Your Nervous System Is Running Your Business Right Now — And It’s Costing You
When life falls apart, your brain goes into survival mode. Here is what that actually looks like inside your working day — and what to do about it.
There is a version of you that sits down at your desk every morning with a plan. She knows what needs to happen, in what order, and roughly how long each thing will take. She is focused. She is capable. She gets things done.
And then there is the version of you that sits down at your desk in the middle of a separation, a loss, a life crisis — and cannot seem to string two coherent thoughts together before something pulls her completely off course.
If you have ever wondered why you cannot just push through and focus — why the business that used to feel manageable now feels like you are running it underwater — this article is for you.
Because the problem is not your work ethic. It is not your discipline. It is not your commitment to your business or your clients.
It is your nervous system. And right now, it is running the show.
What actually happens to your brain during a life crisis
When we experience a major life disruption — a separation, the death of someone we love, a health crisis, a significant loss of any kind — our nervous system activates its threat response. This is the same system that evolved to protect us from physical danger. It does not distinguish between a predator and a painful phone conversation with your lawyer. It responds to threat. All of it.
In this activated state, your brain is scanning constantly for danger. Your focus narrows. Your emotional responses heighten. Your capacity for complex thinking, clear decision-making and sustained concentration all decrease significantly. You become hypervigilant — noticing, reacting to and processing things that your regulated nervous system would have filtered out entirely.
This is not weakness. This is biology. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The problem is that your business doesn’t know any of this. Your clients don’t know. Your projects don’t know. The emails keep arriving. The deadlines keep approaching. The business keeps asking for the version of you that no longer exists right now.
And everything — every notification, every song, every message, every conversation — has the potential to pull you out of your work and back into the storm.
We call these triggers. And learning to identify and manage yours might be one of the most important things you do for your business right now.
What is a trigger — and why does it matter for your business?
A trigger is anything that activates your threat response and pulls you out of your regulated, focused state. In a heavy life season, triggers are everywhere — and they are often invisible until you’re already in their grip.
A trigger might last seconds. But the nervous system dysregulation it creates — the flood of emotion, the inability to concentrate, the spiral of thoughts — can last hours. And for a business owner trying to deliver for clients, meet deadlines and make clear decisions, hours of lost focus is not a small thing.
Over time, I have identified seven of the most common triggers for entrepreneurs going through a separation or major life disruption. Some of these came from my own experience. All of them are more manageable once you name them.
01 | Trigger One > Your Phone
Your phone is a portal to the chaos. And when you’re going through something hard, it buzzes almost constantly with people who have just found out, people checking in, people asking questions, people wanting to process what happened. Every notification is a potential emotional landmine.
The challenge is that your phone is also your business tool. Your clients are there. Your calendar is there. Your email is there. You cannot simply abandon it. But you also cannot keep picking it up every time it lights up without paying a significant cost to your focus and your emotional regulation.
FROM JODI’S EXPERIENCE
In the early weeks of my separation, my phone became one of the most destabilizing things in my life. I would be mid-task and it would buzz and I would check it — and whatever it said would send me somewhere else entirely. Sometimes it was anger. Sometimes grief. Sometimes anxiety. Sometimes, it was just five minutes of distraction that turned into forty-five because one message led to another.
Every time I checked it, I was essentially choosing to step back into the situation I was trying to hold at a distance long enough to get my work done. And I kept choosing it. Not because I wanted to — but because the pull was overwhelming and I did not yet have a plan.
The solution is not to pretend you don’t have a phone or that the people reaching out don’t matter. The solution is to create structure around when you engage with it — so you choose the moments of contact rather than having contact choose your moments.
WHAT TO DO
Set specific Do Not Disturb windows during your deepest work hours and honour them consistently.
Mute notifications from specific contacts — not because they don't matter, but because you need to choose when you’re ready to receive what they send.
Create a separate focus mode on your phone that allows only work-essential apps and contacts through.
Set designated times to check personal messages — once mid-morning, once after your work day — and outside those times let them wait.
If you’re genuinely struggling with compulsive checking, put your phone in a drawer, a bag or another room during work sessions. Physical distance helps when willpower is depleted.
Tell your closest support people that you will respond within a certain window — this reduces their anxiety and yours simultaneously.
Your phone is not the enemy. The absence of a plan for it is. Give your phone a schedule and you give your nervous system a chance to actually settle during your work hours.
02 | Trigger Two > Music
This one surprised me at first. Music had always been part of how I worked. But in the early months of my separation, I discovered that music with lyrics had become deeply unreliable as a working companion.
A single line — a phrase, a word, a melody that had been playing the night something happened — could pull me out of the present and into the past completely. I would be writing a client proposal or working through a spreadsheet and a song would come on and suddenly I was somewhere else entirely, processing an emotion I didn’t have time to process right then.
