Contagion of Calm or Contagion of Chaos?How a leader’s nervous system shapes the emotional climate of a team.
- kempeneerh
- 11 minutes ago
- 8 min read
If you are an executive, work in HR, People & Culture, or in any role where you regularly hold space for other people’s stress, crisis or wellbeing, you are shaping more than policies, processes and decisions. You are shaping the emotional climate of the room.
In leadership roles like these, your nervous system becomes part of the environment others work within. The way you show up under pressure (regulated or overwhelmed, grounded or reactive) directly influences how safe, steady and clear others feel around you.
You have likely heard the familiar advice: “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” While well intentioned, it often frames self-care as something we turn to after depletion, a recovery tactic rather than a leadership practice. In reality, the state of a leader’s nervous system does not remain personal. It spreads (quite literally, through the chemosignals your skin emits). A regulated leader can create a contagion of calm. A dysregulated leader can unintentionally create a contagion of chaos. And in roles responsible for people, culture and organisational wellbeing, the stakes of that contagion might be higher than you think. Let’s get into it.
Self-Care as a Leadership Foundation
In demanding leadership and HR roles, the pressure to be "always on" is intense. You are expected to hold boundaries for others whilst navigating organisational change, stakeholder pressure and the emotional labour of supporting people through difficulty. The pitfall is that over time, this expectation to ‘hold it together’ endlessly, without adequate regulation or recovery, can erode clarity and compassion (yes, Compassion Fatigue is a real thing!).
Self-care, understood well, is about the daily, intentional practices that keep your nervous system regulated enough to think clearly, respond ethically and access empathy. When a leader or HR professional is dysregulated - operating from a place of fatigue, overwhelm or unprocessed stress - they make different choices. They become reactive rather than responsive. They miss nuance in conversations. They inadvertently model that rest, boundaries and recovery are not to be respected.
Conversely, a regulated leader - one who has attended to their own wellbeing and can feel grounded and calm in their own body - creates a different atmosphere entirely. They listen differently and they make decisions with greater clarity. They model that it is possible to tap into empathy, work effectively and maintain your own mental, physical and emotional health.
This is responsible leadership.
The Hidden Cost of Compassion: Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma
If you work in HR, you likely carry stories that do not belong to you. You hold space for redundancy conversations, grief, burnout disclosures, interpersonal conflict and personal crisis. You absorb the emotional weight of supporting people through difficulty, often without adequate acknowledgement or support for yourself. You are likely required to show impartiality, neutrality and objectivity. Now add to this the extra layer of the duty of confidentiality and professional secrecy. Offloading to a colleague or a friend is not an option.
Over time, this accumulation of the stories of others' pain can manifest as compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma, a state in which the emotional and physical toll of caring begins to undermine your own wellbeing and effectiveness.
Compassion fatigue can look like exhaustion that rest does not resolve, emotional numbness, cynicism, difficulty setting boundaries, and a sense that your care no longer makes a difference. Vicarious trauma is the internalisation of others' traumatic experiences, where the stories you hold begin to trigger your own nervous system as if they were your own lived experience. You might start to see life through a darker lens, or behave in ways that are not in line with your values. Both are occupational hazards for professional carers: healthcare workers, therapists, social workers, teachers, lawyers and yes, HR professionals. And they are rarely named or addressed.
Many organisations offer generic wellbeing programmes but overlook the specific vulnerabilities of those who hold space for others. A yoga class does not address vicarious trauma. A mindfulness app does not help you discharge the nervous system activation that accumulates from holding others' crises.
What does help is acknowledging the reality of this work, learning to recognise early warning signs in yourself, and developing effective practices to regulate and restore your capacity to care sustainably.
Nervous System Regulation as a Leadership Practice
The state of a leader’s nervous system shapes the climate of the entire team.
Recent advances in neuroscience and trauma research are reshaping how we understand wellbeing and performance in professional settings. We now know that the nervous system (not just the mind) plays a central role in how we think, feel, relate and lead.
Many of us assume that the mind is the main driver when it comes to regulating ourselves. Yet neuroscience shows that the majority of neural pathways travel from the body to the brain rather than the other way around. Approximately 80% of vagal nerve fibres are afferent, carrying signals from the body to the brain, while only about 20% are efferent, travelling from brain to body. When we understand this, it becomes easier to see why regulation often works most effectively through the body. In therapeutic language this is known as bottom-up regulation, in contrast to top-down approaches such as traditional talk therapy, which primarily work through cognition.
A regulated nervous system allows for what researchers call a large window of tolerance: the zone where we can access our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, perspective-taking and problem solving. Within this window we feel safe enough to connect with others, to tolerate discomfort and to respond flexibly to challenges. Outside this window, the nervous system jumps into survival mode. Our responses become reactive and protective, expressed through familiar patterns such as fight, flight, freeze, submit, please or collapse.
