Taking Back the Controls: A Review of Hijacked by Paula Houlihan

Paula Houlihan | Leadership, Neuroscience, Productivity, and Personal Development | 304 pages | Published June 23, 2026
Rating: ★★★★½

In Hijacked: The Surprising Neuroscience Behind the Choices You Think You’re Making and How to Take Back the Controls, executive coach Paula Houlihan challenges one of the most common assumptions about burnout: that exhaustion is primarily a problem of workload, scheduling, or insufficient rest. Her central argument is more provocative. Burnout, she suggests, often emerges because stress, habit, and unconscious beliefs have taken control of the choices shaping our lives.

The result is a book aimed squarely at high performers who appear successful from the outside but feel depleted, disconnected, or trapped on the inside. These readers may still be meeting deadlines, advancing professionally, and fulfilling responsibilities. Yet much of that activity is happening on autopilot. Their decisions are no longer guided by deliberate priorities so much as by conditioned reactions to pressure.

Houlihan calls this state being “hijacked.” It occurs when automatic patterns override conscious intention, causing people to repeat behaviors that once helped them succeed but now undermine their health, relationships, judgment, and long-term performance. Working harder may temporarily preserve results, but it does not address the internal mechanisms generating the problem.

Drawing on neuroscience, executive coaching, and her own experience in a demanding corporate environment, Houlihan presents Choice Mastery™, a method designed to help readers identify those mechanisms and regain control. The book’s message is neither to push relentlessly nor to abandon ambition. Instead, it asks readers to understand how their choices are being made—and to create a more intentional definition of success.

Burnout as a Decision-Making Problem

The most distinctive idea in Hijacked is its reframing of burnout. Conventional advice often treats burnout as the predictable consequence of doing too much for too long. The proposed remedies usually involve time management, stronger boundaries, vacations, sleep, mindfulness, or reduced commitments.

Those responses can be useful, but Houlihan argues that they may address symptoms without reaching the source. A person can return from a vacation and immediately recreate the conditions that exhausted them. A leader can learn a better scheduling system while continuing to accept every request, pursue every opportunity, and treat every problem as an emergency. Someone can establish a boundary and then abandon it the moment guilt, fear, or external pressure appears.

The deeper issue is the pattern of choices beneath the workload.

Why does a capable person repeatedly agree to responsibilities they do not have the capacity to carry? Why does a successful executive struggle to delegate? Why does someone who understands the importance of rest continue sacrificing it? Why do people remain loyal to standards that are damaging them?

These behaviors are not necessarily the result of ignorance or weak discipline. They may be driven by deeply embedded associations between productivity and worth, control and safety, achievement and belonging, or approval and survival. When pressure activates those associations, people react before they consciously evaluate what they are doing.

Burnout can therefore be understood not only as physical and emotional depletion but also as the accumulated cost of thousands of automatic choices.

The Autopilot Behind Achievement

Autopilot is not inherently harmful. Much of daily life depends on automatic processing. Habits reduce cognitive effort, allowing people to perform familiar tasks without reconsidering every movement or decision. In demanding environments, this efficiency can be indispensable.

The problem arises when automatic patterns formed under one set of circumstances continue governing behavior after they have stopped being useful. A tendency to overprepare may help someone establish a career, for example, but later prevent that person from trusting a team. Hypervigilance may create short-term responsiveness while making every email feel urgent. A strong desire to prove oneself may fuel early achievement but eventually turn success into an endless test that can never be passed permanently.

High performers are especially vulnerable because their patterns often produce visible rewards. Overworking can lead to promotions. Perfectionism can generate excellent results. Constant availability may earn praise. Taking responsibility for everything can make someone appear indispensable.

Because the behavior works in the short term, its long-term costs are easy to overlook. Exhaustion may be interpreted as evidence of commitment rather than as a warning. Disconnection can be normalized as the price of leadership. The individual continues performing, so neither the person nor the organization feels compelled to examine the system beneath that performance.

Houlihan’s idea of hijacking captures this contradiction. A person may look highly disciplined while actually being governed by fear, habit, or stress. Productivity and agency are not always the same thing.

Choice Mastery™

At the center of the book is Houlihan’s Choice Mastery™ approach. Its practical framework guides readers through four stages: assess, evaluate, choose, and act.

1. Assess

The first step is to recognize what is happening in the present moment. Before changing a choice, a person must notice the physical sensations, emotions, assumptions, and impulses influencing it.

