The Passenger

Part 1 of The Radical Reset Chronicles

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being exceptionally good at your job while your body becomes something you merely inhabit. I knew the language of high performance intimately - KPIs, OKRs, capacity planning, change management frameworks. I could architect transformation for entire organisations. But my own body? I was just a passenger.

By late 2023, after a particularly harrowing end to a toxic job, I was running on a depleted operating system. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was dancing around burnout. Broken internal operating system, mental health in the gutter, and self worth at an all time low. But on paper, I was thriving: I’d launched my business as an executive coach, and had a lucrative contract as a Senior HR leader in an 18000 employee strong organisation. In practice, I was managing high-functioning burnout with the same skill I brought to everything else, which is to say, I was exceptionally good at appearing fine.

The mornings started with negotiation. Not with my alarm clock, but with my body. Can I make it through this meeting without my brain fogging over? Should I eat breakfast or will that make me more tired? How many coffees until I can think clearly? By 10 AM, I’d already made a hundred micro-decisions about food, energy, and focus. By 3 PM, the negotiations became louder, more desperate.

This is what I didn’t understand then: food noise isn’t just about hunger. It’s cognitive load wearing the mask of appetite.

The Restart Loop

I’d been in what I now call the ‘Restart Loop’ for years. You probably know it well. Monday’s fresh start, the new plan, the renewed commitment. Wednesday’s compromise. Friday’s collapse. Sunday’s recalibration and the promise that this time would be different.

Each restart came with its own story. I just need to be more disciplined. I just need to meal prep better. I just need to want it more. The psychologist in me could see the pattern - I was treating a systems failure as a willpower problem. But knowing something intellectually and being able to change it are two very different things.

The Restart Loop wasn’t just about weight. It was about energy management, about decision fatigue, about spending so much bandwidth on basic biological regulation that I had nothing left for the things that actually mattered. I could facilitate a three-hour strategy session without breaking a sweat, but deciding what to eat for dinner felt like solving a complex maths problem while running a marathon.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: you can’t build a high-rise career on a depleted foundation.

My body was sending signals I’d learned to override. Fatigue? Push through. Hunger? Ignore or binge, no middle ground. Stress? Manage it with more coffee, more productivity, more achieving. I was treating my nervous system like a poorly supported employee, demanding performance without providing the resources to actually deliver.

The Boardroom vs The Body

The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was helping organisations design better systems, create sustainable workflows, implement change management frameworks that actually accounted for human capacity. But when it came to my own body? I was still operating on the outdated model that willpower was the only resource that mattered.

At work, if a system kept failing despite everyone’s best efforts, we’d investigate the system. We’d look at constraints, resources, underlying structures. We’d never just tell people to ‘try harder’ and expect different results.

But that’s exactly what I was doing to myself.

The breaking point wasn’t dramatic. There was no rock bottom, no singular crisis. It was quieter than that, more like a persistent hum that had grown so loud I couldn’t hear anything else. It was the realisation that I was tired of spending so much energy just trying to maintain baseline function. Tired of every Monday being a new restart. Tired of being a passenger in my own life.

I remember the specific moment clearly. Late November 2024, standing in my kitchen after another day of high-level strategic thinking at work followed by complete paralysis about what to feed myself. I’d helped design a whole leadership development programme that afternoon. I couldn’t figure out dinner.

The gap between my professional capacity and my personal agency had become a chasm.

The Research Phase

I approached the GLP-1 question the way I approach everything: with research. Not just the clinical studies (though I read those too), but the lived experience accounts, the mechanism of action, the long-term data. I wasn’t looking for a magic bullet. I was looking for a tool that might address the system failure rather than just treating the symptoms.

What caught my attention wasn’t the weight loss stories. It was the descriptions of what happened to people’s thinking about food. The way the noise just... stopped. The cognitive bandwidth that suddenly became available. The experience of eating like someone who’d never had a complicated relationship with food in the first place.

I’m training as a psychologist right now, and I understand that behaviour follows biology as much as biology follows behaviour. I’d spent years trying to think my way out of a metabolic problem. What if I could create the metabolic stability first, then build the psychological architecture on top of that foundation?

The shadow work started, even before I’d taken a single dose: I had to contend with my own judgments about needing help. About whether using medication was somehow “cheating” at the transformation I was supposed to will into existence. About whether this made me weak, or less-than, or proof that I’d failed at the one thing I was supposed to be able to control.

I worked with clients on these exact narratives. I could see them clearly in other people. In myself? They were harder to untangle.

The Decision

The decision to try GLP-1s came down to a single reframing question, the kind I’d ask a coaching client: If this were a colleague presenting this situation, what would you advise?

I’d advise them to use every available tool. I’d tell them that sustainable transformation requires addressing root causes, not just symptoms. I’d remind them that we don’t moralise other medical interventions, we don’t tell people with poor eyesight to ‘just try harder’ to see, we give them glasses. I’d ask them what becomes possible when they stop fighting their biology and start working with it.

So in January 2025, I stopped being a passenger and became a researcher. Not just of GLP-1s, but of my own system. What happens when you give a high-functioning person metabolic stability? What becomes possible when food noise quiets? How does professional capacity shift when you’re not spending half your cognitive bandwidth on basic biological regulation?

I placed the order. Waited for the delivery. Read the instructions three times.

And on a unremarkable Tuesday morning, I prepared my first injection.

I didn’t know it then, but I was standing at a threshold. On one side: years of the Restart Loop, of being a passenger, of high-functioning burnout. On the other side: something I didn’t have language for yet.

I just knew I was tired of restarts. I was ready for a reset.

Next in this series: Part 2 - ‘The Quiet’ - What happened when the noise stopped, and what I learned when I chose to turn it back on.