Health, Stress, and Leadership Performance
Leaders are often judged as if decision-making quality is purely a matter of intelligence, values, or willpower. That assumption is convenient because it keeps everything in the realm of motivation and mindset. It also produces inaccurate diagnoses by overlooking the biological system responsible for thought. If the system is underbuilt, underfueled, or chronically strained, performance can degrade even when intent is strong.
Let’s connect two ideas that are usually discussed separately. The first is health, specifically the nutritional substrates that enable executive function. The second is challenge, specifically the reality that people can functionally compensate for deficits until they cannot. Together, they explain many aspects of what appears to be “mysterious” leadership failure, burnout, emotional reactivity, impulsive decisions, and a decline in judgment under pressure.
Executive Function Is a Biological Output
Executive function is not a motivational slogan. It is the brain’s capacity to plan, inhibit impulses, regulate emotion, hold multiple variables in mind, and choose actions aligned with future outcomes. That set of abilities relies heavily on the prefrontal cortex, which regulates limbic reactivity. In plain terms, executive function is what prevents your stress response from becoming a permanent part of your personality.
Because executive function is an output, it has constraints. It depends on the structural integrity of neural tissue, the quality of signal transmission, and the availability of metabolic resources. If those foundations are compromised, coaching and training can still be beneficial, but only within the limits of available capacity. This is why some people “know better” and still cannot reliably do better when stress rises.
Nutrition Does Not Make You Superhuman, It Makes You Functional
The claim here is not that nutrition turns an average person into a genius, although it can certainly help if that is the goal. Instead, the claim is simpler and more defensible. Nutrition provides the raw materials that allow your cognitive system to operate as designed, and it also provides the foundation for potential.
The brain is a metabolically expensive tissue. It is built from fat-rich structures, relies on stable membranes, and requires constant maintenance and repair. When you remove key inputs for a long enough period, the result is not always an immediate collapse. The result is often a slow reduction in resilience, stress tolerance, recovery capacity, and cognitive stability. This is partly why some who adopt less-than-ideal dietary patterns can slowly degrade their cognitive abilities over time.
The Substrates That Matter Most for Judgment
Some nutrients are optional in the sense that the body can adapt to minor shortfalls. Others are functionally non-negotiable for cognitive performance. If you starve the brain of critical building blocks, you may still “get by” for a while, but you will do it at a cost.
Cholesterol is a structural component of neural membranes and is heavily tied to myelin integrity. Omega-3 fatty acids, particularly DHA and EPA, support membrane fluidity and signaling, and are closely linked to neuroinflammation and synaptic function. Choline supports acetylcholine, which plays a crucial role in attention, learning, and memory, and it also supports membrane phospholipids, which are essential for neural structure. Complete protein supplies amino acids that serve as neurotransmitter precursors and repair inputs, which becomes even more important under stress and high demand.
This is where modern dieting trends can collide with cognitive reality. Dietary patterns that systematically restrict animal foods, fear dietary fat, or treat chronic energy restriction as a lifestyle can reduce access to these inputs. Sometimes the deficits are clinical and obvious. More often, they are subclinical and cumulative, and the person simply becomes less stable under pressure over time.
Energy Deficit Shrinks the Margin for Self-Control
Self-control is not free. Working memory, impulse inhibition, and emotional regulation are among the first functions to degrade when the brain operates with reduced energy availability. People often describe this as irritability, impatience, poor sleep, reduced frustration tolerance, and diminished ability to think beyond the present moment. The ability to consider long-term and complex ideas simply fades away. This is a problem for leaders who adopt such habits.
Sure, short, strategic fasting can have specific signaling effects and can be used intelligently and effectively in certain contexts. However, chronic energy restriction is different. When the body interprets sustained scarcity, it prioritizes survival economics, not long-term neural investment. In leadership terms, that often means the person becomes more reactive, more short-term, more defensive, and less capable of complex thinking when the environment becomes demanding. This is literally the antithesis of leadership requirements.
Functional Compensation Can Hide Deficits for Years
This is where the “challenge” portion matters. Human beings are remarkably adaptive, and that adaptiveness can act as a trap if you confuse coping with capacity. Indeed, a person can compensate for weak substrates through structure, routines, caffeine, stimulants, strict scheduling, avoidance of complex situations, reliance on supportive colleagues, or sheer grit. However, those compensations can create the appearance of stability and competence.
