Did My Boss Cause My Cancer? What Chronic Stress Really Does

A friend asked me this recently, and it opened up something I'd been sitting with for a long time about chronic stress, burnout, and what years of high performance had quietly been costing me.

She wasn’t trying to be cruel, but rather was genuinely interested and maybe a little concern. She knew what the years leading up to my diagnosis had looked like. She'd watched me navigate a workplace that had become increasingly stressful, seen the hours I was keeping, the weight I was carrying. And she wanted to know: did she think that caused it?

My first reaction was defensive. I wanted to push back immediately. It felt too simple. Too convenient. Like it let me off the hook for something I wasn't sure I wanted to be let off the hook for.

But her question struck a cord and honestly, I'm glad it did.

The Diagnosis That Stopped Everything

For those of you who have read some of my articles, you will know that three years ago I was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer.

What you might not know was how it all played out. I had just flown back in from New York having have attended the NRF Big Retail Conference. I was in a workshop with some consultants from Bain when my phone unexpectedly rang. My doctor wanted me to see a surgeon that day. Not tomorrow, but that day, no questions.

I remember the feeling of sitting in that surgeon's office and not being able to make sense of what he was telling me. I hadn't felt sick. I had just been in New York. Been on some amazing retail tours and networking events, excited about sharing and implementing some of what I had seen. My son's expression came to mind, wait, what? because that was exactly it. A kind of total, disoriented disbelief.

And then the surgeon said something that I've never forgotten. If I hadn't come in when I did, I likely would have died that year.

My oncologist told me they don't really know what causes the type of cancer I had. The traditional lifestyle factors, obesity, family history didn't apply to me. Which left the other category. Environmental. Workplace. Stress.

What Chronic Stress Actually Does to Your Body

So when my friend asked her question, there was a part of me that did pause. Because the years leading up to my diagnosis had been challenging. Not just busy, but there was a lot of pressure, covid had just happened and so I was operating at a level of chronic stress that I had normalised so completely I didn't even recognise it as stress anymore. It was just how things were. What the job required.

Was it the acute stress of that particular period? Or was it the accumulated weight of years of operating that way, pushing through, overriding, never fully recovering?

I don't know. My oncologist doesn't know. Science doesn't know, not definitively.

But here's what I came to understand during treatment, lying in hospital with nothing to do but think and feel and finally, for the first time in years, be still.

Why Blaming the Environment Isn't the Answer

Whether or not the environment contributed to my cancer, blaming the environment was never going to save me.

Because we take ourselves wherever we go.

That's the thing my friend's question was circling without quite landing on. It wasn't really asking about my workplace. It was asking about me. About how I had been operating inside that workplace. About the years of accumulated stress I had been carrying without tending to. About what I had been feeding my mind, my body, my nervous system, and what I had been quietly starving.

What Taking Responsibility for Your Internal World Actually Looks Like

During treatment I did something I had never properly done before. I stopped.

Not just physically, I stopped and looked. At my purpose. At my values. At the kind of life I actually wanted to be living and the distance between that and the one I had been living. I asked myself questions I had been too busy to ask for years. Who am I without the title? What do I actually believe? What kind of woman do I want to be, not at work, but in the world?

And alongside that, I started doing the work I now teach. Nervous system regulation. Consciously managing my thinking. Learning to notice when my mind was catastrophising and deliberately, patiently bringing it back. Not as a nice addition to my routine, as a practice I took as seriously as any treatment I was receiving. Because I had come to believe, viscerally and not just intellectually, that how I managed my internal environment was going to determine the quality of whatever life I had left.

That belief changed everything.

I want to be careful here, because I'm not saying that toxic workplaces don't cause harm. They do. There are behaviours in some environments that create real, acute damage, and that is never the individual's fault. I've seen it. I've lived some version of it.

But what I also know, from my own experience and from working with the clients I coach, is that when we focus exclusively on the external environment, we give away the most powerful thing we have.

Our agency over our own internal one.

Because the truth is that all of us carry wounds. Histories. Filters we've built up over decades that shape how we interpret what happens to us, how much stress we absorb, how long we hold it, how well we recover. Two people can sit in the same meeting, receive the same feedback, navigate the same difficult quarter, and one will process it and move on while the other carries it home, replays it at midnight, and wakes up with it still running.

The difference isn't the environment.

It's what's happening inside.

And that, unlike most of what happens around us, is something we can actually work with.

Living Differently, Two Years On

I am two years out of treatment now. I have a scan every six months and I won't pretend the waiting is easy. But I am well. And I am living differently.

Not perfectly. Not without stress or difficulty or days where the old patterns try to reassert themselves. But differently.

I know why I do what I do now, and I like my reason for it. I have a daily practice of managing my mind, not as a luxury, but as a non-negotiable, the same way I'd treat medication. I am conscious and deliberate about what I expose myself to, how I think about what happens to me, how I nourish my body and my nervous system. I have stopped outsourcing my emotional state to my circumstances and started taking genuine responsibility for it.

Did my boss cause my cancer?

I honestly don't know.

But I know that the way I was operating, the chronic stress I had normalised, the internal environment I had neglected for years was not giving my body its best chance. And I know that the shift I made during treatment, from managing my external world to taking radical responsibility for my internal one, gave me something no diagnosis could take away.

A life I am actually present for.

Not surviving. Not pushing through. Not running on the fuel of fear or proving or performing for an audience that was never really watching.

Just here. Fully. On purpose.

And for someone who was told she might not have made it to the end of that year, that is everything.

If this resonated and you're ready to start creating a more sustainable way of living. I'd love to have a conversation. You can book a free consultation with me here.