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“It is absurd that I could achieve what I did in four weeks!” — Henry F., former student.
In part I, we explored why the best decisions are emotional. In part II, we’ll look at the phenomenon of emotional debt and explore tools to mitigate its consequences.
If you’ve ever worked at a fast-growing startup, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “technical debt.” Code is scrappily thrown together so that the product can function. It’s done with the understanding that this debt will accumulate and eventually cause things to break if not addressed down the line.
Something similar can also happen with the human nervous system. We are able to buffer intensely stressful experiences by repressing our emotions in the moment (sometimes subconsciously). We save “feeling our feelings” for a later point when we’re more equipped to deal with them. But if we never unpack what’s there, we can accumulate emotional debt that contributes to burnout and causes issues with our bodies.
This isn’t a solved science, and not all cases of burnout or emotional reactivity are the result of accumulated stress reactions. But this “body keeps the score” model has gained a lot of traction in recent years (see the recent New York Magazine cover story). It has its critics, but in my work coaching founders, I’ve seen firsthand how helpful this framework can be.
With that caveat in mind, let’s explore the concept of emotional debt and how to clear it.
Imagine the following scenario: you’re an employee who’s just been fired from your role (or, if you’re a founder, pretend your company went bankrupt overnight). Upon receiving the news, you’re likely to experience a surge of adrenaline and numbness—feeling disassociated or even dazed—right up until you arrive home and collapse on the couch. At this point, ideally the buffered emotions would surge to the surface to be experienced and processed.
This is what’s known in therapy circles as completing the “mobilization response,” and it’s an evolutionary process that we have hardwired into our nervous systems. Most mammals have an built-in mechanism for paying off this emotional debt.
To illustrate, witness this footage of an impala barely escaping from the jaws of a leopard. Once it realizes that it’s safe, lying on the ground, the impala’s entire body begins to shake—discharging the energy and completing the mobilization response that was triggered by encountering a predator. (These observations come from the work of Dr. Peter Levine, a biophysics and psychology doctorate who wrote one of the seminal texts on trauma processing.)
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Somewhere along the way, many of us human mammals have forgotten how to complete these physiological stress cycles. Research has shown that this accumulated emotional debt wreaks havoc on our nervous systems—often leaving us stuck in hyper-aroused (anxious) or disassociated (shut-down) states. Most of the scientific literature focuses on people with extreme cases of PTSD, but I’ve seen these patterns play out with clients from a range of backgrounds.
In the short term, there are times when building up emotional debt is essential to survival. We have this biological wiring for an important reason: it allowed our ancestors to get through intensely stressful experiences and only process them once safety had been reached.
However, if left unaddressed—especially in a world filled with ambient sources of stress—these buffered experiences accumulate and contribute to various health conditions or burnout.
In the neuroscience literature, this emotional debt is labeled “allostatic overload.” It typically presents with what’s known as a “fluctuating or heightened neuroendocrine response”—which is the technical way of saying adrenaline floods our system.
Allostatic overload has a range of downstream consequences, like significantly accelerated cellular aging, increased mortality, and chronic health conditions. This is from where phrases like “the body keeps the score” and “the issues are in the tissues” arise.
One recent study found that allostatic overload causes a 60% increase in energy expenditure. This is energy produced by the body that is essentially wasted, like pressing your foot on the gas pedal without first removing the emergency brake. You may see it manifest in your body as anxiety or agitation.
For individuals with a higher degree of emotional debt, their nervous systems will be prone to greater fragility and reactivity in relationships. They may be more liable to shut down in high-pressure situations. This can become a vicious cycle, leading to the loss of support nets of friends or romantic partners, causing even more stress to the system.
Here’s an example from my time working as a venture-backed startup founder. There were some co-workers whose critical feedback elicited a disproportionate response in me—I’d get triggered. The resulting spike in shame, anxiety, or anger would severely diminish my capacity to act rationally in that moment or empathize with myself or others. My feelings usually didn’t match the scale of the situation—they were residual, repressed emotions from the past, trying to claw their way to the surface.
Perhaps you can relate? This is a sign of emotional debt at play.
My collaborator Jan Chipchase and I sought to explore the long-term consequences of accumulating this physiological debt. We surveyed 261 leaders from 43 countries about their experiences with burnout. We presented our findings in the Emotional Resilience in Leadership Report, hearing firsthand what happens when emotional debt accumulates beyond our capacity.
One San Francisco-based participant described his “breaking point”: “I remember…getting off a call with my client at the time during an extremely stressful project phase. My brain went completely blank like it was frozen or something, and then tears just streamed down my face. I wasn't able to make any decisions or have a conversation, and I had to just go home and try to rest.”
If you are in a leadership position, your emotional debt will have an outsized impact on your team and the company culture. “Emotional contagion” occurs when the moods and feelings from one person are passed to others. Research has shown that because of their role, leaders are particularly contagious. I’ve seen up close how calm managers impart serenity to their team, and highly anxious managers add to their reports’ stress. (My previous piece has more on this topic.)
In my work as a founder coach and facilitated breath repatterning (FBR) practitioner, I’ve guided hundreds of people through processing all manner of stored emotions—from reliving the fear of a near-death drowning, to fully grieving the loss of a loved one, to recovering from burnout.