'm like, but this one's kind of mean, I'm working on it, y'all, but I'm gonna be honest, just because I'm leading people through this doesn't mean I am always perfect, and I always have it right. It's so much easier to coach other people than it is to coach yourself, and as I'm, like, reflecting back about my notes on this lesson that I wrote, I'm like, this is me. Okay, high-functioning, high-capacity, high-achieving leaders often override their stress signals. That is me. I just got the chills just saying that out loud, and kind of being vulnerable and owning that, but… I tend to, myself, think, like, I gotta get this done, I don't have a choice, I gotta… I gotta override it. I know my body needs to rest, but when I get this thing done, I will rest, and then I don't. I move on to the next thing. So… we, because I'm gonna put myself in that category, just push through and I normalize overload. And I'm working hard to address that, because the irony of it is the leaders who care the most are often the ones operating longest in survival mode. So, I care, I feel like I have to help all these people get all these things done, but because I'm not doing a great job of resting all the time. I keep myself in survival mode. I'm high-functioning survival. People around me don't think I'm in survival, but I know I'm in survival and I come in and I go out. So, you ebb and flow, but the goal is to stay out of it more. And in the last couple years, I've gotten out of it more, because I've gotten deeper and deeper and deeper into this work. But there are still seasons of life, especially when there are things out of my control, that put me in survival, that I can work myself out of, but I can't control that they're putting me there. So, just something to think about. So, if we don't become aware of this. If we don't recognize this, if we don't adapt and change this type of response and behavior, then it leads to moral injury. And we're going to do a conversation in the future on kind of the depths of what moral injury is, because there's a lot of that going on in the world right now. It also leads to emotional detachment. Which we don't want from our end or our employees' end, and it leads to decision fatigue, not just for us, but for everyone involved in and around us that are helping us make decisions. So, those are 3 things that we do not want more of in our organization, because again, they will leave… they will lead to people leaving.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, regulation is what is going to kind of restore us here. So… when you're regulated, it doesn't mean that, like, you're slowing leadership, but what it really means is, like, you're expanding it. You're expanding your choices, you're expanding your clarity, you're expanding your headspace, you're expanding your time, because when you become regulated, you regain perspective, you regain more patience, you regain ethical clarity, you regain strategic, like, sequences, planning, all these things. Those things come from, in some ways, moving slow, but really expansion, and expansion in, like, a good and positive way when people are more regulated, they might be moving slower, but it's not about necessarily slowing down. It's about… Regulation, and regulation doesn't always mean slow, it just means that you are accessing your thinking brain more than you are riding and living in your emotional brain.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, so here's just a couple, like, micro practices. Again, I did an episode on this a couple… a couple episodes on this, a couple episodes ago, but the 90-second, even 60 seconds, even 30-second pause, just pause. Before you're gonna make a high-impact decision that causes people to feel overloaded, or add more to their plate, or whatever it is, pause, name the pressure, and ask, is this decision driven by urgency or intention? And that 30 to 90 second pause is going to help you to shift out of your survival, dysregulated state into the state that will actually make the right decision, instead of just hastily making the decision, moving forward, and then dealing with the repercussions. So, there's just one strategy I'm gonna give you. Again, I went over a whole bunch in previous episodes, and we'll do more in this series on… on strategy work as well.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay. So… what's coming up next? Where are we going from this? Because I wanted to set the foundation of, like, what's the impact of stress on leadership, of stress on the brain, of stress on decision making, and then we'll go into and kind of open this up more. So, in the next episode, we're going to talk about, really, if we know that stress distorts our regulation and our decision-making, the next thing we want to think about and ask ourselves is, how do leaders Hold this authority and act from place of regulation without creating, like, too much urgency, which leads to fear. So, we're gonna talk about power, we're gonna talk about presence, we're gonna talk about trust, we're gonna talk about creating regulation as, like, an infrastructure for yourself and for the organization. Okay? The goal isn't to eliminate stress, because we can't do that. We don't have a lot of control over the things that stress us, though we can… we can control how we respond to the stress, and we're going to stop letting stress run the system. It's not about making perfect decisions, which some of us perfectionistic people like to focus on. It's about making regulated , conscious decisions, and you realize there's a lot less backlash and repercussions to deal with when you do that. Again, I'm gonna be two questions to kind of… or two thoughts to kind of reflect on. One, think about a decision last year that you would make differently if you would have made it from a regulated place. And then, as you kind of reflect on last year and move into this year, think about one system pressure that deserves attention before the next cycle, before the next decision. And if you want to know about all of this, and how you integrate it into your own work, into your organization, Jessica and I created a program called the Staff Sustainability Program. So, if you want to learn more about that, go to FiveIves.com, F-I-V-E-I-V-E-S dot com, and… the services tab will show you staff sustainability. It'll map out for you everything that we do, and how we do it, and what it is, and how it'll help you, and how we even, like, modify it to meet your organizational needs, depending on which, like, entity you work for and in, and even the size of your organization. If you're thinking about some of these things from a more educational standpoint, we are going to launch our next round of courses with… in partnership with University of Pennsylvania, so we're running our Behavior Breakthrough course in end of January. And it is 4.5 credits that you can get from the University of Pennsylvania, actually a transcript from Penn, and we will be running that at the end of January, and it will run until the beginning of May. It's a bit of a hybrid, asynchronous, live coaching course. That is also on the website under our on-demand resources. Or, if you want to learn about any of this, and you don't want to go to the website, you can just shoot me an email, or shoot Jessica an email, or both of us, and we're Lauren at Five Ives, F-I-V-E-I-V-E-S dot com, or Jessica at FiveIves.com. Don't forget to lock in what you learned today by actually doing those reflection questions, actually thinking about how does this apply to my life, and sitting in reflection, and thinking about what shifts or changes or things might I need to consider as I go into 2026. And until next episode, I'm Lauren, and thanks for joining me.


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