What your body is telling you between meetings — and how to respond with choice instead of habit

It's 9:58, and your meeting starts at ten.

Nothing about the day is a crisis: the slides are finished, the numbers are ready, and yet your shoulders have migrated towards your ears, your breathing has gone shallow, and your jaw has been clenched since the first email. By 4pm you'll be staring at a paragraph you've read four times, wondering why a brain that handled the morning so well now feels like it's wading through water.

If the last article in this series was about the mind that won't switch off — the rumination, the replayed conversations, the reopened decisions — this one is about the other half of the story: the body that never got the memo that you're safe, competent, and sitting in an ordinary office on an ordinary Tuesday.

That is the territory of nervous system regulation, and almost everything you've heard about it is slightly wrong.

The Worst Advice in Wellbeing

Regulate your nervous system, calm down, reset, breathe, ground yourself, become more resilient — you've heard it all, probably from a workplace wellbeing email sent during the busiest quarter of the year. The advice isn't useless, exactly, because breathing exercises and grounding techniques have real evidence behind them; the problem is what the advice assumes, namely that calm is always the goal and that one technique fits every state.

Neither is true, and the failure of technique-collecting follows directly from that. The same slow-breathing exercise that settles one person makes another feel trapped and agitated, and a mindfulness practice that works beautifully at 7am does nothing at 2pm when the actual need is movement, food, or a difficult conversation you've been avoiding for three days. Collecting techniques fails because it skips the skill that actually matters: reading the state first, and choosing the response second.

What Your Nervous System Is Actually Doing at Work

Your nervous system isn't misbehaving when it activates before a presentation, because activation is energy and focus — the very state that lets you be sharp in the room. It isn't failing when you hit the afternoon fog either, since shutdown and heaviness are often the system's way of forcing a pause it can't get any other way.

The important shift is this: these states are not malfunctions, but information. The tight chest before the board meeting, the irritability that arrives whenever a particular colleague's name appears in your inbox, the exhaustion that no weekend touches — each is data about what your working life is asking of you and what it's costing. As I wrote in When Coping Stops Working, the professionals I surveyed — averaging 7.3 out of 10 for stress while still performing — weren't broken; they were running entirely normal nervous system responses to sustained, abnormal demands, and the 2025 State of Occupational Stress report puts the evidence behind that.

The difficulty is that the body reacts before the mind narrates, which means that by the time you've noticed you're "stressed," your physiology has often been running the show for hours. Regulation has to start earlier than that, at the level of signal rather than crisis.

Regulation Is Not the Same as Calm

Here is the reframe at the centre of everything that follows: sometimes the regulated response is not to settle down. Sometimes it's to move, because a brisk walk up two flights of stairs will do more for afternoon fog than any breathing app. Sometimes it's to connect, since five minutes of honest conversation with a trusted colleague regulates more effectively than twenty minutes of solitary technique — which is one reason isolation is so corrosive for high performers who burn out surrounded by people. And sometimes the right response is a boundary, an expression of anger that tells you something matters, or a proper stop.

The goal was never to be calm all the time; it's to understand yourself well enough to respond with choice instead of habit.

That distinction matters particularly for professionals, because "stay calm" quietly becomes one more performance standard to fail at — one more thing you're apparently doing wrong at 4pm. Regulation, done properly, is not another self-improvement project but a listening skill.

Notice, Discern, Choose

The most useful framework I've found — and the one at the heart of a book I'll mention shortly — comes down to three skills.

Notice means catching the early signals before the state takes over: not the 9pm collapse, but the 11am shoulder tension, the breath-holding while reading email, the third coffee you didn't taste. In practice this can be as small as a sixty-second check-in between meetings in which you ask what is actually happening in your body right now, and while it sounds trivially simple, almost nobody does it.

Discern means asking what the state is actually asking for. Is this pre-presentation activation — useful energy that needs a channel — or anxiety about the email you've been avoiding? Is this tiredness that needs rest, or flatness that needs movement and daylight? And critically, does this response belong to now, or is it an old pattern firing in a new context? This is the skill that separates what genuinely helps from what merely numbs, and it's why scrolling your phone between meetings, which feels like recovery, so rarely is.

Choose means moving from automatic reaction to intentional response, knowing which direction to move in, how much, and when to stop. Three orienting questions cover most situations: am I safe enough to pause, what direction do I need right now — settle, activate, connect, or rest — and what is the smallest helpful thing I could try? The emphasis on small matters, because you cannot meditate for twenty minutes between back-to-back calls, but you can put both feet on the floor and lengthen one exhale before you join the next one.

When the Problem Isn't Your Nervous System

An honest article about regulation has to say this clearly, because the wellbeing industry often doesn't: sometimes your nervous system is responding appropriately to a genuinely unreasonable situation. No breathing exercise fixes a sixty-hour week, and no grounding technique compensates for a team where anxiety travels downwards from leadership.

If your body is persistently activated because your workload is persistently impossible, then the state isn't the problem — the circumstances are, and part of regulation is learning to tell the difference. Where that distinction feels blurry, the free Professional Stress and Resilience Audit will give you an objective read on where the pressure actually sits.

And if what you notice is that the pattern lives mostly inside you — the overthinking loops, the perfectionism, the inability to switch off regardless of circumstances — that's the point where structured CBT-based work and regulation skills complement each other well, one working with the patterns of thinking, the other with the state of the system.

Where to Go Next

This framework — Notice, Discern, Choose — is the subject of a short, practical book I've written called Learning to Listen to Your Nervous System. It's £3.99 on Kindle or as a PDF, deliberately priced to remove the barrier, and the introduction and first chapter are free to read before you decide anything. It covers the full toolkit — breath, movement, grounding, sound, connection, recovery, boundaries — but always in service of the judgement rather than the collection: which practice, when, how much, and when to stop.

Alongside it, I've built Regulate, a free companion platform whose Quick-Start Pack gives you six practical tools, including the sixty-second check-in and a regulation compass for working out which direction you actually need, while the companion app offers one small, doable practice at the moment you check in. There is no subscription pressure, no streaks, and no gamified wellness — just the tools, available when the 2pm wobble arrives.

Your nervous system is not a problem to fix; it's information to listen to, and the skill was never calm but choice.