About
Why do some people stay capable under extraordinary pressure, while others don’t?
I have spent my career trying to answer this question.
WHERE IT BEGAN
I didn’t arrive at that question through research. I watched it happen.
My mother built a career at the United Nations without a degree, at a time when women were not expected to lead anything. She was the breadwinner, ran our household and, to anyone who saw her at work, was formidable.
At home, I watched a different story unfold. The same woman who appeared so capable to the outside world was slowly unravelling under the weight of everything she carried, and her health was paying the price.
Long before I had the language for it, I understood something that would become a recurring theme in my own life: performance and capability are not the same thing. The distance between them is often invisible to everyone except the person living inside it, and the people who love them most.
When I was thirteen, my father died from a brain tumour. A year later my mother was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, and continued working throughout her treatment. I didn’t deal with any of it. There wasn’t room to.
Years later, I found myself repeating the same pattern. I was the first person in my family to finish a degree, built a successful career and went at everything so hard that by my mid-twenties I had burned out completely, carrying grief I had never really dealt with.
I got help, and eventually the symptoms subsided. But I was left with questions no one could answer: why had my capacity disappeared in the first place, and why people can respond so differently to the burdens life asks them to carry?
WHAT FOLLOWED
The questions took me into the science.
I went back to study. Health science first, with a focus on integrative and complementary medicine, followed by nutritional biochemistry and genomics, and now postgraduate study in neuroscience and mental health. I have been in clinical practice since 2009.
What continues to fascinate me is how much we are still discovering about human biology. Neuroscience is only now producing strong findings on meditation, nutrition and the effects of time in nature on cognition — things practitioners have worked with for generations while the evidence caught up.
I am rigorous about the distinction between what is established science and what is still emerging. Where evidence is strong, I say so. Where it isn’t yet, I say that too.
When a senior leader tells me everything is ‘fine’ and the work is still getting done, I know precisely what that can conceal. I grew up watching it at close range.
Begin
Your performance tells only part of the story. If you want to understand the biological capability beneath it, let’s talk.
Credentials
Qualifications
Professional Memberships
Australasian Neuroscience Society (ANS)
Alessandra also serves on the board of Tide & Times Alliance, a not-for-profit dedicated to dementia education and community support.
Alessandra is also a certified Tiny Habits® Coach and a qualified Sivananda Yoga and Meditation Teacher, integrating evidence-based behaviour change, nervous system regulation and mind–body practices into her work where appropriate.