When Performance Stops Working

There comes a moment where doing more stops helping.

Not suddenly. Not dramatically.Nothing breaks on the outside.

The strategies that used to work still function. You are competent. Reliable. Respected. You still deliver. From the outside, your life looks intact. Productive. Even successful.

But inside, something has shifted.

Thinking harder no longer brings clarity. It brings noise. Pushing through doesn’t create momentum, only friction. Rest doesn’t feel restorative. It feels strangely unsettling, as if something you’ve been outrunning is starting to catch up.

Most high-performing leaders don’t talk about this phase. Not because they don’t feel it. Because there’s no language for it in the cultures they learned to succeed in. The only recognised problems are visible ones: performance drops, missed targets, conflict, burnout. As long as you’re still functioning, the system assumes everything is fine.

So this moment gets misnamed.

Stress.Fatigue.A temporary dip.Something to manage. Something to optimise.

But it isn’t any of those.

It’s a threshold.

Performance isn’t the problem.

For a long time, performance works because it organises us. Discipline creates structure. Standards create order. Goals give the nervous system something solid to hold on to. Performance can be a way of staying coherent in a demanding world.

For many people, it is also a way of staying safe.

Staying busy. Staying useful. Staying ahead of what might surface if things slow down. Performance becomes a form of regulation. It keeps the internal world contained and the external world impressed.

And for a long time, this strategy is rewarded.

Until it stops working.

Not because it was wrong.Because it has done its job.

There is a phase that arrives for many high performers that doesn’t look like failure. Often, it looks like increased effort with diminishing returns. More thinking, less clarity. More discipline, less energy. More control, less contact.

Some people feel it as irritability. A shorter fuse. A quiet impatience with others. Some feel it as flatness. A sense that things that should matter no longer quite land. Others feel it in the body first. Sleep that doesn’t restore. A constant tightness in the chest or jaw. A nervous system that never fully downshifts, even when life appears calm.

What makes this phase particularly difficult is that nothing is obviously wrong enough to justify stopping. You can still show up. You can still perform. You can still convince yourself that you just need to push through the next stretch.

So you do.

And the cost quietly accumulates.

This isn’t a motivation problem.

It’s the nervous system telling the truth.

When the body is braced for long enough, the brain stops organising around vision and starts organising around survival. Strategy narrows. Curiosity drops out. Everything becomes about getting through.

A system organised around threat cannot also organise around possibility.

This isn’t a mindset issue. It’s biology.

You can’t lead from vision when your body believes it is being hunted.

At this point, most leadership advice becomes actively unhelpful. Calls to “be more resilient” or “get clearer” assume that the issue lives in thinking or effort. But the problem here is not capability. It’s access.

Access to intuition.Access to emotional signal.Access to the quieter data that doesn’t shout, but matters.

Decisions still get made, but they feel heavier. Conversations still happen, but they feel tighter. You can speak fluently, but inside there’s a growing sense of distance from your own words. Leaders often describe it as functioning without contact. Being effective, but not fully present.

From the outside, this can look like strength. From the inside, it often feels like bracing.

High performance is often framed as virtue. Discipline. Grit. Endurance.

What gets talked about less is how often it also functions as avoidance. Not in a lazy sense. In a deeply human one. A way of not feeling what hasn’t had space to be felt. A way of staying oriented toward the next task instead of the current truth.

For some people, performance was never just ambition. It was protection. It kept the world predictable. It created identity. It kept difficult things at bay.

And then, eventually, the body stops cooperating.

Not in rebellion.In intelligence.

It’s not saying “quit.”It’s saying “stop overriding me.”

That moment is destabilising for people who have built their lives on competence. Because if effort no longer produces clarity, the old maps stop working. And without those maps, the quiet becomes loud.

This is usually where people reach for solutions. New frameworks. New routines. New ways to optimise what is already overloaded.

But what’s needed here isn’t improvement.

It’s contact.

Contact with what has been ignored in the name of function. Contact with signals that don’t speak in words or KPIs. Contact with the parts of experience that don’t respond to force.

This is where presence stops being an idea and becomes unavoidable.

Not presence as a technique. Not something you add to an already crowded life. Presence as what remains when you stop interfering with yourself.

Slowing down here is not a lifestyle choice. It’s a requirement. Not because slowing is virtuous, but because speed is no longer informative.

In the quiet, things become audible that were previously drowned out. Sensations. Emotions. Knowing that doesn’t arrive as thought.

This is why so many high performers stay busy. Not because they love intensity. Because the quiet confronts them with what has been deferred.

I’m careful about how much personal story I bring into public writing. But I know this terrain from the inside.

I’ve lived the cost of performing success while being disconnected from myself.

For a long time, I could function under pressure. I could deliver. I could stay composed. In certain environments, that gets rewarded endlessly.

Until the internal system that made it possible collapsed.

What failed wasn’t competence.It was the strategy of using performance to stay regulated.

That collapse forced something else to emerge. A way of leading that wasn’t built on control or endurance, but on contact. On listening. On trusting signals that can’t be forced into neat plans.

That shift didn’t make life easier.It made it truer.

When leaders arrive in this phase, they rarely name it directly. They don’t come asking for presence or intuition. They come asking why things feel harder than they should. Why decisions drain them more. Why they feel less patient, less clear, less alive.

What they are sensing is not a need to do more.

It’s a need to stop fighting themselves in order to function.

This isn’t a call to abandon ambition or effort.It’s an invitation to notice what they’re costing, and whether they’re still serving what matters.

This work is not about becoming better. It’s about becoming available again. Available to yourself. To others. To the reality you’re actually living in, not the one you’ve been managing.

Clarity doesn’t arrive here through force. It arrives through reduction. Less internal noise. Less bracing. Less self-override.

And from that quieter place, something steadier becomes possible.

If you recognise yourself in this, there’s nothing to fix right now.

Just notice the reflex to push.Notice the urge to explain.Notice how quickly the system wants to regain control.

Then notice what happens if you don’t.

Sometimes clarity doesn’t arrive as an answer.Sometimes it arrives as a settling.

That is often where real leadership begins.

https://gilleschatelin.substack.com/i/184435884/when-performance-stops-working