FROM JODI’S EXPERIENCE
I tried classical music first because I had heard it was good for focus. It helped a little but it was not really my thing and I found myself distracted by the unfamiliarity of it rather than settled by it. What eventually worked was finding instrumental versions of music I actually liked — rock instrumental playlists, productivity and focus playlists on my Alexa and through the Insight Timer app.
The shift was significant. The music gave me a sense of companionship and pace in my work without the lyrical landmines. I still use instrumental playlists almost exclusively during focused work sessions. It became a cue to my nervous system that this time is work time — separate from everything else.
Music with lyrics is not bad. But when your nervous system is in a heightened state, words carry weight that your regulated brain would have filtered automatically. A song that would have been background noise six months ago can now stop you completely.
WHAT TO DO
Temporarily remove lyric-heavy playlists from your work sessions and treat them as something you choose consciously rather than default to.
Explore instrumental playlists — classical, jazz, lo-fi, rock instrumental, film scores — and find what actually settles rather than stimulates your nervous system.
Try Insight Timer's focus playlists — specifically designed to support concentration without emotional activation. [Note: There’s an extensive library as part of the free Insight Timer app.]
Use music as a transition signal — a specific playlist that means "this is work time" trains your brain to shift states more reliably.
If you find any music is becoming noise rather than support, try working in silence for a session and notice whether your focus improves.
Be honest about what is helping versus what has become habit. Not all background sound is serving your work right now.
03 | Trigger Three > Online Groups & Social Media Feeds
When we’re going through something heavy or painful, we naturally seek out others who understand. Online groups for separation, divorce and grief can seem like an obvious source of support — people who get it, who are in the same place, who will not ask you to explain yourself.
The reality is often very different.
FROM JODI’S EXPERIENCE
I joined several Facebook groups for separation and divorce in the early months hoping to find community and guidance. What I found instead was largely a stream of anger, grief and grievance — people venting about their exes, sharing painful stories, relitigating what had happened to them over and over.
When I saw stories that mirrored pieces of my own, I would feel pulled in completely. My own situation would resurface. The anger or the grief I had managed to set aside for long enough to get work done would come flooding back. I would close the app and sit with an emotional residue that could last the rest of the afternoon.
I eventually left all of those groups. Not because the people in them were wrong to be there — but because for me, that environment was not healing. It was re-wounding. The groups flooded my feed every time I opened the app, which meant the triggering was not even a choice I was making consciously anymore.
Your social media feed during a hard season is an environment you largely did not design for where you are now. It was built for a different version of your life. Managing it actively — rather than passively absorbing it — is a legitimate and important business decision.
WHAT TO DO
Audit the groups and accounts that regularly appear in your feed and ask honestly — is this helping me heal and move forward, or is it keeping me stuck in the story?
Leave or mute groups that are consistently activating rather than supportive — this is not a criticism of those communities, just a recognition that they are not right for you right now.
Use the Snooze function on Facebook to temporarily hide people or groups without permanently leaving.
Consider a scheduled approach to social media — 15 minutes at a set time rather than open access throughout the day.
Curate your feed toward accounts that support focus, calm and forward movement rather than those that keep you in the emotional content of the past.
Separate your business social media use from your personal social media use — different times, different intentions, different headspace.
04 | Trigger Four > The Stories Other People Want to Tell You
This is one of the most complicated triggers to manage — because it involves people who love you.
When news of your separation or situation becomes known, something interesting happens to people in your network. Suddenly, they want to share with you things they have known for months. Pieces of information they have been holding. Stories that feel newly relevant now that you know. Context that, in their minds, will help you make sense of what happened.
Their intention is almost always kind. But the impact is often destabilizing.
FROM JODI’S EXPERIENCE
After people found out about my separation, I started receiving messages and phone calls from people who wanted to tell me things — things they had known for months, sometimes longer. Each piece of information was like a new tile added to a puzzle I had not asked to build. And every time a tile arrived, I had to stop everything I was doing to process it.
The anger was immediate and consuming. The grief would resurface in a different form. The questions would multiply. I would spend the next hour — sometimes longer — unable to think about anything else.
Learning to say "I don't want to know that right now" was one of the hardest and most important things I did for my recovery and my business. Some people were hurt by it. Some pushed back. But protecting my mental space was not about being unkind to them. It was about staying functional enough to keep everything I had worked for from falling apart.
You’re allowed to control the information that enters your system right now. You’re allowed to say not now, or not ever, or I appreciate you wanting to share that but I need you to keep it. This is not selfishness. It is an act of self-preservation that your business desperately needs you to make.
WHAT TO DO
Give yourself explicit permission to decline information that will destabilize you — even from people you love and trust.
