Wellbeing
Nick Jonsson on Why the Body Shows Executive Loneliness First
On the ALLSET Podcast, the author of Executive Loneliness explains why weight and routine often change before a leader admits anything, and how a daily walk helped him rebuild.
How to Overcome Executive Loneliness ft Nick Jonsson of EGN Singapore | Health Geeks/ALLSET Podcast
Video from ALLSET.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
What are the early warning signs of executive loneliness?
Nick Jonsson says the first signs are often physical. A leader who stops exercising, stops caring about food, or gains or loses a lot of weight may be struggling behind a confident face. He recovered by speaking to his wife and a doctor, joining a peer support group, and rebuilding his fitness one walk at a time.
Executive loneliness rarely announces itself. Nick Jonsson, co-founder of EGN Singapore and author of a book on the subject, told the ALLSET Podcast that senior leaders tend to hide the problem well. What gives them away, he argues, is often the body, long before anyone says a word about how they feel.
His own survey work puts numbers on the problem. He found that about three in ten senior executives in Singapore felt lonely in their jobs from time to time. When he repeated the survey during the pandemic, with people isolated and working from home, the figure for the same group roughly doubled.
In this conversation about health challenges for the C-suite, Nick Jonsson describes what his own decline looked like from the outside, how a simple walking plan helped him rebuild, and why the leader at the top has to be the first person to admit that they are human.
Key takeaways
- A big change in weight, diet or exercise habits can be the first visible sign that a leader is struggling in silence.
- Nick Jonsson calls the polished front many executives keep up smiling depression: a calm surface with real distress behind it.
- His recovery began only when he told someone, then grew through a doctor, a peer support group and steady exercise.
- Leaders who share their own hard times make it safe for their teams to say they are not okay.
1. The facade that hides the struggle
Nick Jonsson says it really is lonely at the top, and that the higher a person climbs, the lonelier the role tends to become. He first met the phrase executive loneliness in a Forbes article, then began surveying and interviewing senior executives himself to see how common the experience was among directors, vice presidents and the C-suite.
Many of the people he interviewed had never told anyone what they were going through. Some asked to meet him a second time, almost as if they were practising how to open up. One managing director at a bank broke down in tears during that second conversation and described years of extreme isolation as a woman working her way up a male-dominated industry.
He knows that silence from the inside. In his book, Executive Loneliness: The 5 Pathways to Overcoming Isolation, Stress, Anxiety & Depression in the Modern Business World, he calls it smiling depression. The outside looks polished and in control, while behind the facade things are far less pretty. People close to him could not see that he was suffering, because he hid it so well.
2. The physical signs colleagues can watch for
When he was in that dark place, Nick Jonsson stopped exercising and stopped caring much about what he ate. He says that pattern is common, which makes it useful for friends, family and colleagues. The person struggling may never say anything, but changes in routine and appearance are much harder to hide than feelings are, even for a skilled leader.
His advice is to notice when someone suddenly gains or loses a lot of weight, or when their usual habits shift. On its own, that is not proof of anything. It is a signal that something may be going on, and a reason to check in with the person rather than wait for them to raise it themselves.
That matters because he believes people can stay in a hard place for years. They keep going to work because they feel they must bring the money home for the family, and the result is a slow, grinding downward spiral. In his view, the spiral needs to be broken early, before it goes as far as it did in his own case.
3. Rebuilding health, then leading by example
His turning point came when he finally told his wife. She took him to a doctor, and soon afterwards he joined an anonymous support group of executives who had been through their own crashes and breakdowns. Hearing how they had recovered showed him a path. If they could come through it, he reasoned, so could he, and his rebound came fairly quickly.
Exercise became a central part of that rebuild. He set up tracking apps and devices, hired a fitness coach and followed the training plan, starting with about six kilometres of walking a day. He calls exercise the natural happy pill and says it helped him come off the medication he had been prescribed. That is his own account, not general medical advice.
For leaders who want to protect their teams, Nick Jonsson's answer is authentic leadership. The person at the top has to show that they are human too, and that they also face crises and hard times. A boss with a closed door who never talks about feelings will find that nobody on the team ever comes to knock on it.