Assessment interrupts automaticity. It creates a pause between a trigger and the habitual response. That pause may be brief, but it is where agency begins.

A leader facing criticism, for example, may immediately feel defensive and begin constructing a rebuttal. Assessment means noticing the reaction before acting on it. What is happening in the body? What emotion has appeared? What threat does the mind believe it is confronting? What behavior is it preparing to execute?

This stage does not require suppressing the reaction. Its purpose is to make the reaction visible.

2. Evaluate

Once the pattern has been recognized, the next task is to examine it. Is the perceived urgency real? Is the response proportionate to the situation? Which belief is influencing the decision? Does the automatic impulse support the desired outcome?

Evaluation separates facts from interpretations. A delayed response from a colleague may be a simple scheduling issue, but a stressed mind can interpret it as disrespect, incompetence, or impending failure. If the interpretation remains unconscious, the resulting decision may solve an imagined threat while creating a genuine conflict.

This step also asks whether an old strategy remains useful. A behavior that protected or motivated someone in the past does not necessarily belong in every future situation.

3. Choose

The third stage involves making a deliberate choice aligned with current values and goals. This is the point at which a person shifts from reaction to intention.

The important question is not simply, “What can I do?” It is, “What outcome am I trying to create, and which response genuinely supports it?”

That distinction matters because high performers often default to the response that demonstrates maximum effort rather than the one that produces the best sustainable result. Choosing intentionally may mean delegating, declining, postponing, asking for clarification, tolerating imperfection, or deciding that a problem does not require immediate intervention.

4. Act

Insight does not create change unless it becomes behavior. The final step is therefore to act on the intentional choice.

This can be more difficult than identifying the right decision. Automatic patterns are familiar and emotionally persuasive. A values-based choice may initially feel uncomfortable, irresponsible, or unsafe even when it is objectively healthier and more effective.

Action turns self-awareness into practice. Repetition gradually strengthens the ability to choose deliberately under pressure rather than only during calm reflection.

The framework’s strength lies in its simplicity. It gives readers a structure that can potentially be used in real time, when stress is active and clear thinking is most difficult.

Neuroscience Without Fatalism

The neuroscience dimension of Hijacked supports the book’s argument that people do not make every decision through calm, rational analysis. Stress affects attention, perception, memory, and behavior. Under pressure, the brain tends to prioritize speed, familiarity, and threat reduction rather than careful reflection.

This helps explain why intelligent, experienced people can make decisions they later struggle to understand. Knowledge does not automatically prevent reactive behavior. A leader may know how to communicate constructively and still become controlling when a project appears unstable. A professional may understand the value of boundaries and still say yes before consciously evaluating a request.

Houlihan’s use of neuroscience is valuable because it moves the discussion away from moral judgment. People caught in harmful patterns are not necessarily lazy, irrational, or incapable. Their nervous systems may be responding exactly as they have been conditioned to respond.

At the same time, the book does not treat biology as destiny. The point of understanding automatic responses is to create more opportunities to interrupt them. Neuroscience becomes a foundation for agency rather than an excuse for helplessness.

That balance is important. Explanations can become limiting if they imply that people are merely passengers in their own brains. Houlihan instead emphasizes that awareness, deliberate practice, and repeated action can change how choices are made.

The Hidden Cost of High Performance

Hijacked is especially relevant to people whose unhealthy patterns are disguised as professional strengths. The high performer’s dilemma is that many behaviors associated with burnout are rewarded long before they become visibly destructive.

Organizations may praise the employee who never refuses a request, answers messages at all hours, rescues failing projects, and consistently exceeds expectations. Yet the same behaviors can conceal fear of disappointing others, an inability to delegate, or an identity entirely dependent on achievement.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop. The more the individual overfunctions, the more others rely on that overfunctioning. Increased responsibility then confirms the belief that slowing down is impossible. Eventually, the person becomes trapped inside the reputation their coping mechanisms created.

Houlihan’s own account of reaching the edge of an adrenal crisis in a high-pressure corporate environment gives the subject personal urgency. She is not describing burnout solely as an external observer. Her framework grows from confronting the difference between visible success and internal sustainability.

That experience supports one of the book’s most persuasive claims: people can become extraordinarily skilled at succeeding in ways that are damaging them.