Let’s be clear about something. Compensation is not the same as durability. It often works until the demand rises, the environment becomes unstable, sleep declines, stress accumulates, or the person loses the support they were relying on. Then the gap becomes visible, and it is often interpreted as a sudden personal failure. In reality, it may simply be the result of an overextended compensation strategy collapsing.
Challenge Exposes the Truth, It Does Not Create the Weakness
When people fail under pressure, observers often blame the pressure. That diagnosis is emotionally satisfying because it suggests the solution is to reduce difficulty. However, it is also frequently wrong, because difficulty does not manufacture deficits. Difficulty merely reveals them.
This is why demanding environments can be brutally clarifying. They reveal whether a person can maintain judgment when tired, regulate emotion when provoked, think strategically when outcomes are uncertain, and inhibit impulses when consequences are delayed. If outcomes matter, then the ability to operate effectively in demanding environments is crucial. And this is to say that if nutrition and recovery are poor, the person may have far less margin than anyone realizes, including themselves.
Leadership Development Often Tries to Fix the Wrong Layer
Most leadership development focuses on behaviors, communication techniques, emotional intelligence frameworks, and mindset training. This is a mistake. Granted, those can be useful. However, they become less useful when they are used as substitutes for substrate, recovery, and functional capacity.
If a leader is depleted, undernourished, chronically under-recovered, and operating with a narrow energy budget, asking them to “be more patient” is like asking a phone at five percent battery to run a demanding application all day. Sure, it might do it for a while if the person is disciplined and shuts down every other app. Even then, it will not last indefinitely, and the failure mode will resemble a character when it is actually a capacity issue.
A More Practical Way to Think About Performance
A simple model is helpful here. Biology provides capacity, experience provides refinement, and environment applies demand. When demand is low, compensation can hide weak capacity. When demand rises, compensation fails, and capacity becomes visible.
This matters because it changes what you do next. Instead of treating every performance issue as a motivation issue, you examine the basic inputs. Is the person sleeping, fueling, and recovering? Are they running on chronic restriction? Are they relying on stimulants to simulate stability? Are they avoiding fats and nutrient-dense foods while asking their brain to perform like a high-output machine? Unfortunately, most development initiatives don’t even consider the preceding.
What This Means for Leaders and Organizations
If your organization invests heavily in training but ignores the biology of performance, I think you are building on unstable ground. If your culture rewards chronic overwork and treats food, sleep, and recovery as optional, you will select for brittle leadership. If your leaders are constantly depleted, they will increasingly default to short-term decisions, emotional reactivity, and rigid thinking, even if they are smart and well-trained.
Now, this is not a call for comfort culture. That road simply leads to stagnation and decline. Instead, this is a call for seriousness and accuracy. High standards require high capacity, and capacity requires adequate substrate. If you want disciplined execution, stable judgment, and long-range thinking, you must treat the leader’s cognitive system as a system that requires inputs, maintenance, and periodic rebuilding. Health simply cannot be ignored.
Final Thoughts
The leadership world constantly discusses decision-making, but rarely inquires into what it comprises. This is a mistake. Executive function is not a vibe, and pep rallies don’t secure wins. Executive function is a biologically grounded capability that depends on structural integrity, metabolic sufficiency, and recovery capacity. It really is that simple.
Of course, the second error is mistaking compensation for strength. People can “hold it together” for a long time while gradually degrading. Challenge is necessary for many reasons, but in this case, it reveals whether the system is robust or merely propped up. If you care about leadership outcomes, you need both sides of the equation, substrate and challenge, because one determines capacity and the other reveals whether that capacity is real.
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Dr. Robertson is a health researcher and educator, not a physician. The information provided here is not medical advice, a professional diagnosis, opinion, treatment, or service to you or any other individual. The information provided is for educational and anecdotal purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or professional care. You should not use this information as a substitute for a visit, call, consultation, or the advice of your physician or other healthcare providers. Dr. Robertson is not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment, diagnosis, or additional information, services, or products you obtain or utilize. IF YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY, YOU SHOULD IMMEDIATELY CALL 911 OR YOUR PHYSICIAN.
