For many high achievers, slowing down brings about an existential vertigo, writes Dr Katrina Gisbert-Tay

I learned early on that stillness was not an option. During my medical training, with a young family and a career that demanded everything, the unspoken rule was simple: keep moving. Speed was survival. Everyone around me was running at the same pace—through night shifts, exams, the machinery of hospital life—and slowing down meant being left behind.

So, I ran. And for years, that strategy delivered. Until the chronic frenetic pace became my new baseline, and subsequently evolved into an inability to rest and a nervous system that didn’t know how to settle.

It was only later, after a decade of coaching senior leaders, that I recognised the same pattern in almost every high performer I sat across. The context was different—boardrooms instead of hospitals, deals instead of diagnoses—but the operating system was identical. Leaders moving too fast to experience any of it: the CEO who looked up and realised they had missed their children’s entire childhood. The executive who gave everything to the company but could not make it to his parent’s deathbed. The entrepreneur who built an empire but never savoured any of it—until a diagnosis forced him to stop.

In Formula 1, the drivers who win championships are not the ones who go fastest at every point. Rather, they know when to brake, when to pit, and when to push. It is not about hurtling at maximum speed at all times. It is about presence, being attuned to the environment, and having awareness.

Being Present

What I talk to these leaders about most is not how to perform better. It is how to be present for the life their performance has built.

For many of them, this pattern is inherited. Somewhere early in their childhood—in a household where love was earned through grades, in a culture where achievement honoured the sacrifices of the previous generation—a script took root: your worth is what you produce.

Rest was never modelled as legitimate. In competitive environments like Singapore, this is amplified. The fear of slowing down is tightly woven with the fear of falling behind. It is a form of FOMO that operates at the level of identity rather than social media. And it keeps intelligent, capable people locked in a pattern they can see but cannot seem to exit.

Part of the difficulty is practical with relentless calendars, and real demands. But beneath the logistics, there is something else. When the noise finally drops—whether through retirement, retrenchment, or a rare gap in the calendar—a disorientation sets in.
An existential vertigo takes over when the psychological equivalent of losing your balance after reference points disappear.

No meeting to prepare for. No problem to solve. No role to perform. Just you. For someone whose sense of self has been built around what they produce, that silence can feel like freefall. Who am I when I am not performing? Stillness does not feel like relief. It feels like stepping into a black hole, one that might be full of things they may not want to face.

Rethinking Rest

There is a reason the pace rarely drops voluntarily. Constant motion is not a flaw, it is a strategy that has worked. The problem is not the drive. It is that the drive has become the only gear. And when a single gear is all you know, slowing down feels less like a choice and more like a malfunction.

There is a physiological layer worth understanding. Under sustained pressure, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—the system governing cortisol release—adapts. Cortisol stays elevated. The nervous system recalibrates around stress as its baseline. Over time, pressure does not just feel normal. It becomes the body’s version of what safety feels like.

Research on HPA axis dysregulation shows that chronic cortisol elevation impairs the prefrontal cortex—responsible for clear thinking and emotional regulation—while heightening the amygdala’s sensitivity to threat. So when a high performer finally stops—a long weekend, an empty evening, a holiday—the nervous system does not settle. It scans for danger. Stillness gets read as a threat.

Interestingly, neuroscientist Marcus Raichle’s research at Washington University showed that the brain does not go idle during rest. It shifts into the Default Mode Network—responsible for self-reflection, emotional processing, and memory consolidation. Rest occurs when the brain does its most essential integrative work. Refuse it, and you deprive yourself of the very function that sustains judgment, creativity and self-awareness.

This is where the paradox lives. The leaders who resist rest are the ones who need it most. Not to recover from their lives, but to actually inhabit them. When the Default Mode Network is given space to operate, clarity sharpens. Decisions become considered rather than reactive. Leaders who learn to slow down report something their pace had been costing them for years: perspective. The ability to see whether they are taking people with them or leaving them behind. In F1 terms, this is the difference between a driver who races and a driver who wins. The fast laps matter. But so do the pit stops.

I know this now from experience. There was a period in my career where I could not rest in any meaningful way. I could take time off and still be running scenarios in my head. The knowing did not protect me from the pattern. What shifted was recognising that hard does not have a fixed shape. Sometimes hard is running at 120 per cent of capacity. Sometimes hard is allowing yourself to operate at 60 per cent and trusting that that is enough for now. That recalibration changed how I coach, how I lead, and how I live. It revealed something I had been too busy to notice: the life I had built was worth being present for.
Rest is not the opposite of drive. It is what makes drive sustainable. The leaders who will thrive over the longest arc are not the ones who never stop. They are the ones who have learned to be still—and to tolerate, even welcome, what surfaces when they do rest.

There is something on the other side of the restlessness that most high performers have not yet experienced: the savouring of a moment without needing it to be productive. The joy of being fully in your life rather than performing your way through it. The perspective of knowing you have a choice—that you are here because you want to be. That is not a wellness platitude. It is what makes the success worth having.

About Dr Katrina Gisbert-Tay:
Dr Katrina Gisbert-Tay became a parent at 22 while still in medical school, an experience that would quietly shape the way she later understood leadership, wellbeing and human behaviour. With a career spanning medicine, psychology and executive coaching, she integrates science, systems thinking and human development in her work with leaders, teams and parents. She’s spent the past decade working with C-suite leaders and global organisations across Asia, Europe and North America, coaching high performers through burnout, transitions, identity shifts and the particular kind of exhaustion that looks, from the outside, like success. She also hosts the podcast, Unpolished Wisdom.

This story first appeared in the June 2026 issue. Purchase it as a print or digital copy, or consider subscribing to us here