The solution is not necessarily to abandon achievement. For many readers, being told to care less, lower every standard, or walk away from ambition would be neither practical nor desirable. Houlihan offers a more nuanced alternative: preserve high performance while changing the internal drivers behind it.

Values-Based Productivity

The book’s approach to productivity differs from systems focused primarily on efficiency. Traditional productivity advice asks how to complete more tasks, organize time, or eliminate distractions. Values-based productivity asks whether the work being completed is connected to what actually matters.

Efficiency without clarity can accelerate the wrong life. A person can optimize a schedule while remaining committed to goals inherited from family expectations, workplace culture, social comparison, or an outdated version of the self. The system may become smoother, but the disconnection remains.

Houlihan encourages readers to examine the motives beneath their goals. Is a decision driven by genuine purpose or by the need to prove worth? Is an opportunity attractive because it supports a meaningful direction, or because rejecting it feels frightening? Is a person working toward a desired future or merely attempting to avoid guilt, criticism, and uncertainty?

These questions complicate productivity in a useful way. They suggest that the quality of a decision cannot be measured only by its immediate output. A choice must also be considered in relation to health, values, relationships, and long-term sustainability.

This does not mean that every choice should feel easy or pleasant. Meaningful work often requires sacrifice, persistence, and discomfort. The distinction is between intentional discomfort in service of a chosen value and chronic self-abandonment driven by automatic pressure.

Leadership Under Pressure

Although Hijacked can apply broadly, its strongest audience is likely to be executives, managers, entrepreneurs, and professionals working in high-stakes environments. Leadership magnifies the consequences of unconscious decision-making because a leader’s stress responses affect entire teams.

A leader operating on autopilot may become controlling, impatient, avoidant, or excessively risk-averse. Someone who equates personal worth with flawless results may create a culture in which mistakes are hidden. A manager unable to tolerate uncertainty may demand constant updates, slowing the work while believing they are protecting it.

These behaviors can spread through an organization. Employees learn what the leader rewards, fears, and punishes. If urgency receives attention, everything becomes urgent. If overwork signals commitment, exhaustion becomes cultural currency. If questioning a decision triggers defensiveness, honest communication disappears.

Choice mastery therefore has implications beyond individual well-being. A leader who can recognize and interrupt a reactive pattern is better positioned to create psychological safety, delegate effectively, and respond proportionately to setbacks.

Self-awareness is not a soft alternative to performance. It is part of competent decision-making. Leaders who do not understand their own triggers may mistake emotional impulses for strategic insight.

Flow, Focus, and Sustainable Success

The book links more intentional choices with greater focus, resilience, and opportunities for flow. This connection makes sense within Houlihan’s larger framework. Chronic stress fragments attention. When the mind is continually monitoring threats, unfinished tasks, expectations, and potential failures, deep engagement becomes difficult.

Flow cannot be forced through relentless pressure. It requires a degree of absorption and alignment that constant self-protection disrupts. A person who is simultaneously performing a task, anticipating criticism, and evaluating personal worth has less attention available for the task itself.

Taking back control of choices can reduce some of that internal noise. Clearer priorities make it easier to direct attention. Stronger boundaries protect cognitive energy. Values-based goals provide motivation that is less dependent on fear or external approval.

Resilience is similarly reframed. It is not the ability to absorb unlimited pressure without visible consequences. Genuine resilience includes recognizing strain, adapting strategies, and recovering before the system collapses.

This understanding challenges workplace cultures that romanticize endurance. A person who repeatedly survives unsustainable conditions is not necessarily demonstrating healthy resilience. They may simply be postponing the cost.

A Practical Book for People Who Already Know the Basics

Many high performers already know that they should sleep more, establish boundaries, delegate, exercise, and take breaks. The problem is often not a lack of information. It is the inability to apply that information when pressure activates older patterns.

Hijacked addresses that gap by focusing on the moment a decision is made. This makes the book potentially valuable to readers who have consumed conventional productivity or wellness advice without achieving lasting change.

Its framework encourages practical reflection:

• What situations cause me to react automatically?
• What physical or emotional signals appear before that reaction?
• Which belief is operating beneath my behavior?
• What am I trying to protect, prove, or avoid?
• Does this response support the result I actually want?
• What would an intentional choice look like?
• What action would make that choice real?

These questions are simple, but answering them honestly can be uncomfortable. The habits that cause burnout may also support a person’s identity and social standing. Letting go of them can feel like becoming less responsible, ambitious, or valuable.

