3 Strategies to Relax Without Losing Momentum During Disruption

Disruption sends your nervous system into overdrive. It narrows your attention, floods your body with stress hormones, and cues your brain to default to old habits and reactive behaviors. This response might be helpful in a short-term crisis—but it’s unsustainable in long-term complexity.

Relaxation isn’t disengagement—it’s recalibration. It’s how you reset your system so you can access your full executive intelligence: strategic thinking, emotional regulation, intuition, and creativity. These aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re the core capabilities you need in moments of volatility.

From a neuroscience perspective, chronic stress activates the sympathetic nervous system (your “fight or flight” mode). Over time, this reduces prefrontal cortex function—the part of your brain responsible for focus, decision-making, and impulse control—and increases reactivity and tunnel vision. Relaxation activates the parasympathetic nervous system, bringing your body into a state of restoration and expanding your cognitive and emotional range.

But relaxing when things are uncertain can feel risky or even wrong. That’s why you need structure—simple practices that cue your body to reset even in high-stakes environments.

Here are three strategies we teach leaders who want to lead skillfully under pressure—without burning out:

1. Schedule Micro-Recovery Moments

When everything feels urgent, the body mimics that urgency—tight, fast, shallow. These micro-states build up into exhaustion if we don’t break the cycle.

Micro-recovery breaks interrupt chronic stress and replenish executive capacity.

Even a few minutes of deep breathing or silence can regulate your autonomic nervous system and reduce cortisol levels. The result? More centered thinking and reduced emotional volatility. 

This boosts clarity, improves decision quality, and reduces emotional spillover into your team.

A 2021 study published in Nature found that short mindful pauses (under 5 minutes) significantly improved sustained attention and reduced stress-related biomarkers in high-demand roles.

Action: Block “reset” time into your calendar like a meeting. Use it for breathwork, silence, or stillness.

2. Use Physical Cues as Checkpoints

Your body is a real-time feedback system. But most executives override it—until burnout forces a pause.

Using body tension as a cue to relax trains your system to self-regulate in the moment.

When you notice a clenched jaw or tight shoulders, you can shift your state before it spirals. Over time, this builds interoceptive awareness—a key factor in emotional intelligence and resilience.

Stimulating the vagus nerve (which governs the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system) through slow exhalation or gentle movement increases heart rate variability (HRV)—a key predictor of leadership stamina, stress adaptability, and longevity.

This increases emotional agility, improves energy regulation, and reduces reactionary behavior.

Action: Choose one body signal (e.g., shallow breath, jaw tension) to track. Let that signal prompt a short breathing or movement reset.

3. Anchor Yourself with a Daily Closing Ritual

When your days bleed into nights, your nervous system stays on high alert. Sleep suffers. Recovery suffers. Strategic thinking suffers.

A daily ritual signals to your brain and body that it’s safe to downshift.

This isn’t about perfection—it’s about repetition. Even a 2-minute intentional close to your day can cue the release of mental load and prime your brain for deeper restoration overnight.

According to research from the University of Southern California, leaders who consistently engage in reflective rituals show improved default mode network (DMN) activity—linked to insight generation, moral reasoning, and creative problem-solving.

This enhances overnight integration, improves sleep quality, and builds the internal spaciousness needed for creative leadership.

Action: Keep it simple: 3 gratitudes + 1 breath practice + a symbolic act like lighting a candle or closing your laptop with intention.

When you restore your nervous system, you restore your leadership.

Relaxation during disruption isn’t a soft skill. It’s a high-performance move backed by neuroscience and field-tested by the most effective leaders we’ve worked with. It gives you back your clarity, widens your perspective, and helps you respond instead of react.

In moments of uncertainty, the most strategic thing you can do isn’t always to push harder—it’s to pause with intention, reset your internal state, and then act with greater alignment.

Because you can’t lead others through turbulence if you’re trapped in survival mode yourself.

Ready to upgrade how you lead through disruption?

Our Disruption Leadership Audit is a focused, science-backed tool designed to help you identify what’s working, what’s getting in your way, and what strategic resets you may need to lead with clarity, confidence, and calm—even in complexity.

Gain a snapshot of your current leadership patterns

Discover your reactive vs. responsive tendencies under pressure

Walk away with personalized strategies to stay grounded, focused, and effective

Book your Disruption Leadership Audit today and learn how to relax without losing momentum.

Because how you show up inside the disruption shapes everything that happens beyond it.

Author

Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations.

Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.