Stop Stuffing It
How to make your anxiety work for you and why the leaders who can are changing everything around them.
You’ve gotten really good at it.
The performance. Shoulders back, voice even, jaw relaxed. You walk into the high-stakes meeting, the hard conversation, the make-or-break decision, and you look like none of it touches you. Because that’s what leaders do. They hold it together. They don’t rattle. They certainly don’t sit in a boardroom and say, “Actually, I’m kind of terrified right now.”
So you stuff it. You square your shoulders and go.
And somewhere around 2am, it wakes you up anyway.
Suppressing anxiety doesn’t make it disappear. It makes it louder — and eventually, it finds a way out.
It comes out in your tone when a team member asks the wrong question at the wrong moment. It comes out in the decision you make when you’re depleted at 4pm that you’d never make at 9am. It comes out in the tension your people feel in the room before you’ve said a single word, because humans are wired to detect threat in the nervous systems of the people around them.
The problem was never that you felt anxious. The problem is what you’ve been taught to do with it.
After more than a decade coaching executives, founders, and high-stakes leaders, I can tell you with confidence: the leaders who have mastered suppression are often the ones struggling the most. Because they’ve built an entire leadership identity on containing something that is trying, desperately, to help them.
What anxiety actually is
Let’s start with the reframe, because it changes everything.
Anxiety is not a malfunction, it’s not evidence that you’re not cut out for this, or a character flaw dressed up as a feeling.
Anxiety, fear, doubt, worry — all of it — is an internal flag.
A signal that says: I don’t have enough information yet, or I don’t have a plan yet. That’s it.
That’s the whole message. Your nervous system has identified something it hasn’t resolved, and it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: it is flagging it for your attention.
The question isn’t how to stop feeling it. The question is: what is it trying to tell me?
When you shift that question, you shift your entire relationship with the emotion. Instead of managing a problem, you’re gathering intelligence. Instead of performing calm, you’re actually leading.
THE REFRAME
Anxiety isn’t the enemy. It’s a signal that you don’t have enough information or enough of a plan yet. That’s your nervous system doing its job. Your job is to listen.
Why stuffing it makes everything worse
Most of us learned to suppress anxiety because, in the short term, it works. You contain it, you get through the meeting, and you feel a brief wash of relief on the other side. Competence confirmed. Crisis managed.
But here’s what’s happening under the surface: suppression is not resolution. It’s compression. And compressed anxiety doesn’t dissipate — it builds pressure.
Over time, that pressure manifests in ways that are harder to trace back to the source. Decision fatigue that sets in faster than it used to. A shorter fuse in low-stakes moments. A creeping sense of dread before situations that used to feel manageable. Sleep that keeps getting interrupted for no obvious reason.
And then there’s the transmission problem.
You cannot hand your unprocessed anxiety to your team and call it leadership. But that is exactly what happens when we stuff it. The words say everything’s fine, but the energy in the room says something else entirely. People are not reading your PowerPoint. They are reading you. And what they pick up on shapes how they show up, how much risk they’re willing to take, how honest they’re willing to be with you.
You become the emotional weather system for every room you walk into. The question is whether you’re bringing a storm you haven’t acknowledged, or something people can actually navigate by.
The writing exercise that changes everything
I want to give you a tool you can use before your next high-stakes moment. Not a lengthy journaling practice, not a meditation routine, not anything that requires a retreat weekend to implement. Just three questions and a piece of paper.
Before you walk into the meeting, have the conversation, or make the decision — write down:
1. What specifically am I anxious about? (Not “everything”, get granular. What is the actual source?)
2. Where is the fear or worry coming from? (Is this a real gap? A worst-case spiral? Something I’ve experienced before?)
3. What do I need to address, ask, or figure out before I move forward? (Now you have an action, not just a feeling.)
That’s it. The act of writing moves the anxiety from your body to paper — and in doing so, shifts it from your amygdala to your prefrontal cortex. You’re not suppressing it. You’re not performing through it. You’re giving it a job.
When anxiety has a job, it stops being noise and starts being data. It becomes part of your preparation instead of a liability you’re managing around.
