Why Your Body Keeps Score When Your Culture is Making You Sick
TLDR:
- Toxic culture, whether at work, at home, or in society, is a chronic stressor that affects the body's physical systems, not just your mood.
- Brené Brown's research links poor leadership directly to cultures where people feel unsafe, unseen, and unable to do their best work.
- Dr. Gabor Maté argues that most chronic illness has an environmental root, meaning the culture around you shapes your biology over time.
- Diet culture is a specific form of toxic culture. It creates anxiety, disordered eating, and a baseline of self-distrust that compounds everything else.
- The way back is not a new supplement or a better morning routine. It starts with recognizing that a lot of what you're feeling is a reasonable response to an unreasonable environment.
There is something deeply frustrating about doing everything right and still feeling terrible.
You sleep. You exercise. You eat reasonably well. You have a therapist. You take your vitamins. And still, by Wednesday afternoon, you are running on fumes, your jaw is tight, and you have that low-grade dread that never quite goes away.
Most wellness content will tell you to add something. A new habit. A better supplement. A morning routine with seventeen steps. That advice is not wrong, exactly. It just skips the part where we ask what is draining you in the first place.
Sound familiar?
The body does not separate "work stress" from "real stress"
Your nervous system does not clock out at 5 PM. When you spend eight to ten hours in an environment that feels unsafe, unpredictable, or chronically unfair, your body registers that as a threat. Not a metaphorical threat. A biological one.
The HPA axis, the system that governs your stress response, responds to psychological pressure the same way it responds to physical danger. Cortisol rises. Inflammation follows. Over time, that becomes the baseline. You are not anxious because something is wrong with you. You are anxious because something is wrong around you.
This is the core of what Dr. Gabor Maté has spent decades arguing. In his work, including *The Myth of Normal* (2022), Maté makes the case that most chronic illness is not primarily genetic. It is environmental. The culture you live and work inside shapes your physiology. Stress that has no outlet, grief that has no permission, a sense of self that has been slowly compressed by the demands of the people around you. These are not soft problems. They are biological ones.
The impact of toxic culture on health is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism.
What Brené Brown means by leadership accountability
Brené Brown's research on shame, vulnerability, and belonging has a direct line into workplace wellness. Her argument is not that leaders need to be nicer. It is that a lack of accountability at the top creates a culture where people cannot be honest, cannot ask for help, and cannot fail safely. That kind of environment is chronically activating for everyone inside it.
When people do not feel they belong, they do not bring their full attention to their work. They spend cognitive and emotional energy on survival instead. Watching for signals. Managing perceptions. Bracing for the next thing.
The Brené Brown leadership insights that tend to get quoted are the warm ones, the stuff about vulnerability and courage. The sharper point is this: leaders who avoid hard conversations, who let bad behavior slide, who confuse silence with harmony, are not being kind. They are building a system that makes people sick.
The normalization problem
Here is a number worth sitting with. Roughly 66% of U.S. adults take at least one prescription drug, according to data from the Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center. That is not a judgment about medication. Medication saves lives. The question worth asking is what that number tells us about the baseline state of the population.
When a significant portion of adults need pharmaceutical support just to function in daily life, that is worth examining at the cultural level, not just the individual one. Illness can reflect broader community issues. A society that normalizes chronic stress, sleep deprivation, disconnection, and body shame is going to produce a lot of people who are struggling. That is not a coincidence.
Diet culture deserves its own section
Diet culture is a specific kind of toxic culture, and I think it gets underestimated.
The pressure to eat a certain way, weigh a certain amount, and perform a certain relationship with food is relentless. It starts early. It is reinforced by advertising, by social media, by casual comments from people who mean well. And it creates something insidious: a permanent low-level anxiety about your own body.
Overcoming diet culture is not about deciding to love yourself. That framing puts the work back on the individual. The problem is the culture, not the person inside it. Research published in the *International Journal of Eating Disorders* has consistently linked diet culture exposure to elevated rates of anxiety, disordered eating, and depression, particularly in adolescents and young adults.
When your relationship with food is governed by rules, shame, and external metrics rather than internal signals, your nervous system pays for that. Every meal becomes a small test. That is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not lived it.
What building healthy workplaces actually looks like
Building healthy workplaces is not a ping-pong table and a wellness stipend. Those things are fine. They are not the point.
The point is psychological safety. People need to be able to say "I don't know," "I made a mistake," or "I'm not okay" without it costing them something. That requires leaders who model accountability, not just demand it.
A few things that actually move the needle:
- Naming what is happening. Toxic patterns persist partly because no one says them out loud. Naming them is not drama. It is accuracy.
- Accountability without punishment as the default. Mistakes addressed directly, without shame spirals or public examples.
- Belonging that does not require performance. People should feel included because they are there, not because they are performing the right version of themselves.
None of this is easy. It requires leaders who have done some of their own work. That is the uncomfortable part of Brené Brown's argument. You cannot build a culture you have not been willing to examine in yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What defines a toxic work culture?
A: A toxic work culture is one where people consistently feel unsafe, unseen, or unable to do honest work without social or professional consequences. It usually involves a lack of accountability at the leadership level, poor communication, and a gap between stated values and actual behavior.
Q: How does toxic culture affect mental health?
A: Chronic exposure to a toxic culture keeps the body's stress response activated over time, which contributes to anxiety, depression, burnout, and physical symptoms like disrupted sleep and inflammation. The impact of toxic culture on health is not just psychological. It is physiological.
Q: What can leaders do to foster a healthier culture?
A: Leaders can start by modeling accountability themselves, addressing problems directly rather than avoiding them, and creating conditions where honest communication is safe. Brené Brown's leadership insights consistently point to this: psychological safety is built by behavior, not by policy.
Q: How does diet culture contribute to mental health issues?
A: Diet culture creates a framework where your body is a problem to be managed rather than a system to be supported. That framework generates chronic anxiety, shame, and disconnection from internal signals. Research in the *International Journal of Eating Disorders* links diet culture exposure to elevated rates of anxiety and disordered eating.
Q: What are the signs of a toxic relationship?
A: Consistent feelings of dread before interactions, a need to manage or perform your personality rather than be yourself, and a pattern of feeling worse about yourself after time spent together. These are not minor discomforts. Over time, relationships like this have real effects on stress physiology and self-trust.
Final Thoughts
Your body has been keeping score. That is not a flaw in your biology. That is your biology doing its job. The work is not to override those signals with more willpower. It is to look honestly at what is generating them. Some of it is fixable. Some of it takes time. All of it starts with stopping the blame loop long enough to ask the right question.
The content on this page is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. We make no representations about its accuracy or suitability. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider before making decisions about your health.
