I Ran a Poll on Regulation. 13 People Answered. Every Single Answer Was Wrong.

A few days ago I ran a poll.

Simple question: What actually regulates you during high-pressure weeks?

Thirteen people answered.

Clear priorities: 38%.

Staying busy: 31%.

Physical training: 15%.

I just push through: 15%.

I want you to look at those answers.

Because here’s what I saw when the results came in: thirteen people told me exactly how they survive. Not one of them told me how they regulate.

That gap, between surviving and regulating, is what this piece is about.

First, a definition.

Most high-performers use the word “regulate” and mean something completely different from what the nervous system actually needs.

When I say regulation, I don’t mean calm. I don’t mean controlled. I don’t mean productive.

Regulation, in the nervous system sense, means your body believes it’s safe.

That’s it. Not your mind. Your body.

Your prefrontal cortex can be running a perfect boardroom presentation while your nervous system is in a full threat response. You can look regulated and be nowhere near it.

Think about your last high-pressure week. You performed. You delivered. People around you saw someone who had it together.

But what was happening inside?

Was there a low-grade buzz in your chest? A shallowness in your breath you didn’t notice until Friday night? A moment, maybe in the shower, maybe at 2am, where something almost cracked open and you quickly redirected it?

That’s not regulation. That’s a very sophisticated suppression system doing its job.

And I’m not saying that to shame you. I’m saying it because you built that system for a reason. It kept you moving when stillness felt dangerous. It kept you producing when stopping felt like dying.

That system saved you once.

The question is: what is it costing you now?

Here’s the physiology. Clean, not clinical.

Your nervous system has two main operating states.

Regulated: ventral vagal. Safe. Present. Connected. Creative. You can actually think.

Dysregulated: sympathetic activation, fight, flight, freeze, or dorsal vagal shutdown.

High-performers live almost exclusively in sympathetic activation.

It feels like your best state. The adrenaline reads as clarity. The cortisol reads as drive. The activation reads as being switched on. So you optimize for it. You structure your week to maintain it. You call it high performance.

And your body is trying to tell you something very different.

One more question before we go further. Notice what happens in your body when you read it, not just your mind.

When things slow down, a quiet weekend, a cancelled meeting, a rare afternoon with nothing scheduled, does your body relax?

Or does it get uncomfortable? Does restlessness show up? Irritability? A pull toward your phone, your inbox, your to-do list?

If that’s happening, your nervous system is telling you that stillness feels like a threat.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a regulation problem. And no amount of clear priorities fixes it.

Now let’s go through the poll.

Every one of those answers is real. Every one of them works. And every one of them is a survival strategy dressed up as self-regulation.

Clear priorities. 38%.

This was the top answer, and it’s the most sophisticated one. Because it sounds like wisdom. It sounds like leadership.

Here’s what it actually is.

When your nervous system is under threat, one of its primary responses is to narrow focus. Not because you became clearer. Because your system is conserving resources. Under threat, your brain drops everything non-essential and locks onto what feels controllable.

Clear priorities during high-pressure weeks often isn’t clarity. It’s tunnel vision. It’s your system saying: if I focus here, I don’t have to feel the rest.

The tell? How do you feel when a priority shifts unexpectedly? If your whole system spikes, irritation, anxiety, a sense of losing control, that’s not priority clarity. That’s survival structure.

The structure isn’t holding your work together. It’s holding your nervous system together.

Staying busy. 31%.

Staying busy is the oldest survival strategy in the high-achiever’s toolkit. Movement as avoidance. Productivity as a regulation substitute. The calendar as a buffer between you and your own interior.

When you’re busy, you don’t have to feel. When you’re busy, the noise inside is manageable because the noise outside is louder.

I know this because I lived it. I built an entire identity out of busyness. Output as proof that I was okay. Delivery as evidence that nothing was wrong.

And one day my body stopped cooperating. The way bodies do.

A tiredness that sleep didn’t touch. A flatness underneath the performance. A sense that something that used to feel like fuel now felt like running on fumes.

Your body doesn’t forget what you ask it to hold. It just waits.

Physical training. 15%.

This one is different, to a degree. Physical movement is one of the few things that actually does discharge stress hormones from the body. Exercise metabolizes cortisol and adrenaline in a way most strategies don’t. The physiology is real.

So why is it in the survival category?

Because of how high-performers use it.

For most of you, physical training isn’t regulation. It’s discharge. You push through a brutal week and then you push through a brutal workout. Rest days feel wrong. Soft movement feels insufficient. You need the exhaustion to feel like you did something.

That’s not regulating your nervous system. That’s using physical stress to temporarily override psychological stress.

It works. But you’re not building capacity. You’re burning off activation enough to reload.

The question is simple: can you move your body gently and feel okay? Or does it have to be hard to feel like enough?

I just push through. 15%.

