Your brain uses about 20% of your body’s total energy budget all by itself, before a single muscle moves or a single molecule of food gets digested.

Which means it has to be ruthlessly efficient in how it spends those calories.

It achieves efficiency by predicting what’s about to happen based on past learning.

But not only that. It also predicts what’s happening right now.

That sounds weird, right? I mean, why does it need to predict, when it can just watch and listen and find out?

Because tracking reality in real time is a colossal expenditure of energy. If your brain did that, there would be no energy left for action.

Your Brain is Always Seeing Its Own Simulation

In his book The Experience Machine, Andy Clark explains this using the metaphor of how streaming software handles video. Rather than looking at every single pixel in every single frame of a video, the software’s algorithm focuses only on the differences between each frame and the next.

That way, a video can be rendered using a fraction of the data.

Similarly, your brain is constructing your reality, and checking the data from your senses for errors; things in your environment that don’t align with the prediction.

Faced with prediction error, your brain updates, in one of two ways.

It either updates its model with the new information, or instructs you to act on the world to bring reality in line with the model.

Those two options — update the model, or act on the world — are both functional. But your brain has a third trick up its sleeve, and this one actually keeps you from learning.

When Prediction Goes Wrong

The third trick is to ignore error signals from the environment.

Your brain does this when it’s more confident in its model of the world than the evidence of your senses. Basically, it’s refusing to acknowledge that it might be wrong.

For example, a leader whose nervous system has learned that disagreement means danger might walk into a routine strategy discussion and read every pushback as a power play — not because it is one, but because their model is predicting threat that isn't there.

In that scenario, their brain deems it too risky to disregard the perceived threat, even if it doesn’t actually exist in their present environment.

The Cost of Bad Predictions

Remember how much energy your brain burns through? That’s why bad predictions are so costly — they burn through resources at an alarming rate.

Here’s what most senior leaders don’t realize: when you’re stressed, a significant portion of your daily energy isn’t being spent on the actual challenges in front of you.

Instead, it's being spent on your nervous system's outdated predictions about those challenges — predictions formed years or decades ago, running silently in the background, burning energy to fight threats that aren't in the room.

This explains that afternoon slump. The disproportionate exhaustion after a meeting that wasn't even that hard. The weekend you need to recover from a week that, on paper, shouldn't have been that demanding.

That’s not you weakening.

That's simply a brain burning premium fuel on bad data.

Your Leadership Ceiling

As a senior leader, you’ve got chops. You’ve got experience.

You’ve learned a ton about how to get your organization from here to there.

You’ve gotten a PhD from the school of hard knocks about dealing with uncertainty and constraints and sudden threats.

And every single leadership skill you’ve invested in has a ceiling — and that ceiling is your nervous system. Because no matter how brilliant your thinking, you can’t simply think your way out of a physiological state.

And as we’ve seen, thinking while triggered is the most expensive thing you can do, on an organizational as well as a personal basis.

The Organization Cascade of Your Energy Crisis

To understand the true cost, multiply that “burning premium fuel on bad data” across your leadership team and down your whole organization.

Because your nervous system isn’t a private experience. It’s a broadcast.

When your nervous system isn’t responding to what’s going on right here, right now, your team picks it up. Their own threat systems activate. Their thinking narrows.

They shift from “let’s make something great” to self-protection mode. They stop bringing you problems early, when they’re solvable.

They stop taking the risks that drive success.

In other words, triggered leaders create triggered teams. And triggered teams create organizations trying to manage collective hallucinations rather than responding creatively to reality.

Where Leadership Leverage Actually Lives

This explains why Google’s Project Aristotle found that the single biggest predictor of high-performing teams is psychological safety.

It’s not about passing around rose-colored glasses. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: lenses that are clear enough to see reality as it is.

And nervous systems that are regulated and stable enough to disagree, to hash out conflict over ideas and approaches, and to be willing to be uncomfortable in the service of something greater.

Remember that 20% energy budget? When your nervous system is regulated, that energy finally goes where it was meant to — toward seeing clearly and leading well.

When you stop hemorrhaging energy on inaccurate predictions, everything about your team improves. Your regulated nervous system can steady a meeting, steer a project, and shift a culture.

This is what my upcoming book, The Buoyant Leader, is built around: a framework for becoming trigger-proof. If you’d like a sneak peek before publication, let me know by commenting “BOOK” or DMing me.