Think about the last time you were in a difficult meeting. Maybe one where the atmosphere was tense, a decision felt forced, or something was said that landed badly.
How did you respond? Did you speak up clearly, or go quiet? Did you get defensive, or stay open? Did you feel genuinely present, or somewhere else entirely?
Most of us, reflecting on moments like that, will attribute our response to something about ourselves. Our personality. Our communication style. Perhaps our history with a particular person or situation. We frame our behaviour as who we are.
But much of what we experience in those moments isn’t fixed character. It’s temporary physiology.
What a state actually is
The nervous system is always doing something. Right now, as you read this, it’s assessing your environment for threat and safety, regulating your energy, preparing you to meet whatever comes next.
When circumstances feel manageable and safe, the nervous system settles into a state of social engagement. You feel present, curious, able to think clearly, open to connection. This is the state in which people do their best work and have their best conversations.
When circumstances feel pressured or threatening, the nervous system shifts. It mobilises: fight-or-flight kicks in, attention narrows to the immediate problem, and access to the nuanced relational thinking that most workplace situations actually require starts to close down. Or it shuts down entirely, withdrawing energy, producing the flatness and disconnection of a system that has run out of resources to keep going.
These shifts are not personality traits. They’re adaptations. Temporary responses that the human nervous system has developed over millennia to manage the demands placed on it.
And they happen faster than conscious thought. By the time we’re aware of how we’re responding, the nervous system has already been in its new state for some time.
Why this matters at work
The implications run in several directions.
For individuals, understanding that states are temporary and context-driven changes your relationship with those moments of pressure. The colleague who gets defensive in certain meetings is not necessarily a defensive person.
They may be someone whose nervous system has learned to respond to that particular type of pressure in that particular way. The manager who goes quiet when challenged is not necessarily conflict-avoidant. Their nervous system may have shifted into a protective pattern that has never been examined.
When we understand this, we gain something important: a small but decisive gap between what triggers us and how we respond. That gap is where choice lives.
For organisations and teams, the implications are just as significant. States are contagious. Research on co-regulation shows that nervous systems influence each other, that being in close physical or relational proximity to another person’s activated or settled nervous system shifts our own.
The state of a manager affects the state of everyone in their team. The state of the most anxious person in the room moves through the room. The state of a school’s leadership team shapes the atmospheric conditions that every teacher and pupil operates within.
This is not metaphor. It’s the mechanism by which culture actually works.
The difference between a state and a story
One of the most useful things to understand about human states is how they interact with thought.
Most of us experience our thinking as primary: we have a thought, which causes a feeling, which then influences our behaviour. But the sequence is more often reversed. A sensation arises in the body first. An emotion follows. A thought, usually a narrative that explains or justifies the emotional experience, comes last.
The story we tell ourselves about why we responded as we did in that difficult meeting often arrives after the response has already happened. We’re, in a real sense, narrating our physiology after the fact.
This isn’t cause for despair. It’s cause for a different kind of attention, one directed not primarily at the story but at the sensation that preceded it. If we can learn to notice the early physical signals of a state shift, the tightening in the chest, the narrowing of attention, the change in breathing pattern, we gain access to our experience at an earlier and more workable point.
What this looks like in practice
Developing the ability to recognise your own states in real time isn’t a passive exercise. It’s a practical skill, and like all skills, it develops through practice.
It starts with simple noticing. In any interaction during the day, a conversation, a meeting, reading a difficult email, take a moment to ask: what state am I in right now? Not as a judgement. Simply as information.
Over time, this noticing becomes faster and more precise. You begin to recognise your own patterns: the situations that reliably shift you into activation, the early warning signals that something is building, the conditions under which you are most available and most effective.
With that recognition comes something worth more than any communication technique or leadership framework: the capacity to pause. To notice the pull of an automatic response and, occasionally, to choose differently.
States are temporary. They shift. They are shaped by circumstances, history, and the nervous system’s learned responses. But they are not fixed. The person you are under pressure is not a permanent truth about you. It’s a state. And states, with understanding and practice, can change.
This is one of the core understandings that Human State Training is built on. Learn more about the programme
