Let’s be honest. Nobody puts “Excellence in Panicked Decision-Making” on their LinkedIn profile. We talk about leadership like it’s a heroic journey about vision, strategy, and confident strides. But… many times it feels like a quiet, internal cage match with yourself over what you’re actually doing here.
I’ve had more of these conversations around anxiety lately than ever before. With leaders and executives who, by all accounts, have made it. They’ve built companies, led teams, earned the title. And yet, behind the veneer of success is a gnawing fear.
One leader told me: “Everybody is now working remote and it’s going well. The problem is, I don’t know what to do and I have no idea if the team even needs me”. That wasn’t an isolated confession. It’s a sentence I’ve heard in different forms over and over again… the quiet fear that leadership itself is becoming optional. It captures the hidden engine of leadership anxiety: the creeping fear that your role, your value, even your team’s need for you, is slipping away.
And today, the drivers are multiplying. Uncertainty is the new normal. Technology threatens to replace not just jobs but leaders themselves. Restructurings shuffle responsibilities faster than people can adapt. The more responsibility you hold, the less certainty you feel about whether you matter.
We keep talking about stress. Stress management workshops. Stress resilience toolkits. But stress is what you feel when the threat is clear. Anxiety is different. It’s a neurochemical reaction to the unknowns. And modern leaders are drowning in unknowns.
Your Brain on Panic: The Executive’s Bug
Anxiety is a physiological hijack. An anxious brain literally runs on faulty code. When threat circuits light up, your brain narrows its focus. Working memory shrinks. Complexity becomes harder to process. You lose the mental bandwidth for strategy, empathy, or long-term thinking.
Researchers even have a name for it: Attentional Control Theory. But you don’t need a paper to recognize it. You’ve lived it: the 1am mental loop you can’t switch off. The email you reread five times before hitting send. The meeting where your mind narrows in on one detail and you can’t hear the rest.
The brain is busy preparing for a threat that may not even exist. Which means it isn’t available for the work leadership actually demands.
The Predictable Consequences
When anxiety runs unchecked, the patterns are remarkably consistent:
- Paralysis of analysis: Decisions get delayed, not because the options are better, but because the leader can’t bear the discomfort of choosing. Endless analysis looks like diligence, but it’s really a neurochemical retreat.
- The micromanagement trap: An anxious brain grasps for control wherever it can. That’s why leaders start triple-checking slide decks or hovering over minor tasks. Micromanagement is quite often mistrusting your own grip on the bigger picture rather than mistrusting your team.
- The contagious leader: This is the most insidious. Anxiety spreads. Research on emotional contagion shows how a clipped tone, restless pacing, or an impatient sigh infects a room. You don’t have to say “I’m anxious”. Your team already feels it. And once they do, collective problem-solving capacity drops. The well gets poisoned.
The Paradox of Traits
The very traits that often drive leaders to the top such as vigilance, preparedness, the need for control, become liabilities when anxiety becomes chronic.
The Yerkes-Dodson Law still applies. A touch of anxiety can sharpen vigilance and keep you prepared. But beyond that point, vigilance mutates into tunnel vision, preparedness into paralysis, control into suffocation.
And the cost is high. Chronic anxiety raises cortisol, weakens immunity, and chips away at the health and presence leaders need most. The more you push it down, the more it shows up in the way you walk into a room, the way you speak, the way your team feels around you… and yes, also how the room smells. Like literally.
From Anxiety to Anchor
So, what do you do? You can’t eliminate anxiety. Anxiety is baked into leadership. The job is asymmetric: more responsibility than control. Of course there’s anxiety. The task is to transform it. To turn the gnawing paralysis of anxiety into the focused vigilance of an anchor.
That starts with vulnerability. Not oversharing, not confessing every 2am fear, but measured acknowledgment. Researchers call it authentic leadership (Walumbwa et al., 2008)… balancing confidence with openness. Saying out loud that uncertainty exists, that you don’t always have the answer, that it’s okay to feel rattled.
This simple acknowledgment will create psychological safety. It tells the team: You’re allowed to be human here.
The Quiet Mark of Trust
Anxiety is the shadow side of responsibility. It’s not necessarily a proof of weakness but a proof that you actually care. It can be a signal that you’ve been through the fire and chose to keep leading anyway.
With all the glorification of what leadership is and what it’s not. Leadership is also to a degree the courage to face anxiety, admit it… and still act. Sometimes that means having the hard conversation with yourself. And sometimes it means having the honest one with your team. Because in the end, anxiety doesn’t disappear when you lock the door. It only changes when you open it.