When a leader becomes dysregulated, their window narrows by stress, fatigue or unprocessed anxiety and the entire team feels it. And here comes a big watch-out for leaders: stress does not remain contained within the individual body (!). Research shows that emotional states such as stress and fear alter the chemistry of human sweat, producing subtle chemosignals that other people can detect subconsciously. Our nervous systems are constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety or threat, and they respond long before conscious reasoning has time to intervene. The result is often immediate: psychological safety begins to diminish. People become more guarded. Trust erodes. Decision-making becomes reactive rather than reflective, inclusive and strategic.
Conversely, a regulated leader creates a contagion of calm. Their nervous system communicates safety to others. Through tone of voice, facial expression, posture, breathing rhythm and countless other micro-signals (many of them below conscious awareness) the body signals stability. This physiological sense of safety is the precondition for psychological safety: the foundation that helps teams to innovate, take interpersonal risks and bring their full selves to work.
“A regulated leader creates a contagion of calm. A dysregulated leader creates a contagion of chaos.”
Self-care, in this light is organisational infrastructure. A leader who has attended to their own nervous system regulation is not only supporting their own wellbeing; they are actively shaping the emotional and physiological climate of the team. Regulation, quite literally, becomes contagious: creating the conditions for a safer, more resilient and more creative working environment. As a leader, wouldn’t you want to contribute to this virtuous cycle?
Opening the Conversation in Leadership:
How can you bring this conversation into your leadership community in a way that feels relevant and non-clinical?
At SETUKA, we work with organisations through three levels of engagement, each designed to build momentum and sustain cultural shift.
Keynotes create the opening. They name what leaders already sense - that personal leadership and nervous system regulation are essential to sustainable performance - and ground this in science-backed reasoning. A keynote challenges the myths, legitimises the struggle and points toward a path forward. It plants a seed in a room full of decision-makers and creates permission for deeper conversation.
Workshops translate insights into practice. Rather than leaving leaders with awareness alone, workshops offer hands-on tools: participants explore their own stress patterns, learn to recognise early warning signs of overload, and develop personalised strategies for regulation and recovery. Crucially, they do this work in community, recognising that their struggles are shared and that practical solutions exist. For HR and People & Culture professionals specifically, workshops can address the unique vulnerabilities of holding space for others, naming compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma as real occupational risks and teaching effective practices to discharge accumulated stress and rebuild capacity to care.
Longer-term collaborations, blending workshops, immersive experiences and ongoing support, create the conditions for effective change. Leaders feel more comfortable modelling regulation, teams develop a shared language around wellbeing and boundaries, and the organisation can move from crisis management into genuine prevention.
Far from striving for perfection or eliminating stress, this work is about cultivating the capacity to face the reality of stress and pressure that characterises companies that pursue excellence, strive for innovation and cultivate big ideas. It is about helping to support nervous system capacity, awareness and community so that pressure becomes manageable and meaning-making becomes a contributor to job satisfaction.
Reflective Questions for Your Leadership Team:
As you consider whether personal leadership and nervous system regulation are areas worth exploring in your organisation, sit with these questions:
When I think of my most effective, respected leaders, what do I notice about their capacity to stay calm under pressure? How much of their effectiveness comes from their own regulated nervous system?
In my HR or leadership role, when do I notice myself becoming reactive, cynical or emotionally numb? What is happening in my body and nervous system at those moments? What would it take to restore myself?
How many colleagues or team members have disclosed overwhelm, stress or the weight of caring work? Have we addressed the root causes, or only treated the symptoms with generic wellbeing offerings?
What would change in my team, my organisation or my own leadership if nervous system regulation and self-care were treated as foundational to our culture and performance?
Self-care is personal leadership in action. It is the soil from which aspirational leadership, resilience and organisational health grow. If these questions resonate, and you are interested in exploring how to open this conversation with your leadership team or organisation, SETUKA offers tailored programmes designed specifically for leaders and those in caring professions.
We work internationally with organisations committed to moving beyond surface-level wellbeing into sustainable, trauma-informed cultural change. Reach out to explore how a keynote or workshop might serve your leadership community in 2026. Let's build cultures where caring for yourself is understood as caring for others.
If this post resonated with you, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit too. And if you’d like to keep exploring themes like emotional wellbeing, transitions, and conscious self-leadership, I invite you to subscribe to the blog and join the SETUKA newsletter. You’ll receive occasional updates on upcoming workshops, fresh insights, and practical tools to support you, both personally and professionally, on your journey of growth and self-care.
Thank you for being part of the SETUKA community. Let’s stay in touch, and until then, take gentle care.
Heidi Kempeneer,
Therapist and Founder of SETUKA , a platform for body-based therapies and well-being services for individuals and organisations.
References for further reading
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666.
Dalton, P., Mauté, C., Jaén, C., & Wilson, T. (2013). Chemosignals of stress influence social judgments. PLOS ONE, 8(10), e77144.
de Groot, J. H. B., Semin, G. R., & Smeets, M. A. M. (2017). Human fear chemosignaling: Evidence from a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 143(11), 1121–1156.
Mujica-Parodi, L. R., Strey, H. H., Frederick, B., Savoy, R., Cox, D., Botanov, Y., Tolkunov, D., Rubin, D., & Weber, J. (2009). Chemosensory cues to emotional stress activate the human amygdala. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(27), 11086–11091.
Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication and Self-Regulation.
Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
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