As a high-earning, high-achieving man, you’ve climbed the ranks in your chosen field. Whether you’re an executive, mid-manager, entrepreneur or top-performing individual contributor, your success is hard-earned—but it comes with a cost: stress. The pressure to maintain peak performance, lead teams, and balance personal responsibilities can feel relentless. When stress festers unchecked, it risks undermining everything you’ve built, including your health. In this blog post, we’ll take a comprehensive look at the best ways to manage stress as a high achiever. We’ll identify common stressors, reveal the steep toll of ignoring them, and teach actionable strategies to help you thrive under pressure. Let’s dive in.
The Unique Stressors of High-Achievers
You live in a world of high stakes and higher expectations. Your role demands that you consistently deliver exceptional results, whether it’s steering an entire company, driving innovation, managing a team of ambitious people or showing up for your relationships outside of work. Consequently, this life exposes you to stressors that few others encounter. Here’s what you’re up against:
- Relentless pressure to perform: The bar is set sky-high, and staying there requires constant vigilance. A single miscalculation can feel like it jeopardises years of progress.
- Work-life tension: Your career demands long hours, yet family and social responsibilities—whether it’s supporting a partner or attending your child’s football match—pull you in the opposite direction. The guilt of missing out gnaws at you.
- Financial complexity: High earnings don’t eliminate financial stress. Managing investments, tax obligations, and the risks tied to maintaining your wealth can keep you awake at night.
- Leadership burden: As a decision-maker, you carry the weight of your team’s livelihoods and your organisation’s future. Every choice has a deep impact.
These aren’t fleeting pressures; they’re woven into your daily life. You know the feeling of lying awake at night, your mind racing with deadlines, decisions, and what-ifs. Left unmanaged, this chronic stress becomes a silent threat to your success and well-being. Recognising it is your first move towards fixing it.
The High Cost of Unmanaged Stress
Despite what social media wants men to believe, ignoring stress isn’t a badge of toughness—it’s a gamble with catastrophic odds. The Health and Safety Executive reports that work-related stress accounts for 57% of all working days lost to ill health in the UK, a statistic that underscores its prevalence even among top performers. For high-achievers like you, the consequences cut deeper and hit harder:
- Eroded productivity: Chronic stress clouds your judgment and slows your decision-making. What once took hours now drags into days, chipping away at your edge.
- Health breakdown: The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, and for good reason. Stress fuels heart disease, hypertension, and mental health struggles—conditions that don’t discriminate based on income.
- Fractured relationships: When stress follows you home, it strains bonds with your spouse, children, and friends. Irritability and absence replace connection.
- Burnout’s lasting scar: The breaking point—burnout—can halt your career in its tracks. It’s not just exhaustion; it’s a full-stop that can cost you months, even years, of momentum.
When I was working in the Tech industry as an account manager, I was under immense stress. I was a top 2% earner and felt under a lot of pressure to maintain the lifestyle I had become accustomed to living. I had big sales targets to hit, which meant I was working all of the hours under the sun to achieve them. I used alcohol, caffeine and junk food to get myself through stressful situations. I didn’t listen to the warning signs and ended up gaining weight, feeling awful mentally and physically, and burning out! This isn’t uncommon either; it’s a pattern among high-achievers who treat stress as a minor annoyance rather than a critical threat. The data backs this up: a Harvard Business Review study found 60% of executives feel “completely overwhelmed” by their workload. The question isn’t if unmanaged stress will cost you—it’s how much. Let’s learn from my mistakes and start managing stress.
Effective Stress Management Strategies
Stress can be managed and overcome. The following strategies are tailored to your demanding lifestyle. They’re practical, proven, and designed to integrate with your responsibilities as a high achiever. Implement them, and you’ll not only manage stress but turn it into a tool for sustained success.
1. Prioritisation and Time Management
What to Do: Master your schedule with the Eisenhower Matrix—sort tasks into four quadrants: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither. Focus on what drives results and ditch the rest.
How to Start: List your tasks before the week begins, and iterate daily. Assign them to quadrants, and tackle the top priorities first.
Example: A senior leader might reserve mornings for strategy while delegating routine emails to an assistant.
Why It Works: By zeroing in on high-impact activities, you reclaim control over your time and reduce the chaos of an overstuffed to-do list.
2. Delegation
What to Do: Offload tasks that don’t require your direct expertise to trusted team members or external support.
How to Start: Identify one recurring task—like report generation—and assign it this week. Build from there.
