Overreact Much? It's Not You, It's Your Amygdala
It happened in the kitchen—laptop open, Slack pinging, half-listening as my son asked if we could do breakfast-for-dinner.
I snapped. “Not tonight—I don’t have time for this!”
His face dropped. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just being a kid. …and I was just being reactive.
It took less than a second to bark out the words. But it took the rest of the night to untangle the guilt. Looking back now, it’s so clear: overreactions aren’t a personality flaw—they’re a symptom of something much, much bigger…
The Science Behind Reactivity
When you’re burned out, your brain starts to rewire itself for survival—not strategy. The parts responsible for logic, emotional regulation, and thoughtful decision-making start to go offline. And the parts built for threat detection and quick reaction step in to take over.
A 2014 study published in PLOS ONE found that people experiencing burnout had significant changes in two key brain regions: the amygdala, which governs emotional reactivity, and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive function and impulse control. Burnout made the amygdala more active and the prefrontal cortex less responsive. That’s a perfect recipe for emotional whiplash and knee-jerk reactions.
In short: burnout shrinks your buffer. You lose your ability to pause and respond with proportion. Everything starts to feel urgent. Every Slack message becomes an interruption. Every request feels like an attack. Every minor inconvenience gets met with a major reaction.
And it’s not just emotional—your decision-making literally degrades. Cognitive overload leads to mental shortcuts, reactive “no’s,” and tunnel vision. You’re more likely to make impulsive calls or miss obvious solutions simply because your brain is trying to conserve energy. This has nothing to do with your intelligence or leadership ability. It’s a nervous system stuck in survival mode.
So how do you know when you’re living in that reactive space? The signs aren’t always as obvious as yelling or slamming doors. Sometimes, they sneak in quietly:
You reread an email 5 times trying to decide how to respond—then avoid it altogether.
Tiny schedule changes feel like catastrophic disruptions.
You obsess over a comment hours (or days) after the conversation ends.
You feel wired but exhausted—always bracing for the next thing.
People ask, “Are you okay?” more than usual, and you don’t know how to answer.
You keep making to-do lists but can’t seem to finish anything on them.
Silence makes you anxious—so you fill it with noise, scrolling, or busywork.
So How Do We FIX It?
Imagine reactivity as a line on a graph: it is full of sharp spikes—up, down, up again. Now what if you could smooth out that line a bit into small, gradual hills and valleys? The ups and downs are still there, but they don’t toss you around. You can feel without getting hijacked. This state is called equanimity.
According to Merriam-Webster, equanimity is “evenness of mind especially under stress”. Sounds like a pipe dream, doesn’t it? Something completely out of reach to you? Not so fast. Equanimity is not a personality trait, it is a learned skill. A skill that can be achieved by anyone, but only with practice.
My favorite way to explain equanimity comes from Viktor Frankl:
“Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness..”
That space? That’s equanimity.
It’s not emotionlessness. It’s not apathy. It’s noticing when you’re triggered before you react. It’s pausing long enough to observe your internal signals, weigh your options, and then choose your response on purpose.
Equanimity is a skill. And like any skill, it gets stronger when you practice it. Here are two simple (and intentionally uncomfortable) ways to train it:
1. Hold a challenging pose and breathe through the discomfort. Set a timer for one minute. Get into a plank, a wall sit, or any physically demanding position. Then breathe: inhale through the nose for 5 counts, hold for 3, exhale through the nose for 5 counts, hold for 3. Repeat. At some point, your brain will start yelling: “Get up! This is dumb!” When it does, try one more round of breath. And when that round ends, challenge yourself to do one more. Notice the impulse to quit—and stay anyway. Scan your body. Relax your jaw. Soften your hands. Come back to your breath. If one minute doesn’t bring up discomfort, try two. The goal is to find something that you want to run from, then practice relaxing and staying instead of tensing and running.
2. Eat something you dislike—on purpose. Take a small bite of a food you typically avoid, but don’t chew yet. Just notice the texture. Notice your mind’s reaction—“Ew, no.” Ask yourself why: Is it the taste? The smell? A memory it triggers? Now slowly start to chew. Observe how your reaction shifts—or doesn’t. You’re not trying to like it. You’re practicing sitting with it, without immediately jumping to soothe or escape the discomfort.
These small, controlled experiments help you train your brain to tolerate discomfort without spiraling into reactivity. Equanimity grows in that gap between discomfort and reaction. It gives you the power to stay with something long enough to understand it and make a controlled decision, instead of just trying to make it go away.
A taxed nervous system due to burnout doesn’t always show up as collapse. Sometimes it looks like snappy replies, endless urgency, or an emotional rollercoaster you didn’t buy a ticket for. It’s not that you’ve lost your edge. It’s that your system has been in overdrive for too long.
The good news? You don’t have to stay there.
Practicing equanimity gives you back the space between stimulus and response. And in that space, as Frankl said, is your power to choose. This isn’t about being perfectly calm. It’s about building the muscle to stay steady when things get messy. Because leadership—and life—will always bring the mess. But how you respond? That’s yours to shape.
