Where Did The Gas Pedal Go?

A client of mine spent the better part of a year at full speed.

Not by choice…

His client’s internal team wasn’t staffed yet, so he was carrying work that he was never meant to carry alone.

Then they hired the team.

Almost overnight, he went from a hundred miles an hour to five.

I watched it happen. A flinch, more than relief.

Part of him wanted to nap for a week. And the other part of him panicked, because the gas pedal was suddenly just… gone.

How many times have you promised yourself you just need to make it to vacation, and the second you finally stopped, your body picked a fight with you? A cold. A migraine. Bone tired, right when you were finally supposed to be free.

There’s a name for that.

The Crash

When you run on stress hormones long enough to keep pace with something demanding, and the pace suddenly disappears, those hormones drop hard instead of tapering off.

That’s the flat, foggy, short fused feeling after a big push ends. And it’s why people get sick the week after the deadline, not during it.

Your body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to: catching up.

I got curious about my client’s version of it, so I went looking for the science.

There’s a finding from 1908 that still holds up, called the Yerkes-Dodson law. It says performance peaks at a moderate level of mental arousal, and the ideal amount depends on what you’re actually doing.

Simple, familiar tasks, like clearing your inbox or running through a status update call, perform best fast and revved up.

Complex thinking like deciding who’s ready for the next promotion or what the next 90 days should look like works better at a slower pace than most of us run at.

Meaning: If we are going to be strategic, our minds and bodies need to slow down.

Though it’s good for when you need to crank through a task quickly, living in high performance / high arousal mode indefinitely isn’t good for our bodies or our business.

Because when the project is done and the high arousal is gone, we forget everything else we need to do.

Your hormones don’t get the memo. They don’t just turn off when the work is done.

My client didn’t know any of this. He just knew something felt off.

He was still braced for a pace that wasn’t there anymore.

The Descent

Going from a hundred miles an hour to five doesn’t happen just because the workload does.

Your body and your brain need a runway, same as a plane landing. You can’t drop straight from cruising speed to a stop.

A few things that help you make that landing:

Recognize what just happened. Just a beat where you let yourself know the hard part is over. “That was a lot, and I got through it.” Or maybe it’s simpler than that: “It’s done. I can stop bracing now.” Whatever the words are, say them.

Give yourself permission to recalibrate. Small doses of something that actually calms you, built into the days you’re already living. A walk between calls. Time outside before the inbox opens. Dancing, if that’s your thing. Do it daily, even in short bursts, until the bracing eases and you start to feel steady instead of tense.

Once you feel steady, come back to strategic thinking at your new speed. Your brain’s sharpest thinking happens close to when you wake up, before the day’s decisions start wearing it down. That’s biology, plain and simple. Block an hour for your morning strategy dump. A real hour, not a stolen five minutes between meetings.

💡Try This

The residual panic you feel is a real physiological response. It calms the same way every time.

Give it an ending. Give yourself permission to slow down. And remember that your best strategic thinking runs at exactly this speed.

To your best thinking, at its own pace,

Laurie