In a coaching call this week, a current client (the CEO of a fast-growing engineering business)  showed up sounding defeated. “I felt flat and unmotivated for four or five days,” he said. “It felt like I’d gone all the way back again.”

He’d had a genuinely hard Friday and that was enough to send him spiraling back down the mountain he’d just climbed. He spent the whole weekend low and frustrated, thinking he’d lost all his progress under one high pressure day.

I want to walk you through what I told him, because if you’re a leader doing any kind of inner work – breathwork, therapy, coaching, meditation, whatever your practice is – you will hit this exact moment. And what you do with it matters more than the moment itself.

Your stress response is 90 seconds long. What happens after that is on you.

Here’s the physiology: the chemical stress response in your body – the cortisol and adrenaline spike that happens the instant something triggers you – lasts about 90 seconds. That’s it. If you let it move through you, it peaks and passes, and you’re left in a regulated nervous system, able to think clearly again.

But most of us don’t let it pass. We pick it up and then loop it over and over in our head. Someone doesn’t do their job properly and instead of feeling the spike and letting it go, we’re attached to the story and every replay re-triggers the chemical response keeping us locked in. Ninety seconds becomes an afternoon. An afternoon becomes a weekend.

In this scenario the client is now in a dysregulated sympathetic response. When your nervous system is dysregulated it moves into survival mode (and contraction). Being aware of dysregulation is the key to being able to let the emotion pass and bringing the body back into a regulated, expansive, grounded state where you’re able to think clearly and choose your response instead of being run by it. 

For my client, the fix wasn’t complicated. It was: notice the trigger, and buy yourself 90 seconds before you respond. In that time, breathe: an extended exhale – in through the nose, out slowly through the nose or mouth, a pause, and in again. That’s it. That’s the entire intervention. Breathing is the fastest way to physiologically signal to your nervous system that the threat has passed.

Nothing grows from contraction

When you’re triggered, your body contracts. It’s a physical sensation before it’s ever a thought – a tightening in the chest, the jaw, the shoulders. The problem arises when you find yourself staying in a dysregulated state, when one stressor layers on top of another and another without the emotions having time to pass through. This slow compounding effect is what leads to burnout, contraction and feeling stuck.

That’s what happened to my client. One trigger on a Friday, unaddressed, compounded by a nervous system already under ongoing work pressure, the story took hold and he got stuck in the emotion of frustration. It took his body four or five days to find its way back to baseline.

You can’t avoid the trigger, but you can increase your conscious awareness and know your stress signal so that the moment you notice the contraction, there is enough of a pause in your system that you have a choice point – you can keep looping, or you can consciously offset it.

Three ways to circumvent the spiraling: 

breathe into your chest and physically create space,

change your environment – walk outside, get in the ocean, put on music, light a candle, 

click your fingers as a physical reset cue. 

Anything that tells your body: this loop is over, we’re safe now.

Your ego is not trying to help you here

There’s a reason old patterns are so sticky, even once you’ve clearly outgrown them. If you’ve done any real inner work – forgiven someone, shed an old identity, found your voice, showing up – your ego experiences this disintegration as a loss. The identity you’ve carried for decades doesn’t disappear just because you’ve had a breakthrough. It goes looking for a way back in. And a trigger is exactly that: a little window where the old story gets to say, remember me? I’ll just play the old record.

This is the liminal space – one foot in the old version of you, one foot in the new – neither fully left behind. It’s the waiting area where it feels like you’re being tested and it’s genuinely uncomfortable.

And it’s also exactly where transformation happens. 

You don’t get to skip it. The discomfort of “going backwards” is not evidence that the work didn’t take. It’s evidence of how far you’ve actually come and now you can now feel the old pattern for what it is, which you couldn’t do before.

Stop chasing the goal. Start chasing the feeling underneath it.

The other thing my client and I talked through was his “North Star” – the vision he’s building toward. This is not just a list of external markers, you’re required to go one layer deeper: how do you actually want to feel? 

This matters because the felt sense behind a goal carries far more weight than the goal itself. Chase the external metric alone and, even if you hit it, you can end up hollow, because you never connected to the why. Chase the feeling, and the external stuff becomes the icing, not the cake. 

It also gives you a compass you can check in daily: “how do I want to feel?” becomes your mantra and reshapes decisions in a way that chasing an external goal never will.

The collapse is the redirection

When something collapses – a deal falls through, a hire doesn’t work out, a plan falls apart – it feels like failure. But if you reframe the experience to – this is clearing space for something better – you shorten the whole recovery arc because you’re not adding a second layer of story on top of the original event.

The takeaway

None of this is about never getting knocked off balance again. It’s about shrinking the gap between the trigger and your return to yourself – from five days, to one day, to an hour, to 90 seconds. 

If you’re leading a team, running a business, or holding a household together through a demanding season, this is the actual skill worth building – the capacity to regulate yourself under pressure so you can keep thinking clearly when it counts.

That’s the whole game. The faster you can come home to yourself, the more time you spend in an expansive, calm, grounded, conscious state, and which is where the real shifts happen.