When Calm CEO David Ko took the stage at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference earlier this month, he opened with a deceptively simple question. His company had surveyed more than 250 C-suite executives and asked them, plainly: How are you doing?
Most answered the same way many leaders do – good.
On the surface, that response suggests Resilience, Confidence, Control. But when Ko and his team looked beneath the surface, the picture changed dramatically.
Nearly half of respondents—48%—reported feeling overwhelmed. One in four said they were experiencing anxiety or depression. Thirty-four percent felt mentally drained, and 40% admitted they were not mentally present at work. Perhaps most striking: half of the executives surveyed said they had considered stepping down from their roles altogether.
https://www.sundardasnaturopathy.com/neuroplasticity
This gap between how leaders say they are doing and how they are actually functioning points to a deeper issue in modern leadership culture. At the top, composure is expected. Admitting strain can feel risky, even irresponsible. The result is a quiet burnout—one that rarely shows up in quarterly reports but steadily erodes judgment, creativity, and long-term effectiveness.
https://www.sundardasnaturopathy.com/gentle-biogenetics
Ko offered a powerful reframing. Instead of asking leaders to label their mental health with loaded terms, he asked them to think of their energy like a battery. How charged are you?
Only one in four executives said their battery was “fully recharged.” Most, Ko observed, were operating at roughly 20%.
“Think about what that means,” he said.
At 20% battery, we conserve. We react instead of plan. We default to habits rather than innovation. For leaders, that state isn’t just personally costly—it’s organizationally dangerous. Decisions made from depletion tend to be narrower, more defensive, and less humane. Teams feel it. Cultures absorb it.
What’s notable is not that executives are struggling—leadership has always carried pressure—but how widespread and normalized this level of depletion has become. High performance has quietly been redefined as endurance, not sustainability.
The data also challenges a persistent myth: that seniority brings psychological insulation. In reality, responsibility compounds stress. Leaders absorb uncertainty from every direction—markets, boards, employees, technologies—often with few places to offload it safely.
Ko’s battery metaphor matters because it creates permission. It allows leaders to assess themselves honestly without stigma. You don’t need to be “burned out” or “depressed” to recognize you’re running low. And you don’t need to be at zero to justify recharging.
The real question is what organizations do with this insight. If half of their top leaders are contemplating exit, wellness is no longer a personal issue—it’s a strategic one. Supporting mental presence, recovery, and sustainable energy isn’t a perk. It’s leadership infrastructure.
Because when leaders operate at 20%, the entire system eventually follows.
Whether we are working with C-Suite executive or Board members, we have noticed those who are honest recognise that their self-care is inadequate. When we do our assessments, we find time and time again they are not at their physiological best. They are in battery conservation mode.
Here’s the deal: when they’re under pressure, their body releases cortisol, the stress hormone designed to help them power through short-term challenges. That’s useful when they need to ace a presentation or dodge traffic. But when stress sticks around, cortisol hangs out too long—and that’s when the damage begins.
https://www.sundardasnaturopathy.com/emotional-healing
When we subsequently review their health metrics, provide frameworks and apply tweaks in the form of targeted mindset, nutritional approaches and neuroplastic interventions, the story, changes. They realize they have been short changingthemselves.
If you need help you can click here to review your lifestyle choices and find out what you can do to improve it.
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Yours in Health,
Prof Sundardas D Annamalay