When Chaos Addiction Looks Like Leadership
Beneath the high achieving performance was a nervous system hooked on adrenaline and a woman who didn’t know who she was without the mission.
I remember this like it was yesterday. It was New Year’s Eve, 2015. I was in Lake Isabella, California, about six months into my role as a District Manager for Amerigas. I had worked that day, as usual. Back then, I worked seven days a week.
I came home, poured a glass of wine, and sat on my deck. It was New Year’s Eve. The weather was cool but not overly cold, and I felt antsy. I was alone because I had been working too much to make any plans. I was texting friends and family, trying to feel connected.
I still wrestled with who I was after my last deployment to Afghanistan and coming off a long active duty and back-to-back deployment stint. I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t be completely at home with myself. In my mind I was missing the company commander (or CEO equivalent in the civilian world) who had faced convoys throughout southern Afghanistan just the year before and who safely brought home all 86 of the Soldiers under my command. That was my identity. I was an Army officer. It was the most difficult job I had in the army up until that point, yet the most rewarding. I missed it. I longed to feel needed and important like that again.
So I threw myself into my work because that’s what I knew. That’s what had earned me success in the military. I remember thinking: it’s probably time for another deployment. That’s how wired I was. I had already done three long combat tours, anywhere from 9 to 15 months, with only a year or two in between.
And sure enough two years later I did deploy again, this time to Poland. That one finally broke me yet woke me up as well. I didn’t know it yet, but I was deeply addicted to chaos. The adrenaline, being in control during crazy moments, the thrill of solving the problem and bringing order to the chaos - that is what I loved at the time. What I didn’t realize is that I was unraveling, struggling to understand who I was outside the mission and the uniform.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that I was living in chaos addiction and calling it leadership. That New Year’s Eve wasn’t just a quiet night alone. It was my nervous system running on fumes, dissociated from my body, grasping for a sense of control and familiarity through work, excellence, and hyper-performance.
In the military, calm is a skill. You learn to stay clear when others spiral. You perform under fire. You get praised for being steady in the storm. But what no one tells you is that the same mechanism that makes you calm in chaos can make you addicted to it.
Chaos became my comfort. The adrenaline, the pressure, the problem-solving at a thousand miles an hour, it felt like purpose. Like clarity. Like home. Stillness felt like weakness. Or worse, like failure.
Here’s what I know now: when your body has lived in high-stress environments long enough, it builds its identity around vigilance. The sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) becomes the default operating system. Cortisol and adrenaline become the fuel. Your baseline isn’t calm, it’s tension. And over time, your brain starts linking intensity with meaning.
This is the neurological loop of chaos addiction:
• The stress response activates.
• You perform well.
• You get praised.
• Your body rewards the loop with dopamine.
• Calm feels empty. Pressure feels powerful.
• You repeat it, until burnout is the only language your body can speak.
It took me years to realize I wasn’t just “high functioning.” I was braced. I was living in a constant state of sympathetic drive: tight jaw, shallow breath, locked shoulders, gut flaring up, mind always scanning. On the outside, I was “doing great.” On the inside, I was nowhere.
The Cost of Hypervigilance
When you live in hypervigilance long enough, you forget who you are without the pressure. My identity was fractured. There was the leader. The achiever. The woman who handled it all. And then there was the part of me no one saw: the exhausted version. The one who couldn’t sleep, who couldn’t stop, who didn’t know how to rest without guilt.
Hypervigilance doesn’t just cost you peace. It costs you your self. Because you stop listening to and trusting your body. You power through and override your needs. You trade authenticity and alignment for performance. You seek it out and your brain gets rewarded with dopamine each time until it becomes an addiction that drives you. It all happens on auto pilot, and before you know it you haven’t eaten all day and are snapping at those you love. You drink multiple cups of coffee a day to get through…maybe stacking that with pre-workout for an extra kick. You become so good at surviving, you forget how to live.
In the military, we don’t call it dissociation. We call it focus. We don’t call it trauma. We call it strength. And when we collapse? We call it burnout, pour ourselves another drink, crack a gallows humor joke, and go back to work. There’s not room for anything else.
The Medical System Didn’t Help
When my body started showing signs: thyroid problems, gut issues, severe allergies, pain, emotional flatness, I did what we’re taught to do:
I went to the doctor. I got the ibuprofen first, then the prescriptions. I was told to reduce stress and sleep more. I was told to eat less and exercise more. I was told my labs were normal, and that maybe I was depressed when I talked about my deeply ingrained exhaustion no matter how much I slept.
But no one asked about my nervous system. No one explained that chronic stress rewires your body and mind. No one told me that trauma isn’t just about what happened, it’s about what didn’t get to complete in your body. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, these aren’t mental choices. They are autonomic patterns. They shape how you breathe, digest, sleep, speak, react, and connect. And if they aren’t resolved at the body level, they don’t go away. They just go underground and continue to drive your survival mode and unexplained physical symptoms.
What I needed wasn’t medication. I needed regulation.
You Don’t Heal by just by Therapy or Taking Time Off
Rest is important. Therapy has its place. Time off matters. But for high achievers, especially those addicted to chaos, rest alone doesn’t reset the system. Because stillness often feels more threatening than pressure. Sitting still can trigger a flood of survival alarms: guilt, shame, restlessness, fear of collapse. That’s not laziness. That’s dysregulation.
We are taught to push through pain. But we are never taught how to stop bracing against life. That’s what regulation work does, it gives your body the experience of safety, not just the concept of it. And it’s not a one-and-done practice. It’s not do box breathing once and move on.
It’s a daily discipline of reconnection to yourself, your body, and your needs. Energy management. Honoring yourself and what you align with. Finding the tools that work for you. Learning to downshift. To pause. To feel without fear. To rebuild trust with your own system. That’s the real work.
True healing isn’t one breathwork session or one nervous system “hack.” It’s a full-body, full-life recalibration. It’s rebuilding resilience from the inside out: mental, physical, emotional, nervous system, and identity-level work. It’s building a community, those who can be good co-regulators. It’s building a lifestyle that gives you capacity to surge and weather the storms and then rest and recover as well. It’s about learning to live in a body that finally feels safe.
What I Know Now
You don’t heal by working harder. You heal by slowing down without crashing. You come home to your body, without fear. You find your baseline again, not the one the world rewarded, but the one your nervous system remembers. The one that knows peace isn’t lazy. It’s necessary.
If you’ve been leading in chaos, have poured a glass of wine, whisky, or beer (or two) at the end of the day just to stop bracing, and if you have no idea who you are without the pressure…
I see you. And there’s a path back. Not to who you were. But to who you actually are beneath the armor.
You’re not broken. You’re braced. And it’s safe to come home.