Prepare a short, kind script for these moments: "I appreciate you wanting to tell me that. I'm not in a place to receive new information about this right now — I hope you understand".
Identify one or two trusted people who can be a filter — someone who can receive information on your behalf and decide what you actually need to know and when.
If a conversation starts going in a direction you are not ready for, it is completely acceptable to end it: "I need to stop this conversation here — I'm not able to hold this right now".
Recognize that people sharing information with you is often more about managing their own discomfort than serving your healing — you do not owe your attention to someone else's need to unburden themselves.
05 | Trigger Five > Physical Spaces and Objects
Your environment holds memory. A room where significant conversations happened, an object that carries association, a route you always drove together, a restaurant you used to go to — these are all potential triggers that can activate your nervous system before your conscious mind has even registered what happened.
For entrepreneurs working from home — which many of us do — the challenge is acute. Your workspace may be in a home that is changing, in a space that carries strong emotional association, or in an environment that constantly reminds you of what has shifted. There may not be a clean separation between your emotional space and your professional one.
WHAT TO DO
Create a clear physical signal that shifts your space into work mode — a specific lamp, a desk clear-out ritual, headphones on — something your brain learns to associate with focus.
If specific objects in your workspace are triggering, move or remove them temporarily — you can retrieve them when you are in a stronger place.
Consider working from a different physical location on your hardest days — a library, a coffee shop, a friend's spare room — to access focus without the environmental triggers.
If your home office is in a space that is changing or contested, acknowledge that directly and make a temporary plan rather than trying to work through the discomfort.
06 | Trigger Six > Dates, Anniversaries and Calendar Moments
Your calendar holds grief you have not always accounted for. An anniversary. A birthday. A date when something happened. The first Christmas. The first time you had to do something alone that you always did together. These dates arrive without warning in your working day and they carry significant weight.
For business owners, the challenge is that the calendar still shows client deadlines, meetings and deliverables alongside these personal dates. There is no automatic signal that Tuesday is a difficult day. The business does not know.
WHAT TO DO
Map the significant dates you know about in the coming months and flag them in your calendar now — not to dread them, but so they do not arrive as surprises.
On flagged dates, deliberately reduce your professional commitments where possible — schedule lighter work, move calls if you can, give yourself margin.
Build in recovery time after significant dates — the day after is often harder than the day itself.
Tell your therapist or closest support person about the approaching dates so you have somewhere to put them before they land in your working day.
07 | Trigger Seven > Sleep Deprivation and Physical Depletion
Your body is part of the trigger system too. When you’re not sleeping, not eating properly, not moving — your nervous system threshold lowers dramatically. Things that would have been manageable when you were well-rested become destabilizing when you’re running on four hours of broken sleep.
Sleep deprivation is almost universal in the early stages of a separation or major loss. Your nervous system is activated at night. You lie awake. You wake at 2am with thoughts that will not stop. And then you try to run a business the next day on what is left.
WHAT TO DO
Acknowledge that physical depletion is a business problem — not just a personal one — and treat it with the same urgency you would give a revenue problem.
Use the 2am protocol from the STEADY Framework: keep a notepad beside your bed and write down the thoughts rather than trying to resolve them in the dark.
Protect your sleep environment from the triggers already on this list — phone in another room, notifications off, no social media in the hour before sleep.
Accept that some days your capacity number will be lower specifically because of poor sleep — and plan accordingly rather than fighting it.
Talk to your doctor if sleep disruption is significant and sustained — this is a legitimate health issue with real business consequences.
The bigger picture — you cannot think your way through a nervous system response
One of the most important things I want you to take from this article is this: triggers are not a discipline problem. You cannot simply decide to be less triggered. You cannot white-knuckle your way to a regulated nervous system. That is not how the brain works.
What you can do is reduce the volume and frequency of triggering inputs in your environment — so your nervous system has more opportunities to settle, more windows of genuine focus, and less time spent in the activated state that costs you focus, clarity and revenue.
You will not eliminate all triggers. You should not try. They are part of the process of going through something hard. But you can create conditions that make the process less destructive to the business you are working so hard to protect.
The STEADY Framework is built around exactly this kind of practical, honest environmental management. Not pushing through. Not toxic positivity. Just real, specific tools for real, specific situations.
If you want to go deeper — the STEADY Business Survival Kit and the Business First Response program are both built for exactly where you are right now. And the free discovery call costs nothing except 20-30 minutes and the willingness to be honest about where you are.
You are not broken. You are triggered. Those are very different things.
You are not broken. You are triggered.
And there is a way through.
Jodi Laking is a Business Triage and Stability Advisor at Work Smart Canada.
She works with Canadian entrepreneurs navigating separation, divorce and major life disruptions who are determined not to lose what they have built.