The Cost of Performing

Part One

There is a particular kind of functioning that looks completely intact from the outside.

You are showing up. Delivering. Holding responsibility. The performance is there. From every external signal the system is running well. What the external signals do not capture is what is happening inside the system that is running it.

High performance, sustained over years, creates a kind of debt. Not financial, not even psychological in the way most people use that word. Something more physical than that. The body accumulates the cost of chronic activation, of living in a near-permanent state of readiness, of treating urgency as a default operating mode rather than a temporary one.

This happens slowly, which is why it is so easy to miss.

The body does not send a single large signal. It sends small ones, quietly, over a long period. A quality of tiredness that sleep does not fully resolve. A background level of tension that you stop noticing because it has become the baseline. Small things you keep meaning to look at and keep moving past because the performance is still there.

The performance still being there is precisely the problem.

Because as long as you are delivering, the signal gets overridden. The mind produces a story: if the output is intact, the system must be fine. That story is wrong. Output is a trailing indicator. By the time it starts to slip, the cost has already been accumulating for a considerable time.

On the day I turned 40 I was still functioning. That is the part I cannot move past when I think about it. My blood sugar was at 23. My eyesight had deteriorated significantly. I spent two days in hospital on a drip. And from the outside, including in my own daily assessment of myself, I was performing.

The hospital was not the beginning. It was simply the moment the override mechanism finally ran out of road.

Part Two

What I have come to understand, from my own experience and from the work I do now, is that the body is not failing when this happens.

It is reporting.

The signals that high performers learn to override are not noise. They are accurate information about the gap between the pace being demanded and the pace that is actually sustainable. The body keeps this account with complete precision, regardless of whether the mind is paying attention to it.

When you finally stop overriding and start reading the signals properly, two things become clear.

The first is that the cost has been higher than you realised. Not catastrophically in most cases, but meaningfully. There is usually a quality of energy, of presence, of genuine enjoyment that has been quietly absent for longer than you would like to admit.

Continue reading: The Gap →

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