Bankers and risk: adrenaline, decisions and the losses you carry home

It is half past eleven at night. The markets closed hours ago, the children are asleep, and on the table stands a glass of wine he has not touched. His phone lies face down, yet every few minutes he turns it over. Nothing more can happen today, and he knows it. Still, his body sits as if it might ring at any moment. When he finally lies down, his heart is pounding in his ears and a single number keeps circling in his head — the one he lost today.

If you work in investment banking, trading or wealth management, this scene is probably familiar. Perhaps not in this exact form, perhaps without the wine and with a different number. But the feeling that a day on the markets never really ends is known to many who make decisions under pressure every day, with money that is not theirs and with results everyone can see. In this article I will not write about markets, and I will not give any financial advice. I will write about what happens in the body and in relationships along the way — and why stress in finance is something different from ordinary work stress.

The body on the trading floor

John Coates was a trader on Wall Street before he became a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. He was curious about something he had watched for years: why people on a winning streak start behaving as if they were invincible, and why a run of losses turns them into someone they no longer recognise.

Together with Joe Herbert, he followed seventeen traders on a London trading floor for eight consecutive working days. Twice a day they took saliva samples and measured testosterone and cortisol. There were two findings. When morning testosterone was higher, the traders on average had a better result that day. Cortisol, on the other hand, rose with uncertainty — the more unpredictable the market and the more their results swung, the higher it was.

The study is small, and Coates himself warns against drawing conclusions too quickly. But its main idea matters even for people who have never stood in front of the screens: making decisions under risk is not just a mental activity. It is a bodily event. Hormones that evolved for fight and flight do not know that the danger is on a screen rather than in the undergrowth. They respond the same way.

Wins that lift you and losses that stay

In his later book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Coates described how wins and losses accumulate. After a successful day, a person wakes up more confident and ready to take on more risk. That is fine as long as it stays within limits. When too many wins come in a row, though, confidence grows into a sense of being untouchable — risk looks smaller than it is, and warnings start to seem boring.

With losses it is the other way round. In short bursts of stress, cortisol helps: it sharpens attention and mobilises energy. But if uncertainty lasts for days and weeks, cortisol stops coming down. You start seeing a threat in every piece of news, memory narrows to what went wrong, and decision-making becomes rigid. Some people withdraw at that point and no longer dare anything. Others do the opposite: they chase the loss with new risk, because it feels as if they will only be able to breathe again once the number is back to zero.

The crucial point is that all of this happens below awareness. You do not notice that your judgement has changed. You only notice that everything now seems clearer, or more dangerous. That is why willpower and reason are not enough — the body has to be taken seriously as part of decision-making.

Why a loss hurts more than it should

In 1979 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described a phenomenon we now know as loss aversion: losing a sum of money hurts us considerably more than gaining the same sum pleases us. This is not an individual flaw but a feature of the human mind. In the financial world it is discussed a great deal — as a bias to be accounted for in models.

Less is said about what loss aversion means for a person who experiences losses every week. If the market brings you a gain five times and a loss once, it may be mainly that one day that gets recorded in the body. Losses gather like pebbles in a shoe, while wins evaporate because they were expected anyway. People who work in this world often describe it with the same sentence: “A good day is just a day when nothing happened.”

When a good day is merely the absence of a bad one, the nervous system never receives the signal that it is safe. It stays on standby. And standby that lasts for years is no longer sharpness. It is exhaustion pretending to be sharpness. You can read more about how prolonged tension changes the body under the entries cortisol and window of tolerance.

The sleep that is not there

In financial professions, short sleep is almost part of the identity. Anyone who goes to bed at ten is “not serious enough”. Asian markets open while Europe sleeps, and American markets close just when Europe ought to be asleep. The phone stays by the bed because “something might happen”.

The problem is not only that sleep is short. The problem is that it is shallow. A body that lives on high cortisol all day cannot simply let go of it when you switch off the light. You fall asleep exhausted, then wake at three or four with a racing heart and a mind that is already calculating. I wrote about what happens in those hours in Waking at three: what cortisol and a racing mind are telling you.

Lack of sleep is not only a consequence of stress but also an amplifier of it. A person who has not slept regulates emotions less well, sees threats more quickly and judges risk less accurately. And so the circle closes: more tension, less sleep, worse decisions, even more tension. You do not break this circle by deciding to “sleep more from tomorrow”. You break it with a daily habit of closing the day — more on that shortly.

When the number becomes a verdict on you

In finance, success is exceptionally measurable. At the end of the day, the quarter and the year there is a number. The number is public, compared and ranked. That has its advantages — clarity, fairness, less politics. But it also has a hidden cost: slowly you start to believe that the number measures not just your work, but you.

At that point a loss is no longer an event but a judgement. You do not think “that position went wrong”, but “I am bad”. This is the difference between guilt and shame: guilt says you made a mistake, shame says you are a mistake. Shame is particularly heavy because it hides. It is not talked about in meetings, not over drinks with colleagues, and often not at home either. You can read more about this emotion in Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me” and under the entry shame.

Paradoxically, shame often accompanies the most successful. Whoever has climbed high has more to lose, and more people are watching. Many feel they are just one step away from being exposed — something well described in the article on impostor syndrome. How a profession becomes an identity, and why shame is almost inevitable along the way, I explain in When your profession becomes your identity.

What the person waiting at home sees

People in finance often say their work does not affect their family because “they don’t talk about it at home”. But the family sees everything. They see the phone at dinner. They see the irritability at a perfectly ordinary question. They see that the person is in the room with their body, while their mind is somewhere else.

