Why Brooklyn Leaders Are Turning to Nervous System Coaching

There is a word we’re probably going to hear a lot more of: neurowellness.

The Global Wellness Summit named “The Rise of Neurowellness” one of its major wellness trends for 2026, describing it as an emerging field focused on nervous system regulation, recovery and resilience. The report also points to neurowellness moving into settings including corporate wellness.

When I came across the report, it mostly confirmed something I was already seeing.

The language of fight, flight, freeze and nervous system regulation has moved well beyond therapy rooms and into everyday conversation. Spend enough time online and eventually the algorithm will tell you something about your nervous system.

So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that nervous system work is beginning to enter the workplace.

I think it should.

People are beginning to understand that stress isn’t only something that happens in the mind. Our bodies have been communicating with us all along.

For leaders, that might look like the tight jaw before a board meeting, a racing heart before a presentation, or the inability to stop thinking about work hours after the workday has ended. Sometimes it’s simply the exhaustion that comes from carrying an enormous amount of responsibility and still wanting to have something left for the people you love.

Many of the people I work with are exceptionally good at pushing through. They can compartmentalize, scan for problems, mobilize enormous amounts of energy and lead the meeting anyway.

Those aren’t necessarily weaknesses. They may be part of what made someone successful.

The question I’m interested in is what happens when the demand is over.

The presentation ends. The merger closes. You walk through your front door.

Can your system shift with you?

This is where I think the growing conversation around nervous system regulation gets much more interesting than another corporate wellness trend.

Because regulation isn’t about being calm. And it isn’t a breathing exercise.

Breathwork, meditation, movement, time outside and other practices can absolutely be useful. But nervous systems are individual. In my years of working with bodies, I’ve learned not to assume that the breath is an accessible starting point for everyone. Sometimes the breath changes naturally when the body has enough support to settle.

What I’m more interested in is capacity.

Can you access the energy you need for a difficult moment without being completely overtaken by it? When the demand has passed, can your system recover? And can you reconnect with your team, your creativity, your family and the parts of yourself that weren’t required to get you through the crisis?

This is how I think about capacity: respond, recover, reconnect.

If nervous system regulation really is becoming part of the future of workplace wellness, I think there’s a bigger question here than how we help people manage more stress.

What would change if we began treating physiological capacity as part of leadership itself?

High Performance Can Hide Low Capacity

The leaders I work with are exceptionally capable.

Many have already done traditional executive coaching. They know how to run the meeting, give the presentation, manage a team, navigate a board, communicate with authority or make a difficult decision. They may have spent years developing self-awareness and understanding their leadership patterns.

They aren’t necessarily coming to me because they need another leadership framework.

They’re coming because knowing what to do and having access to it under pressure aren’t always the same thing.

This is wheresomatic executive coaching adds something different.

Somatic executive coaching works with many of the same leadership questions as executive coaching, but includes the body and physiology as part of how we understand and work with them. We may be working with performance, communication, decision-making, relationships, patterns or how someone wants to show up as a leader. But we also pay attention to what happens in the body when pressure rises, and whether the leader still has access to the capacities they already possess.

For one person, the heart starts racing. The jaw tightens. There may be heat in the chest or face. Their mind speeds up and begins scanning. Their attention narrows and they feel a strong need to act, fix, defend or control.

Someone else may experience almost the opposite. Their energy drops. Their thinking gets foggy. Words become harder to find. They feel heavy, numb, far away or suddenly exhausted. They’re physically present in the meeting, but they don’t feel entirely there.

These experiences can accompany different patterns of nervous system activation and protection. But I don’t assume a sensation tells me exactly what is happening in someone’s nervous system. Part of somatic work is getting curious about the particular person in front of me.

And many successful leaders have become remarkably good at functioning through all of it.

From the outside, the presentation went well. The decision got made. The job got done.

I’m interested in what that performance cost them.

Maybe they spend the next three hours replaying what they said in the meeting. Maybe their mind immediately starts scanning for what went wrong. Or they get home physically exhausted but unable to stop thinking about work, with very little left for a partner, their children, their friends or themselves.

Human beings are remarkably adaptive. Vigilance, compartmentalization, intensity, control and the ability to push through can all become real strengths in leadership. The goal isn’t to take those strengths away. It’s to have more choice around when we need them.

Endurance and capacity are not the same thing.

The biology of stress helps explain the distinction. Allostasis describes how our systems adapt to changing demands. Allostatic load describes the physiological cost that can accumulate when those adaptive systems are repeatedly activated, overstimulated or fail to shut off efficiently after stress, as described in Bruce McEwen’s foundational work on allostasis and allostatic load.

What interests me most is what happens after the demand has passed: can the system shift when it no longer needs to stay mobilized?

