Healthy Leaders Build Healthy Businesses: Why Joy, Stress, and Your Nervous System Matter More Than You Think
- Brent Stromwall
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Your Business Feels What You Feel:
Your emotional life is not separate from your leadership—it’s the foundation. Most
business owners think about health in terms of sleep, diet, and exercise, and those
matter. However, many leaders miss a deeper truth: your emotional life and your level of
maturity are shaping your physical health every day.
I’ve lived it—dreading Monday mornings, keeping a tight grip on everything to control
outcomes, and lying awake at night with constant anxiety, hopelessness, and fear of
failure. Entrepreneurs and leaders carry a unique emotional load: financial responsibility, payroll, customer demands, team drama and conflict, and the constant sense that you’re “one mistake away.” Decisions carry weight, conflict is unavoidable, and financial risk is real. So, the real question isn’t whether stress exists, but how much. And not whether you can “handle it,” but what your body is doing while you try.
Scripture has been telling us this for millennia: “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a
crushed spirit dries up the bones” (Proverbs 17:22). That isn’t just poetic language; it’s a
revelation of how we’re created—joy changes what your nervous system does under
pressure, and that powerfully influences physical health.
Your Body Is Listening:
Modern research confirms what Scripture already revealed. In The Body Keeps the
Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains how unresolved stress and emotional
pain don’t just live in the mind; they lodge in the nervous system, muscles, and immune
response. When emotions are ignored, suppressed, or unmanaged, the body pays the
cost. In other words, what we refuse to feel, process relationally, and heal doesn’t
disappear—over time it shows up as tension, fatigue, and vulnerability; often as anxiety,
depression, chronic pain, and stress-related illness.
Many entrepreneurs live in a near-constant state of low-grade fight-or-flight—the body’s
response to threat—which is why so many leaders experience tight shoulders, shallow
breathing, gut issues, restless sleep, chronic fatigue, and high blood pressure. These
aren’t random inconveniences; they’re signals. Your body can treat everyday leadership
burdens—managing finances, people, processes, and problems—as if they are threats
to your life. The Mayo Clinic explains that “The long-term activation of the stress
response system and too much exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones can
disrupt almost all the body's processes. This puts you at higher risk of many health
problems,” like anxiety, physical pain, heart disease, sleep problems, weight gain, and
more.¹
Research from Dr. Jim Wilder at Life Model Works helps explain why. Our brains are
designed to operate best in a state of relational joy and secure attachment. When
leaders lack emotional maturity and safe connection, their brains stay stuck in survival
mode – what Wilder calls Enemy Mode. Over time, that state becomes exhausting and
damaging. The sobering reality is that leaders often normalize what is actually
unsustainable; you may be “handling it,” but your body is keeping the receipts.
Emotional Maturity Is a Leadership Skill:
Emotional maturity isn’t about being soft. It’s about being honest, self-aware, and
processing unpleasant emotions in a relationally healthy way. Immature emotional
patterns like avoidance, anger, control, or constant overwork and busyness are signals
of a lack of emotional maturity and create internal stress even when outward success
looks strong. Stephen Covey said it plainly: “Private victories precede public victories.”²
Emotional health is a private victory that directly affects public outcomes, including your
physical health and leadership capacity, and the health of your relationships – with God,
family members, employees, and others.
Leaders who don’t process disappointment, anger, fear, or grief well often respond by
driving themselves harder instead. That might work for the short-term. But in the long-
term, it shows up as burnout, illness, or emotional shutdown.
Faith, the Brain, and the Body:
Christian leadership isn’t just about ethics or vision – it’s about formation. Jesus
modeled emotional awareness, rest, and relational connection: He withdrew to pray, He
wept, He slept in storms, He confronted conflict directly and relationally, and even when
angry He didn’t blow up – He healed (Mark 3:5).
Spiritual maturity supports emotional maturity. When leaders live from trust rather than
fear, their nervous systems settle. When identity is rooted in Christ rather than
performance, pressure loses its grip. Scripture doesn’t separate spiritual life from
physical life. We are integrated beings—spirit, soul, and body.
Life Model Works emphasizes building joy, quieting the brain, and practicing relational
connection as foundations for resilience. These aren’t “soft skills” – they’re biological
necessities for healthy living. It’s no accident that the fruit of the Spirit begins with love,
joy, and peace, because warm, safe connection (love) helps the body come out of threat
mode—often lowering stress hormones over time—and oxytocin is one of the key chemicals associated with bonding and attachment. Peace isn’t “just a mindset,” either; it shows up as nervous-system regulation—the body shifting into a calmer, restorative state (“rest and digest”). And relational joy engages the brain’s attachment and reward circuitry, strengthening resilience and making it easier to recover after stress. This is how God designed us.
A Question Worth Asking:
If your body could speak honestly, what would it say about how you’re leading?
Dr. Wilder teaches that “the ability to quiet the body after a distressing experience is the
best predictor of mental health across the lifespan!”³ This raises a simple question: How
are you at resting – not just sleeping or mindlessly scrolling or flipping channels. (These
are not rest, but often ways we avoid emotional pain.) Can you sit peacefully without
activity and be with the One who brings you peace – the One whose mere presence
calms your fears – so that being quiet with God is good for your relationship with Him
and healthy for your body, your soul, and your mind.
Chronic tension is not a badge of honor. Emotional numbness is not strength. Pushing
through at all costs is not faithfulness. Avoiding fear of failure is not trust.
Your business and employees need you healthy, your family needs you present, and
your calling deserves a body – the temple of the Holy Spirit – that isn’t breaking under
the weight of unprocessed emotion. Leadership starts on the inside. When you grow in
emotional and spiritual maturity, your body feels the difference, and over time, so does
everyone you lead.
This month, take 60 seconds three times a day to quiet your body by remembering a
peace- or joy-filled memory—no phone, slow breathing, present with God—and notice
what changes.
¹ Mayo Clinic Staff. (n.d.). Chronic stress puts your health at risk. Mayo Clinic.
² Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press, 1989), 43.
³ Jim Wilder, “Attachment and Brain Science: Relational Brain Skills & the Life Model,” Life Model Works,
accessed January 2026, https://lifemodelworks.org/blog/attachment-and-brain-science/relational-brain-skills-the-life-model
Comments