This is how an evening conversation after a bad week might sound (composite, not a real person):

“How was today?”
“Fine.”
“You were looking at your phone all evening.”
“Because it was fine. If it hadn’t been, you wouldn’t have seen me at all.”
“I don’t see you now either.”
“What do you want me to do? Quit my job?”
“No. I want you to tell me what’s going on before you get like this.”

The partner in this conversation is not asking for anything to change at work. She is asking for access. When someone carries tension alone, in a relationship it shows up as distance, irritability or silence — and the partner begins to read it as rejection of themselves. This creates a second circle, which is no longer about markets but about whether the two of you are still close. I write more about what long working hours do to relationships in Eighty-hour weeks.

What happens over the years

Alexandra Michel followed young investment bankers for nine years, from their first year onwards. Her ethnography is one of the few studies that has looked at what happens to people in this environment over the long term. She described a very instructive pattern. In the early years, the bankers treated the body as a tool to be controlled and overcome: less sleep, less rest, more endurance. But around the fourth year, for many of them the body “rebelled” — with insomnia, pain, autoimmune and other health problems, addictions or burnout.

What followed is interesting. Those who kept trying to overpower their bodies had more problems. Those who began to listen to the body as a source of information often became more creative and better at judgement. Michel did not write that you have to leave the job. She wrote that you have to change your relationship with yourself within it.

If you want to know how to recognise that this is already happening to you, read Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break. The picture below summarises four places where the market most often moves into private life.

The third point deserves special attention. When the body is used to high arousal, calm begins to feel like emptiness. Some fill it with extreme sport, others with alcohol, others with betting. None of these is an illness in itself. But it becomes a trap when you can no longer calm your body without it.

That is why it makes sense to learn to close the day in a different way — not with chemistry, but with the body itself. The exercise below is simple and you can do it tonight.

Exercise: closing the day in ten minutes

The aim of this exercise is not to relax on command. The aim is to send your body a clear signal: the working day is over, the danger has passed. Do it every evening at the same time, ideally at least an hour before bed.

1. Write down what is still open. On a sheet of paper (not your phone), write what worries you most today and one thing you cannot solve tonight. This tells your mind that it has been recorded and it does not need to keep repeating it.
2. Put your phone in another room. If your job truly requires you to be reachable, set an exception for calls from only one or two numbers. Messages can wait.
3. Breathe with a longer out-breath for three minutes. Breathe in for four, out for six or eight. A long exhale is one of the most direct ways to calm the nervous system.
4. Name what you feel in your body. Do not explain, just describe: “tightness in my chest”, “hot hands”, “weight on my shoulders”. Naming alone lowers the intensity of the response.
5. Tell someone one thing about your day. Not about the numbers — about how it was for you. If there is no one, write it down. Tension that has been spoken does not stay locked in the body.

For the first few evenings the exercise may seem silly or useless. That is normal. The body does not learn a new signal in a single day. After two or three weeks, though, many people notice that they wake less often — or at least that at three in the morning they no longer reach for the phone straight away.

Where this story does not apply

It would not be fair to portray work in finance only as something that wears people down. Many thrive in it. Risk does not corrode them; it wakes them up. The arousal of decision-making brings them meaning and joy. For some, markets are what mountains or music are for others. If that is you, and you sleep, have people you are close to and a life outside work — then this article may not be for you. And that is a good thing.

It is also important to say what therapy cannot do. It cannot tell you how to invest or decide whether your job is right for you. It cannot replace a doctor: if you have a pounding heart, chest pain, high blood pressure or long-lasting insomnia, go to your GP first. Nor can it replace specialised help with addiction — if you realise that betting or alcohol are no longer a choice but a compulsion, read Gambling: the addiction with no smell that stays invisible and look for help that is designed for it.

And finally: sometimes the problem is not in you but in the environment. A culture that celebrates sleepless nights and punishes every sign of tiredness will wear out even the most stable person. Therapy can help you not to lose yourself in such an environment — or to decide that you will not stay in it. But it cannot change the environment on its own.

If you are having thoughts that it would be better if you were not here, do not wait. In Slovenia, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). If you are in immediate danger, call 112.

How therapy can help

People from the financial world often come to therapy with a very concrete wish: “I’d like to sleep again.” “I’d like my wife to stop looking at me like that.” “I’d like to stop getting so angry.” These are good beginnings. But it often soon turns out that something older lies behind them.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we look at how patterns from the family we grew up in repeat themselves in our present life. Your relationship with risk, money and success was not formed on the trading floor. It was formed at the kitchen table. Perhaps you grew up in a family where money was always a source of worry, and you promised yourself it would never happen to you. Perhaps love depended on achievement. Perhaps your father was someone who risked a lot and lost a lot. Patterns like these do not determine your fate, yet they quietly steer how you experience winning and losing.

One way to look at them is a genogram — a family tree that records not only names and dates but also relationships, losses and recurring stories. With me you can draw one in a longer session, A Look into the Past. Often this is exactly the moment when the number on the screen becomes just a number again — and not a verdict on whether you are worth something. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Therapy will not take away the sharpness you need at work. But it helps you switch that sharpness off when you no longer need it.

What to remember

• Deciding under risk is a bodily event: wins and losses change your hormones, and your hormones change your judgement — mostly below awareness.
• Losses are recorded in the body more strongly than wins, so when you work with risk the nervous system rarely truly settles.
• Short, shallow sleep is not a sign of dedication but an amplifier of stress and poorer decisions.
• When the number becomes a verdict on you, shame is born — it hides, yet your family still feels it.
• Closing the day every evening tells your body it is safe; therapy helps you understand where your relationship with risk and loss comes from.