The book’s promise is not that a four-step process will remove every external pressure. Rather, it offers a way to stop amplifying that pressure through unexamined patterns.

Where the Book Is Most Convincing

The book is strongest when it rejects the false choice between relentless striving and complete withdrawal. Burned-out professionals are often presented with two unattractive options: continue at the same pace or abandon the career and ambitions they have spent years building.

Houlihan proposes a third possibility. A person may be able to retain ambition while changing its fuel source. Performance driven by clarity, purpose, and conscious commitment may be more sustainable than performance driven by fear, shame, or compulsive self-proving.

The focus on real-time interruption is another strength. Reflection after a difficult moment can produce insight, but the decisive skill is learning to create awareness while the pattern is unfolding. That is when choice becomes possible.

The aviation metaphor embedded in the title also works well. Being hijacked does not mean the individual has permanently lost the capacity to steer. It means control has been seized by forces operating without deliberate authorization. Taking back the controls requires identifying those forces, understanding how they gained influence, and practicing a different response.

Potential Limitations

As with many books combining neuroscience, coaching, and self-development, the value readers receive will depend heavily on application. Recognizing a pattern intellectually is not the same as changing it. Readers looking for transformation without sustained practice may find that even a clear framework becomes another piece of information they know but do not use.

The emphasis on individual choice also needs to be held alongside the reality of structural burnout. Some exhaustion is produced by understaffing, economic insecurity, discrimination, toxic leadership, caregiving demands, or workplaces that systematically reward overwork. Self-awareness cannot compensate indefinitely for an environment designed to consume more than a person can sustainably give.

The most useful interpretation of Houlihan’s argument is therefore not that every burned-out person created their own condition through poor choices. It is that greater awareness can help people recognize how they are responding to difficult conditions, where they still possess agency, and when the necessary choice may be to challenge or leave an unhealthy system.

Readers should also approach any popular-neuroscience framework as a practical model rather than as a complete account of the brain or of clinical burnout. Severe exhaustion, depression, anxiety, trauma, or physical symptoms may require medical or mental-health support in addition to coaching strategies.

These limitations do not invalidate the Choice Mastery™ approach. They clarify where it fits: as a tool for greater self-awareness and intentional action, not as a universal substitute for organizational reform or professional care.

Who Should Read Hijacked?

This book is particularly well suited to:

• Executives and leaders making consequential decisions under pressure
• Entrepreneurs who struggle to separate identity from business performance
• High achievers who appear successful but feel chronically depleted
• Professionals who repeatedly violate their own boundaries
• Managers seeking to understand how stress affects team culture
• Readers interested in neuroscience-informed personal development
• People who know what they “should” change but cannot make the change last
• Anyone who feels busy and productive yet increasingly disconnected from their life

It may be less suited to readers seeking a purely academic neuroscience text or a narrowly clinical treatment of burnout. Houlihan’s purpose is practical and developmental: she uses scientific ideas to illuminate behavior and support better decision-making.

Final Assessment

Hijacked offers an engaging and useful reframing of burnout, leadership, and high performance. Paula Houlihan argues that sustainable success is not achieved simply by managing time more efficiently or forcing the body to tolerate greater pressure. It begins with understanding the hidden processes making our choices.

The book’s central insight is both unsettling and liberating. Many decisions that feel voluntary may be heavily shaped by stress responses, old beliefs, and reinforced habits. Yet recognizing this influence creates an opportunity to intervene. The goal is not perfect control over every thought or reaction. It is a greater capacity to pause, evaluate, and act in alignment with chosen values.

Houlihan’s assess-evaluate-choose-act framework gives readers a memorable way to practice that capacity. Its simplicity makes it suitable for high-pressure moments, while its broader implications extend into leadership, productivity, relationships, and personal identity.

Most importantly, Hijacked does not treat ambition as the enemy. It distinguishes between achievement consciously chosen and achievement compulsively pursued. One can create energy, purpose, and sustainable performance; the other can produce an impressive life that feels increasingly unlivable.

For readers who feel as though their calendar, career, expectations, or nervous system has taken over the cockpit, Hijacked presents a compelling invitation: stop trying only to work harder or recover faster. Examine who—or what—is making the choices, and begin taking back the controls.

Thank you to the publisher for an advanced review copy of this book.