The Hidden Cost of a Drama-Free Workplace

A team of Swedish researchers recently set out to answer a question on everyone’s mind: What happens when you drug a bunch of baby salmon with anti-anxiety meds?They exposed Atlantic salmon smolts — young salmon making their once-in-a-lifetime migration from river to sea — to clobazam, a benzodiazepine. (Clobazam is in the same family as Valium and Xanax. It takes the edge off.)They watched what happened when a predator was introduced. Normal salmon tighten up — they shoal, forming cohesive groups, doing the collective threat-response thing their species has been refining for millions of years.The drugged smolts didn't. They drifted apart. They moved as individuals.The drug did more than make the fish more relaxed. It made them miscalibrated.Their environment is genuinely full of threats, including birds of prey, otters, fish, and even terrifying-looking merganser ducks complete with serrated bills.Salmon’s nervous systems evolved to read those threats and respond.Clobazam makes them environmentally illiterate.The Experiment We’re Already RunningI've been thinking about this study a lot lately — because most organizations are running the same experiment on their people, just without the benzos.Workplaces routinely ask people to perform calm.Don't bring drama. Don't catastrophize.Don't make a fuss. Stay positive. The implicit message — sometimes explicit — is that the appearance of being unbothered is the same thing as being well-adjusted, and well.It isn't.Performing calm and actually being regulated are very different states.The first is a flattening, where people’s perceptions respond in a similarly limp fashion to threats and opportunities.The second is a kind of capacity — the ability to take in information, including unwelcome information, and respond to it from a steady center rather than from panic or paralysis.A regulated nervous system is online. It's reading the environment. It's noticing what's off.A "nothing-to-see-here" workplace culture asks for the opposite. It rewards the appearance of regulation and punishes healthy responses to actual dangers.It tells the people whose nervous systems are picking up real signal — the early warning, the pattern that doesn't add up, the customer drift, the quiet worry about a strategy — to settle down, look more relaxed, not be such a downer.Those people aren't the problem. They're a functional sensing apparatus.Every time the room signals that their concern is bringing the energy down, it doses them with a little hit of emotional clobazam.Their threat-perception is compromised in ways their leaders won't see until something breaks.This isn’t an ode to anxiety. It’s the difference between head-on-a-swivel regulation and why-bother sedation.Regulation Isn’t PerformanceSeeing your team this way — as a sensing apparatus rather than as problems to manage — is a reframe I owe to my friend Ian Lawton, founder of NeuroHive, an organization supporting late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults.Ian read an early draft of my forthcoming book The Buoyant Leader and pointed out, with characteristic kindness, that I'd wandered into territory that wouldn't serve a meaningful slice of my readers — autistic, ADHD, trauma-affected, and otherwise neurodivergent leaders, but also leaders whose teams include people across that full neurological range.His feedback reorganized my thinking: regulation isn't an outward look, it's a stability of intention. The team member whose worry registers in her body before it reaches her words isn't failing at composure. She's regulating. She's also probably reading something the room needs to hear.Ian's framework reorganized substantial portions of my book. More importantly, it should reorganize how you think about what "good leadership presence" actually means — both in yourself and in the people you're leading. Read his foreword when The Buoyant Leader comes out. (And while you're there, read the rest of the book.)Back to the FishThe drugged smolts didn’t die of relaxation. They died of illiteracy.They lost the ability to read their environment, and each other.They stopped shoaling, and lost their fear of very real and present dangers.That’s what a “keep calm and carry on” culture builds.So here's my question for you:In the rooms you lead, are you cultivating a culture where people can stay regulated through hard things — or one where they have to look calm regardless of what they're picking up?Only one of them lets your team do what the undrugged smolts do instinctively: shoal up, read the water together, and move as one through genuinely dangerous terrain.