The ‘Mental Autoimmune Response’—Why Your Brain Fights Against Too Much Pressure
By: Greg Chasson, PhD, ABPP
Greg Chasson, PhD, ABPP, is a speaker, esteemed psychologist, and Professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. He’s the author of the award-winning and best-selling book, Flawed: Why Perfectionism is a Challenge for Management. Discover more about Dr. Chasson at www.gregchasson.com.
“Pressure is a privilege.” — Billie Jean King, Tennis Legend
“The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.” — Robin Sharma, Leadership Expert
Two quotes, two perspectives.
If you ask an elite athlete about pressure, they’ll likely tell you it’s something to embrace.
Billie Jean King famously called it a privilege or an opportunity to ‘rise to the occasion’.
Now, if you ask a business leader, you might hear something different.
Robin Sharma, a leadership strategist, talks about foresight.
Foresight = anticipating challenges before they overwhelm you.
In sports, pressure is often immediate and external.
In business, it’s long-term, cumulative, and mostly self-imposed.
And that’s where things get tricky.
Last time, we talked about the Cognitive Cost of Overcommitment—how constantly saying ‘yes’ piles up mental debt that slows you down.
This week, we’re taking it a step further,
‘What happens when the pressure itself turns against you?’
When your brain starts working against you instead of for you?
That’s the Mental Autoimmune Response.
In other words, your mind’s way of trying to protect you from stress but, in the process, sabotaging your performance.
When Pressure Becomes a Threat
A little pressure is good—it fuels focus, pushes you to perform, and keeps you engaged. But too much pressure?
That’s when things start to backfire.
Think about your immune system. It’s designed to protect you. But when it overreacts, it starts attacking healthy cells, mistaking them for threats.
That’s what happens to your brain under chronic stress (ouch).
When your mental immune system is overwhelmed, your cognitive functions
- Decision-making
- Focus
- Creativity
get hijacked. Your brain prioritizes survival over performance, leading to:
Decision paralysis—simple choices feel overwhelming.
Mental exhaustion—constantly “on” but getting nothing done.
Overreaction to stress—small obstacles feel like insurmountable problems.
Emotional detachment—you start feeling numb to work, relationships, and goals.
A study published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience found that prolonged stress rewires the brain, shrinking the prefrontal cortex (responsible for rational thinking) while strengthening the amygdala (the brain’s panic center).
In other words, too much pressure literally reshapes your brain to make you more reactive and less strategic.
That’s why you need to grasp the core of this dilemma.
Flawed Thinking and the Perfectionist
This ties directly into the ideas I explore in Flawed,
Perfectionists are especially vulnerable to the Mental Autoimmune Response.
Why?
Because they overestimate how much control they have.
They believe that if they just work harder, they can manage every outcome.
The conflict?
When things don’t go as planned, their brain perceives it as a failure and instead of adjusting, they double down (working longer hours, pushing themselves harder, and piling on more stress).
In their head this is resilience.
But, as a psychologist, I suggest
This is self-destruction.
Why My Course Exists (and Why You Should Care)
A 2023 study from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology found that professionals who don’t schedule deliberate recovery time experience 40% higher rates of burnout and 30% more cognitive errors in decision-making.
Burnout doesn’t happen because you worked hard. It happens because you never stop working hard.
Most high performers won’t realize they’re in the Mental Autoimmune Response loop until it’s too late.
This isn’t entirely their fault because in most cases, it doesn’t feel like burnout at first, it feels like you just need to work a little harder to get back on track.
You can fight burnout by focusing on three core concepts to destroy this destructive pattern:
- Mental bandwidth optimization—so your brain works for you, not against you. We do this through training smart prioritization.
- Strategic pressure management—learning when to push and when to pull back. This is based on values-based action.
- Cognitive reset techniques—to stop stress from hijacking your decisions. The course delves into this based on cognitive defusion techniques.
The result? Healthy performance longevity.
The consequence of inaction? The stress will win at a steep cost to your ‘mental health’.
To learn more about Dr. Chasson work, to purchase his book or follow him visit his webpage: https://www.gregchasson.com/. This blog was shared with permission from Dr. Chasson. He will be a featured speaker at our 2026 Perinatal Leadership Forum.
The material presented in this blog represents the opinion of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of Synova Associates. Synova Associates does not endorse any specific products or organizations but strives to connect its industry partners with leaders interested in product/educational innovation.