The most honest answer in the poll.

There’s something almost dignified about the straightforwardness of it. No pretense of a strategy. Just: this is hard and I keep going anyway.

But here’s what pushing through actually does in the body.

It doesn’t build resilience. That’s the myth.

What it builds is a higher threshold for discomfort. Which sounds the same. But isn’t.

Resilience is the capacity to move through difficulty and return to baseline. A high threshold for discomfort means your baseline has shifted.

What used to feel dysregulated now feels normal. What used to feel like a warning signal, you’ve learned to override.

You’ve gotten better at not feeling it. Not at processing it. Not at integrating it. At not feeling it.

And at some point, the body stops sending quiet signals. And starts sending loud ones.

This isn’t positioning. The research backs every word.

The clinical distinction is between strategies that actually return your nervous system to a regulated state and strategies that modulate activation without resolving it.

Every answer in that poll operates in the second category.

Narrowing focus under pressure is a documented sympathetic nervous system response to perceived threat. Polyvagal research is clear: it’s adaptive, and it’s also what your brain does automatically under stress. That’s not the same as regulation.

Perpetual motion, staying busy, prevents the nervous system from completing its stress cycle. Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Deb Dana: all of them name this explicitly. The cycle needs completion to regulate. Busyness interrupts completion.

High-intensity training at the wrong arousal level can actually reinforce sympathetic dominance rather than discharge it. Gentle, somatic movement regulates. Punishing workouts, for most high-performers, don’t.

And suppression research is unambiguous. James Gross at Stanford has spent decades on this: suppression maintains or increases physiological arousal while reducing outward expression. The body stays activated. The signal just goes underground.

So when I say none of those answers are regulation, I’m not being provocative. I’m being precise.

What real regulation actually looks like?

Not techniques. Markers. Because techniques you can do wrong. Markers you can feel.

Marker one: You can be still and not be restless.

The body that can sit in five minutes of quiet without reaching for something, phone, task, thought spiral, that body has some access to safety. Test yourself this week. Five minutes. No input. No output. Just notice what happens. The discomfort that arises is the data.

Marker two: You can feel the pressure without becoming the pressure.

Regulated under pressure looks like: this is a lot, I can feel that it’s a lot, and I’m still connected to myself.

Dysregulated under pressure looks like: I become the problem. I am the urgency. My identity fuses with the demand.

You probably know what that fusion feels like, the moment where you stop being someone managing a hard week and start being the hard week itself.

Marker three: Your recovery speed.

Not how well you perform.

How fast you return to baseline after the performance.

After a hard conversation, how long until you’re actually okay?

After a crisis moment, how long until your body lets it go?

After a conflict, how long does it live in your chest?

High-performers with dysregulated nervous systems perform fine. They recover slowly.

They need more distance, more decompression, more time between demands than they have available.

And they usually interpret this as weakness.

It’s not weakness. It’s a capacity issue. And capacity is buildable, but not by doing more of what you’re already doing.

The one thing that changes it.

Not a practice. Not a morning routine. Not another tool for the toolkit.

You stop treating your nervous system like an obstacle to your performance and start treating it like the source of it.

Right now, most of you are managing your nervous system. Keeping it quiet enough that you can keep going. Keeping it steady enough that it doesn’t interrupt the output. You are performing despite your body.

What becomes available when you perform from your body is categorically different.

The decisions are different. The creativity is different. The leadership is different. The sustainability is completely different.

Right now your model is: push until I break, recover, push again.

The regulated model is: build genuine capacity, work from that capacity, capacity grows.

Those are not the same arc.

Here’s what I need you to hear.

• You built a phenomenal system. You built it under conditions that required it. You got very, very good at it. And that system got you here.

  
  

The question is not: what’s wrong with me?

The question is: is this system still the right tool for where I’m going?

Because the dysregulation that worked in your thirties becomes the limitation in your forties. The override that built your first success becomes the ceiling on your next one. The survival strategy that felt like strength becomes the thing your body has to work around.

You’re not failing. Not at all. You’re outgrowing the code. And that’s a completely different problem, with a completely different solution.

Before you close this.

Thirteen people answered that poll.

Every single one of them told the truth.

Clear priorities. Staying busy. Physical training. Push through.

All real. All working. All costing something.

And none of them are what I would call regulation.

Because regulation, real regulation, doesn’t feel like managing pressure.

It feels like the pressure doesn’t own you anymore. You can feel it. You can work inside it. And you remain, recognizably, yourself.

One question before you go. Not for me. For yourself.

What would be different in your work, in your leadership, if your body wasn’t something you had to override to get there?

Sit with that.

If something in this piece named something you’ve been living, not thinking about, living, I’d love to know. Find me on LinkedIn or reach out directly.

The door to Golden Bridge opens March 1st. Eight spots. Three months of this work, at the code level.