Tip: Empower your team with clear instructions and trust them to deliver.
Example: An entrepreneur delegates social media management to a marketing lead, freeing hours for client negotiations.
Why It Works: Delegation lightens your load and leverages your team’s strengths, amplifying collective output.
3. Mindfulness and Meditation
What to Do: Practice short, daily mindfulness sessions to reset your mind. Apps like Headspace or Calm make it accessible.
How to Start: Commit to 5 minutes each morning or before bed—focus on your breath or follow a guided session.
Example: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey credits meditation for maintaining clarity amid his dual leadership roles.
Why It Works: Studies show meditation lowers cortisol (the stress hormone) and sharpens focus, giving you an edge in high-pressure moments.
4. Physical Exercise
What to Do: Integrate at least 30 minutes of movement daily—walking, running, or high-intensity interval training (HIIT).
How to Start: Block it on your calendar like a client meeting. A brisk lunchtime walk or a walking meeting works well.
Tip: If time’s tight, try a 15-minute bodyweight HIIT session at home—no gym required.
Example: My client, a Chief Revenue Officer, spent most of his day sedentary in back-to-back meetings and drinking coffee. He started to walk during meetings whenever it was appropriate and soon was clocking over 10,000 steps per day and felt much better for it.
Why It Works: Exercise triggers endorphin release, a natural antidote to stress, while enhancing physical resilience.
5. Professional Support
What to Do: Engage a therapist, coach, or mentor who gets the high-achiever’s world.
How to Start: Schedule a monthly session to offload concerns, gain tailored strategies and receive some accountability.
Example: Fortune 500 CEOs often rely on coaches to navigate stress and refine leadership—a practice you can adopt.
Why It Works: External perspective cuts through blind spots, offering solutions you might not see solo.
6. Setting Boundaries
What to Do: Draw firm lines between work and personal life—say, no emails after 7 PM or uninterrupted weekends.
How to Start: Communicate your boundaries to your team and enforce them with tools like email autoresponders.
Tip: Test it for a week; adjust as needed.
Example: A business owner designates Sunday as family-only, recharging for the week ahead.
Why It Works: Boundaries protect your mental space, preventing work from consuming every waking hour.
7. Hobbies and Leisure
What to Do: Carve out time for activities that disconnect you from work—golf, reading, or running are firm favourites of my clients.
How to Start: Pick one hobby and dedicate 30 minutes weekly, scaling up as it sticks.
Example: Bill Gates takes “think weeks” to read and reflect, emerging sharper and less stressed.
Why It Works: Leisure recharges your mind, breaking the cycle of constant problem-solving.
8. Nutrition
What to Do: Focus on hitting your protein and fibre targets while swapping simple carbs for slow-release complex carbs.
How to Start: Set your daily protein target by using this calculator and aim for a minimum of 20g of fibre daily. Swap out simple carbs such as white bread, cakes, sugary breakfast cereals for complex carbs such as porridge oats, wholemeal bread, and sweet potato.
Example: My client Tim struggled with poor energy levels and feeling sluggish, which impacted his ability to deal with the stress of running his company. He often skipped breakfast, which meant he had strong cravings by lunchtime, leading to an unhealthy lunch, which resulted in an afternoon energy slump. The simple act of having a healthy slow slow-release breakfast, such as porridge and a protein shake, kept him going strong into lunch and minimised his cravings. The impact was felt immediately and he now had the energy to face stressful situations head on!
Why It Works: Fixing your nutrition ensures you have steady energy throughout the day, meaning you can better deal with whatever comes at you.
But what if you have no time?
Start small—5 minutes of meditation or getting off a stop earlier during your commute to get some steps in. The return on investment—clarity, health, productivity—far outweighs the minutes spent. These aren’t luxuries; they’re necessities for balancing out your life and managing stress.
Conclusion: Taking Control of Your Stress
Stress is a given in your high-achieving life, but it doesn’t have to dominate you. You’ve seen the unique pressures—performance demands, leadership burdens, and the tug-of-war between work and home. You’ve also felt the pain of ignoring them: burnout, health crises, and lost opportunities. Now, you know the tools to fight back: prioritise ruthlessly, delegate confidently, embrace mindfulness, move your body, seek support, set boundaries, reclaim leisure and fix your nutrition. Start today—pick one strategy and act. Build from there. Your career, your health, and your legacy depend on mastering stress, not just enduring it. You’ve already conquered challenges to reach where you are today; stress is one more summit to claim.
