Economic uncertainty, shifting geopolitics, constant technological disruption, and unrelenting scrutiny create a demanding climate for today’s CEOs. Yet the greatest threat to effective leadership rarely begins in an earnings call, shareholder meeting, or even a scandal. More often, it starts quietly, through the gradual erosion of a leader’s mental health.
Cracks in mental health aren’t just personal struggles; they’re also organizational risks. A CEO’s judgment is the company’s compass. When clouded by stress, anxiety, exhaustion, or distraction, it misguides culture, strategy, and ultimately shareholder value. These seven essential mental health habits help highly effective CEOs ensure their compass stays true.
1. They Protect Recovery Like A Board Meeting
The first casualty of a CEO’s calendar is often recovery. Back-to-back commitments, constant travel, and endless decisions create the illusion that skipping rest is simply part of the job. Yet this sacrifice quietly drains the very resources leaders depend on: focus, composure, judgment, and charisma.
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Highly effective CEOs treat recovery as immovable as a board meeting: it isn’t optional and it’s scheduled. That means establishing clear boundaries around sleep, practicing disciplined transitions out of work mode, incorporating micro-recovery rituals into the day, and even deliberately using tools such as saunas or cold plunges to support recovery. By making restoration a structural priority, leaders protect their clarity and steadiness required for long-term leadership.
2. They Treat Movement As A Mental Reset, Not Just Exercise
For many leaders, physical activity is often viewed as a means to stay fit, look sharp, or maintain energy. But for highly effective CEOs, movement serves a different purpose: it’s a circuit breaker for the mind. Disney CEO Bob Iger, for example, has described exercise as his way of creating clarity and control.
Author Haruki Murakami echoes this sentiment in his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, where he describes running as a means to enter a “void”—a state of mental emptiness that facilitates reflection, perspective, and emotional processing.
And the science backs this up. Research published in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology found that even a 10-minute break for physical activity significantly improved attention and reduced stress levels. For CEOs, these micro-resets can mean the difference between entering a meeting reactively or walking in with complete confidence.
3. They Train Their Mind And Their Inputs
Physical training is a standard practice for executives aiming to maintain their physical well-being. Yet the most effective CEOs recognize that the mind also requires conditioning. Left unchecked, the brain becomes cluttered with stress, anxiety, and digital noise, all of which degrade decision quality.
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Effective leaders treat their minds like a gym. They build mental resilience through practices such as meditation, therapy, or structured reflection. Just as significant, they exercise discipline over their inputs. Constant notifications, nonstop news cycles, and decisions that should have been delegated all accumulate as mental debt. By curating what gets through, leaders protect their attention as carefully as they protect capital.
The result isn’t just calmer thinking, it’s cleaner and more effective decision-making in the moments that matter most.
4. They Invest In Relationships To Avoid The Isolation Trap
The higher leaders climb, the fewer people remain who can speak to them candidly. Left unaddressed, this isolation breeds anxiety, distorted judgment, and burnout. Highly effective CEOs resist the lone-wolf trap.
They deliberately cultivate relationships that support their mental health and hone their perspective. That includes nurturing personal bonds outside the office, protecting time with family, and building circles of trusted peers who tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
These connections act as stabilizers, protecting both the leader’s judgment and the organization’s stability.
5. They Use Light As A Lever For Focus And Mood
For most people, light is background. For highly effective CEOs, it’s an underutilized lever of performance and mental health.
Morning sunlight signals the brain to wake fully, thus elevating alertness and setting the body’s internal clock. Midday daylight breaks help sustain energy, while dim, warmer light in the evening primes the mind for recovery. Conversely, late-night screen exposure tells the brain it’s still daytime, which delays sleep and compounds stress.
Leaders who engineer their light environment, just as they engineer their financial strategy, operate with steadier focus and emotional balance.
6. They Delegate Beyond The Business
Many CEOs excel at delegating within their companies but fail to extend that discipline to their personal lives. The result is mental overload: managing health logistics, life admin, and recurring tasks that chip away at focus and create decision fatigue.
Highly effective leaders take a different approach. They outsource tasks that don’t require their judgment, such as health coordination, household logistics, or scheduling. By removing themselves as bottlenecks outside of work, they free up cognitive bandwidth.
That reclaimed time is then reinvested where it yields the highest returns: in strategic decisions and meaningful relationships.
7. They Maintain An Identity Beyond Their Title
One of the most overlooked risks to a CEO’s mental health is identity collapse, when self-worth becomes synonymous with quarterly results or company performance. When the business stumbles, so does the leader’s sense of self.
Highly effective CEOs build and protect a portfolio of identities beyond the corner office. They invest in roles as parents, partners, athletes, mentors, or creators. These alternative sources of meaning act as stabilizers, ensuring their mental health isn’t tied solely to external metrics beyond their control.
Better Mental Health, Better Leadership
The pressures of modern leadership aren’t slowing down. If anything, they are accelerating, making the protection of a leader’s mental health more critical than ever.
When CEOs and boards prioritize mental health as a non-negotiable, the benefits ripple throughout the company, resulting in stronger strategies, more resilient cultures, and steadier teams. Mental health isn’t just self-care. It’s also essential leadership infrastructure. The CEOs who treat it that way not only endure, they set the pace for everyone else.
Credit: www.forbes.com