That question sits at the center of the Human Capacity Method I use at State House. Capacity isn’t perpetual calm. It’s having greater flexibility in how we respond to pressure and what becomes available again afterward. For me, that is what developing leadership capacity actually means.

When Insight Isn’t Enough

Executive coaching can help a leader see themselves more clearly. They can recognize a pattern, understand what happens to their communication when the stakes rise, and make different choices about how they want to lead.

That insight matters.

But sometimes a person understands the pattern completely and still finds themselves inside it.

They know the presentation isn’t dangerous, but their heart is racing and some part of them wants to get out of the room. They know the email can wait until morning, but their system remains alert long after the laptop is closed. They know the difficult conversation went reasonably well, but they spend the next two hours replaying it anyway.

The mind can know something that the body has not yet learned.

This is where Somatic Experiencing® has deeply shaped how I work.

Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented approach to working with patterns of stress and trauma. What has mattered most to me as a practitioner is the way the work asks us to pay close attention to the individual person in front of us rather than assuming everyone needs the same intervention.

Two leaders can display almost identical behavior and have arrived there through entirely different paths.

Two CEOs might both become controlling when a meeting goes sideways. One may be responding to the enormous responsibility they carry in their current role. For another, control may be part of a pattern that developed much earlier in life. A third may have an entirely different experience underneath behavior that looks almost identical from across a conference table.

Human beings aren’t protocols.

I don’t know what a person’s physiology needs simply because I know their job title, personality type, leadership challenge or symptoms. And I don’t want to take an adaptation that has served someone well and immediately label it as a problem.

This is also why I hesitate when nervous system regulation gets reduced to a set of universal tools. The deeper work isn’t finding the perfect technique for making an uncomfortable sensation disappear.

We aren’t chasing symptoms. We’re getting curious about the person experiencing them.

That may mean noticing tightness in the jaw without immediately trying to relax it. It might mean tracking what happens as someone approaches a difficult subject, or recognizing the moment they begin to speed up, brace or move away from their own experience.

The aim is more flexibility and choice, not simply getting better at looking regulated.

Sometimes the question underneath the leadership work is: what happens when you already know how you want to lead, but under pressure your body keeps taking you somewhere else?

That’s where working with physiology can add something insight alone cannot.

Because high performance shouldn’t require access to less and less of yourself.

Why State House, and Why Brooklyn

State House Somatics grew out of a belief that we shouldn’t have to choose between high performance and being fully human.

I came to somatic work because I was interested in what helps people feel more whole and alive. As my work has moved into leadership, I’ve found myself asking that same question in a different context: what does it mean to remain connected to ourselves while carrying ambition, responsibility, pressure and power?

Neurowellness isn’t the only relevant shift in the Global Wellness Summit’s 2026 report. It also identifies an “Over-Optimization Backlash”—a response to a wellness culture increasingly organized around tracking, scoring and optimizing ourselves. The report describes a movement back toward emotional repair, nervous system safety and more embodied forms of care.

I find it compelling that these conversations are happening at the same time.

We’re becoming more interested in the nervous system while also questioning whether human beings should be treated like machines that can be endlessly optimized.

I don’t think the answer is asking people to become less ambitious.

I don’t want to make an intense leader less intense. As an Enneagram professional—and an Enneagram 8 myself—I certainly don’t want to lose my own intensity. But I have wanted to learn how to soften it.

Maybe that’s part of what I’m interested in for leaders, too: what is the softer expression of the adaptations that helped us succeed?

I don’t want to take vigilance away from someone whose ability to anticipate risk has made them exceptional at what they do. I want to know whether that vigilance can become more discerning, available when there is actually something that requires our attention rather than keeping us perpetually on alert.

I don’t want to take away someone’s ability to compartmentalize. There are moments when leadership requires it. I want them to be able to compartmentalize and still have access to tenderness.

And I don’t want to eliminate intensity. I want intensity to be something we can access rather than something we have to live inside.

The point isn’t to become less powerful. It’s to have access to more of ourselves while we use that power.

Can we keep the performance and expand the person?

The name State House began here in Brooklyn, on State Street, where this work first started taking shape. But a house carries another meaning for me, too. It’s a place of return. A place where we come back to ourselves.

Perhaps capacity isn’t only about how much we can carry. It’s also about our ability to come back—to recover when the demand is over, reconnect with what we had to put aside and carry responsibility without allowing it to become the only part of ourselves we can access.

State House is now bringing somatic executive coaching to Brooklyn more intentionally, working with founders, executives and other leaders carrying substantial responsibility.

Not because Brooklyn leaders need to become calmer, and not because ambition is something we need to heal from.

I think there is another possibility for leadership:

Can you have access to everything that makes you formidable at work without losing access to everything that makes you human?

That’s the work I’m building here.

Bringing nervous system work to the workplace. Where High Performance Becomes More Human.