The Emotional Hygiene of High Stakes Leadership

How to process stress, setbacks, and pressure without letting it leak into your team.

Author

Regina Gerbeaux
December 14, 2025 • Reading Time: 12 minutes

Hi! Welcome to another issue of Force Multipliers, your weekly briefing from Regina Gerbeaux, where Silicon Valley's behind-the-scenes operators get battle-tested frameworks for their toughest challenges, from putting out chaotic fires to managing strong personalities.

A QUICK NOTE! 📝 

Hey Force Multiplier - happy (almost) new year! 🎄 

Still one of the best movies, old sport. 😉 

As we close out another relentless year and step into the next, I like to remind my coachees that we have a rare moment of stillness: one that invites both reflection and intention. December and January always seem to hold a mirror to our leadership…it’s a comparison to what stretched us, what strengthened us, and what’s been asking for our attention as we move into the new year.

With this issue, I'm starting a seven-part series on resetting and refocusing so you can get your best work done.

My hope over the next seven issues is that together, we can explore how you can operate at your highest level, without sacrificing yourself in the process. Not in the surface-y, performative way leadership culture often treats it, but in the grounded, practical sense - regulating stress, protecting your mind, and sustaining your energy as the foundation of your effectiveness as an operator.

I’m hoping you’ll find it both interesting and beneficial.

Happy reading! 📖 

Introduction: When I learned to handle stress in tech

To kick us off, let me tell you a story about the first time I ever experienced burnout while working in a high-paced startup environment, and the most critical skill I had to learn to preserve my mental bandwidth.

I was new on the Operations team at On Deck, and there was a day where my manager pulled me into a meeting. He said, "Leadership wants us to go from three fellowships to about 30-40 next year. You ready?"

I said, “Sure!” without a second thought. 😬 

Maybe it was naiveté, but no alarm bells went off in my head.

A few months later after we had done the impossible (launched 13 product lines in two months), a friend told me, "No offense, but I was sure you were set up for failure. I can't believe you actually survived."

Not only had we survived, but we executed.

Was it flawless? Of course not. But, it was as good as it could get. On Deck 10x’ed its revenue, raised a $20M Series A with several appealing term sheets, and every product/fellowship we launched was profitable from Day 1.

We can credit one part of our survival to having great processes… but actually, a huge part of it was keeping stress and pressure off the ops team.

Out of the 20-something ops members on my team, only two of them really knew how stressed I was. I tried to shield everyone else from bulk of the craziness. As anyone who’s been through it knows, everything internally is chaotic and a hot mess when you’re scaling so quickly.

What was super important to me, outside of successful launches, was keeping everyone away from unnecessary stress. Adding more weight to their plates would have resulted in suboptimal work.

I think of this as emotional hygiene: where you process stress effectively.

When I coach leaders and founders, many of them think emotional hygiene is a waste of time.

They think processing stress takes away from execution. That slowing down to wind down properly, or taking time to move their body, or being deliberate about decisions means they're not moving fast enough.

But emotional hygiene is the best use of time you can invest in. It causes you to move more deliberately.

Slower? Sure. But slower and more intentional decisions always beats fast, half-baked, sense-of-urgency gut reactions. Every single time.

Saying that emotional hygiene slows you down is like saying taking a shower slows you down. “I could be prospecting new customers instead of using Dr. Bronner’s!” 🚿

…okay, true, but also…gross. 🤮 

Emotional hygiene wants you to slow down - that’s the point!

When your emotional hygiene breaks down, here's what happens:

  • Fear and anger seep into your decision making

  • You build contempt towards your teammates

  • You can't shut down at night properly

  • Your personal life takes a huge toll (divorces, breakups, lack of friends or family time, hobbies disappear)

  • You're constantly on edge

  • You lean on stimulants or depressants (drugs, alcohol, gambling, addictive behaviors)

This isn't theoretical. I've coached leaders through all of these patterns. It's human to feel fear and anger, but managing it is a lifelong journey.

Here’s how to do it.

The Playbook on How to Maintain Emotional Hygiene Under Pressure

1. Take inventory of your week and be intentional, not reactive 🎯 

Most leaders operate in reactive mode. Something comes up, they drop everything, they context switch seventeen times a day.

👉 Ask yourself: What are the 1-2 things that actually matter this week?

