The Risk of Too Much

The board meeting is next week and you’ve sent out the pre-read. You now have seven days to be productive, move on, and tackle the next thing on your list.

Instead, at 3am, you’re rewriting the report in your head: adding the slide you forgot, anticipating the question you can’t answer, and running seventeen mental simulations of a meeting that hasn’t happened yet.

Congratulations. You have just out-prepared yourself into exhaustion.

Somewhere between “prepared” and “3am rewrite number four,” you crossed a line. You’re not adding value anymore. But you are running cortisol like an expert.

Performance doesn’t scale with effort indefinitely; it peaks. On the way up, you’ve got interest, enthusiasm, and determination, the qualities that drive your expertise. At the top, you hit flow. But when keep pushing past the peak, the same engine that got you there starts running against you. First, worry. Then, rumination. Then a low-grade anxiety that follows you into the weekend.

Most high performers know this pattern well. They visit it regularly. Stopping feels like giving up, and staying busy feels like progress. You’re still doing something, even when you’ve passed the point of a reasonable risk/return outcome. The problem: the brain doesn’t distinguish between productive effort and anxious rehearsal. Both feel like work, but only one of them is.

Dr. Julia DiGangi, a neuroscientist who studies the intersection of emotional energy and leadership performance, calls these patterns the “overs” (overfunctioning, overachieving, overdoing). The “overs” are almost always motivated by fear, not excellence. CFOs, COOs, and senior leaders are particularly susceptible, because they are responsible for outcomes. So the brain keeps looking for threats to neutralize, even after the deliverable is out the door.

Think about how you manage risk in your organization. You identify the exposure, assess the probability, weigh the impact, and build a mitigation strategy. You do not catastrophize about every possible outcome with no plan to address them.

And yet.

The same rigor you apply to your balance sheet rarely gets applied to your own energy. You run yourself like an unmanaged asset: no floor, no ceiling, no monitoring. You would never let a key system operate that way. But here you are at 3am, fully committed to a problem that either can’t be solved tonight or doesn’t exist at all.

Of course you care about doing good work. That’s how you got to this role. The issue is whether what you’re doing right now is actually improving the outcome or whether it’s just the fear talking.

Start treating your energy the way you treat organizational risk. When the spiral starts, run the assessment: What’s the actual probability this goes wrong? What’s the real impact if it does? What can I do about it right now, at this hour? If the answer to that last question is nothing, you’ve just identified an unproductive risk response. Log it and shut it down.

The most effective leaders I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who never worry. They’re the ones who know when more is too much.

If you’re at the point of “too much” (too much work, too many unanswered questions, too many challenges), feel free to set up time to talk. I work with senior leaders who hit “too much” and need help. www.kathygledhill.com