Your Microbiome Might Be Trying To Tell You Something

By Tony Martignetti and Adela Bonoiu, Ph.D.

Understanding your microbial ecosystem can help you prevent leadership burnout.

In a recent survey of several thousand senior leaders across the U.S., 72% reported being emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted. Leadership burnout is usually framed as a psychological or professional challenge — something to be solved with mindset work, productivity adjustments, or meditation apps. But what if the earliest signs of burnout don’t start in your calendar or your cognition, but in your gut?

In our combined work, Adela, a researcher in biological systems and the mapping of organizational wellness, and Tony, a leadership advisor and experience designer, have observed the same pattern: burnout is not just emotional fatigue — it’s biological dysregulation. Long before exhaustion becomes visible, the microbiome — the trillions of microorganisms that help regulate immunity, inflammation, neurotransmitters, and energy — begins to lose balance.

When this ecosystem becomes disrupted, leaders often experience the earliest indicators of burnout: fatigue, irritability, cognitive fog, digestive changes, and difficulty making even simple decisions.

The Biology Of Burnout: When Stress Becomes Systemic

Stress is not just mental strain; it’s a whole-body cascade. Through the gut–brain axis — a communication network involving neural, hormonal, and immune pathways — chronic stress shifts the microbiome toward lower diversity, higher inflammation, and weaker resilience. Research shows:

• Chronic psychological stress alters microbial diversity within weeks.
• Microbial imbalance amplifies stress responses and affects emotional regulation.
• Social isolation increases inflammatory markers by 20–30%.
• 80 to 90% of serotonin is produced in the gut, supporting mood regulation; although gut serotonin acts locally and doesn’t cross into the brain, its signaling influences overall stress physiology.

In other words, before burnout shows up in your behavior, it shows up as inflammation, imbalance, and disrupted communication between your gut and brain. Your body whispers “something’s off” long before you feel overwhelmed.

Humans Are Ecosystems, Not Machines

We often talk about energy as a battery to be recharged. But biologically, we’re not machines; we are ecosystems. We’re shaped by our environment, food, connections, and social structures. Modern work, however, is increasingly optimized for efficiency rather than ecosystem health. Remote work, hyper-individual productivity, and back-to-back meetings weaken the social interactions that regulate our biology. Communal rituals — shared meals, conversations that matter, collective pauses — are not soft culture. They are physiological interventions.

As Doug Rushkoff writes in Team Human, “We’re not here to compete; we’re here to connect.” Research now shows that connection is not only emotional, it is also biological. When we eat with others, laugh together, or share meaningful stories, our bodies release oxytocin and serotonin — neurochemicals that also nurture microbial diversity and improve digestion.

A Microbiome-Informed Approach To Leadership Resilience

Before burnout becomes a crisis, the body broadcasts early signals, like digestive shifts or discomfort, fatigue that rest doesn’t resolve, “wired-but-tired” cycles, brain fog or slowed cognition, irritability, detachment, or emotional flattening. These are not just inconveniences; they are feedback.

Once you know what to look for, you can use this feedback to change your behavior. Here are a few ways leaders can integrate this awareness into their personal and organizational well-being:

1. Build Oxytocin and Reduce Cortisol Through Connection. Create multicultural, multigenerational, cross-functional teams that collaborate during work hours, not after. Purpose-driven social rituals — hearing from customers, sharing impact stories, brief team gratitude rounds — boost oxytocin, reduce stress hormones, and counter isolation. They strengthen both psychological and microbial resilience.

2. Move Together to Support Mitochondria and Mood. Movement increases blood flow, supports mitochondrial efficiency, and helps maintain gut motility. Instead of fostering internal competition, design shared challenges outside work — team hikes, charity runs, or group training. These experiences build camaraderie while supporting the biology that underpins focus, mood, and performance.

3. Make Microbiome Literacy Part of Your Culture. Short “lunch and learn” sessions on anti-inflammatory foods, herbs, sleep hygiene, and the stress–gut connection help teams understand their own rhythms. Communal meals, tea rituals, or shared food traditions — long-standing human bonding practices — reduce stress responses and support microbial diversity.

These aren’t wellness perks. They are biological interventions that improve decision-making, creativity, and cognitive flexibility. As Adela puts it: “A dysregulated microbiome is a canary in the coal mine. It mirrors the imbalance between leaders and their environment.”

From Individual Self-Care To Organizational Ecosystem Health

Burnout is not an individual failure: it’s a systems imbalance, biologically and organizationally. When workplaces function like ecosystems — interdependent, regenerative, and rooted in rhythms — leaders and teams stay healthier. When organizations ignore the ecosystem, people burn out. The leaders who will thrive next aren’t the ones who grind the hardest; they’re the ones who understand their own ecology, and their team’s. Your microbiome doesn’t care about productivity hacks. It cares about connection, nourishment, rhythm, restoration, and meaning. When leaders build environments that support biological resilience, they create cultures where people and their microbes flourish.

About the Authors

Tony Martignetti is the chief illumination officer at Inspired Purpose Partners, where he unlocks the collective genius lying dormant within organizations through the power of deep connection, creative collaboration, and multidimensional thinking. He is the best-selling author of Climbing the Right Mountain: Navigating the Journey to An Inspired Life and Campfire Lessons for Leaders: How Uncovering Our Past Can Propel Us Forward.

Adela Bonoiu, Ph.D., is a scientist turned entrepreneur with a vision to build multidisciplinary teams that streamline the journey from Lab to Launch. As the CEO at Catena Biologics, she leverages her expertise in microbiome, nanomedicine, cell and gene therapy, chronic pain, vaccine development, data analytics, and regenerative medicine to design solutions for the healthcare industry. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo. She has published more than 30 papers with 3,500 citations and owns U.S. patents. She is Co-Chair at Consortium on Translational Research in the Microbiome (CTRM).