Bernadette Boas explains how social threats like rejection and humiliation activate the same brain circuits as physical pain. Workplace toxicity rose to 80% by end of 2025, up 14% from 2024. Low psychological safety suppresses contribution and drives mere compliance.
When it comes to psychological safety, you know, we're looking at the brain being able to take intelligent risk. That is how I will articulate it because social threat triggers the same circuitry in the brain as physical threat. So rejection, exclusion, humiliation, shame. Those actually light up the same areas that process the regions of physical pain. When psychological safety is low, the threat of social punishment overrides the capacity for contribution. So people will only give minimal impact. They're gonna protect themselves. You get compliance, you don't get performance. And so when you think about psychological safety, high periods of workplace trauma, workplace toxicity. Workplace toxicity is at its highest, it's 80% right now, up 14% from 2024. So that data was at the end of 2025. So we know that this is a problem and we know that people's brains are actually being taken offline because it's showing up as pain. And there's studies on this that actually have people taking acetaminophen, which of course reduces pain experience. And on functional MRIs, we can see that their brains are actually not as reactive. So we know that not having psychological safety in the environment, that's why it's so important
From Stuck to Leading, Episode 2 — Meet the 5 Inner Fears Destroying Your Leadership