The body connection most leaders skip
There’s a piece of neuroscience that I come back to over and over in my coaching work, because it genuinely surprises people every time.
Fear and excitement are physiologically identical.
Same elevated heart rate. Same cortisol spike. Same tight chest, same heightened senses, same surge of adrenaline. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between “I’m about to do something terrifying” and “I’m about to do something thrilling.” It just registers: high stakes, elevated state, pay attention.
The only variable is the story you’re telling about what that state means.
The difference between fear and excitement is your breath. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology.
One slow, intentional exhale — not a dozen, just one — signals safety to your nervous system. It activates the parasympathetic response. It gives your brain the fraction of a second it needs to choose the story you’re telling about what this moment means.
Before the meeting, before the call, before the conversation where everything is on the line: take one breath. Not to relax. Not to perform calm. But to give yourself the biological conditions for clarity.
Building the muscle: PQ reps
In Positive Intelligence (PQ, the somatic layer beyond IQ and EQ) these micro-practices are called reps. PQ reps are small, physical, consistent actions that train your nervous system to stay regulated under pressure.
The concept is straightforward: emotional regulation is a muscle. Like any muscle, it develops through repeated use, not through understanding the theory of it. You can read everything ever written about the gym and your body won’t change. You have to do the reps.
PQ reps look like this: the breath before you respond. Feeling both feet on the floor before a hard conversation. Writing down the three questions instead of running the spiral in your head. Naming the emotion out loud to yourself before you walk into the room.
None of these are dramatic. That’s the point. They’re small enough that you can do them anywhere, in any context, under any amount of pressure. And the more you do them, the shorter the gap between trigger and response becomes — which is precisely where leadership lives.
WHAT THE REPS DO
Each rep trains your nervous system to move through activation instead of around it. Over time, you stop needing to white-knuckle through high-pressure moments. You start navigating them with actual clarity.
The goal isn’t calm. It’s clarity.
I want to be direct about something, because I see it misunderstood constantly.
This is not about becoming unbothered. It is not about meditating your way to equanimity or rewiring yourself to feel nothing when the stakes are high. Those things are not leadership. They’re not even possible for most humans operating at the level of intensity that demanding work requires.
The goal of this practice is clarity. Calm is a byproduct — it happens, sometimes, but it isn’t the metric. Clarity is the metric. Clarity is: I know what I’m feeling, I know what it’s signaling, and I’m choosing my response instead of reacting from the pressure of suppression.
Leaders who have built this practice don’t stop feeling pressure. They respond faster and cleaner. They enter rooms differently. Their teams feel it. The quality of their decisions changes. The relationships around them change.
Because here’s what becomes possible when you stop stuffing it: you stop transmitting it. You stop being the weather system no one can predict. You become the kind of leader people can actually orient by.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.
You can’t lead from clarity while running on compressed anxiety. But you can learn to stop compressing it — and that changes everything.
Where to start
You don’t need to overhaul your routine. You don’t need a new system. You need one rep, done consistently, until it becomes the default.
Pick one:
• Before your next high-stakes moment, write down the three questions. Just once. See what it surfaces.
• The next time you feel anxiety rising, name it out loud to yourself: “There’s the flag.” That’s it. Don’t fix it, don’t suppress it, just name it.
• Tomorrow morning, before your first hard conversation, take one slow breath. On purpose. Notice what shifts.
That’s one rep. And one rep, done enough times, is how the muscle gets built.
The anxiety isn’t going anywhere. But what you do with it — that’s entirely yours to choose.
About the author
Lauren LeMunyan, MCC is the founder and CEO of Spitfire Coach, a certified women-owned leadership development and executive coaching firm. With 4,000+ coaching hours and 500+ C-suite clients, Lauren works with leaders at the intersection of high performance and human intelligence. She is the creator of Future Self Design™, host of the Spitfire Podcast, and author of two books on leadership.
Listen to the podcast episode
Stop Stuffing It: How to Make Your Anxiety Work for You available now on the Spitfire Podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen.
Work with Lauren
Ready to stop managing your energy and start leading from it? Learn about 1:1 executive coaching and the Future Self Design™ program at spitfirecoach.com/futureself.