When I was scaling On Deck's operations, I focused on three things:

  • Building a playbook for launching products (general enough that any product director could use it for 80% results)

  • Hiring quickly and well (spotting hidden talent, reviewing takehomes at lightning speed)

  • Firing quickly if hires weren't working out (thankfully only one or two people out of twenty)

If you're focused on the 1-2 things that really matter, you can shield your team from a lot of noise.

When emergencies come up, be deliberate. Say out loud: "I am subbing out X for Y because it's important." That intentionality keeps you from spiraling into reactive chaos.

Use a prioritization system. Don't guess at what matters. Have a formula.

2. Build a wind down and startup ritual 😴 

This is non-negotiable. If you can't shut down properly at night, your stress compounds. You wake up anxious. You start the day already behind.

Here's my ritual:

End of day:

  • Last meeting finishes

  • Phone goes on the wireless charger (I'm done talking to people digitally for the day)

  • Close my laptop and push it to the back of the desk (workday is over)

  • Turn off my external monitor (workday is over, again)

  • Clear my desk of clutter (makes starting tomorrow more inviting)

  • Push my chair into the desk

  • Close the office door

When you have a ritual, you build a habit. And the startup ritual is built in. Just reverse it:

Start of day:

  • Open office door

  • Pull chair out

  • Turn on monitor

  • Open laptop

  • Write

  • Check emails and texts

  • Start meetings

The ritual tells your brain: work is starting. Work is ending. There's a boundary.

3. Do not sacrifice personal life 🌴 

There should always be time for a hobby, exercise, or meaningful connection with loved ones. Even if it's short.

Five to ten minutes of uninterrupted, non-phone connection time makes a huge difference.

I worked too much during the On Deck days. I wish I had worked smarter, not harder. But I was disciplined about the shutdown ritual. That separation kept me sane.

4. Move your body 🏃 

Physical movement is one of the most powerful stress combatants.

When you're stuck in fear or anger, you're living in the future or the past. That's where suffering happens. That's where judgment happens.

Physical discomfort brings you to the present. Exercise hard. Hold ice. Do something that forces your body to focus on right now.

Do not act on fear or anger in the moment. Give it a night. Let the pause do its work.

5. Lay off substances ☕️ 

Stimulants make things worse, not better. They ramp up your nervous system when you need to be regulating it.

If you're relying on substances to get through the day, you're treating a symptom. The real problem is you're not managing your energy well.

6. Know who to be vulnerable with (and how much) ❤️ 

In one of my jobs in the past, I had two direct reports who knew how stressed I was. They were my deputies. It was their job to tell me who was struggling, who would rise quickly, and what personalities would match well with which leaders.

In hindsight, I wish I had been a little less vulnerable with them. They didn't need that much information to do their jobs well. And some of that vulnerability got used as ammunition later to serve their own interests.

👉 Ask yourself: Is this information additive or detracting?

You need people to process stress with. A coach. A therapist. A peer outside your company.

But be discerning about what you share with your direct reports.

Vulnerability is powerful. Oversharing creates liability.

The Bottom Line

Emotional hygiene is soft, but you need soft skills and hard skills. Emotional hygiene is clever and strategic.

When you manage your stress well, you make better decisions. You shield your team from chaos. You stay in the game longer.

When you don't, fear and anger leak into everything. Your team feels it, your culture erodes, and your personal life crumbles.

Slower, more intentional decisions beat reactive chaos every time.

What's one ritual or practice you've put in place to manage stress as a leader? Reply and let me know.

Until next time,

P.S. What did you think of this framework? Hit reply and let me know which part resonated most with you. I read every response.

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About Regina Gerbeaux

Regina Gerbeaux was the first Chief of Staff to an executive coach who worked with Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Sam Altman (OpenAI / Y Combinator), and Alexandr Wang (Scale).

Shortly after her role as Chief of Staff, then COO, she opened her own coaching practice, Coaching Founder, and has worked with outrageously talented operators on teams like Delphi AI, dYdX, Astronomer, Fanatics Live, and many more companies backed by funds like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.

Her open-sourced write-ups on Operational Excellence and how to run a scaling company can be found here and her templates can be found here.

She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner, daughter, and dog, and can be found frequenting 6:00AM Orangetheory classes or hiking trails nearby.

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