At some point during a difficult stretch a few years back, I stopped making plans.

I didn’t cancel everything or announce I was withdrawing. I just quietly stopped initiating, stopped booking things, kept saying ‘maybe’ to invitations until maybe became ‘no’. I told myself I was managing priorities, being realistic, not getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t notice I’d done it until a friend asked if I was okay, and I realised I’d been isolating for months.

That particular habit, putting yourself on hold until something else is sorted out, is so common and so quiet that most of us don’t recognise it while we’re doing it.

At the time, it feels like sensible triage. But underneath it’s usually something else: a belief that life, properly enjoyed and fully inhabited, is something that happens after.

After the thing is dealt with.
After the relationship repairs.
After the situation settles.

After.

The problem is that ‘after’ rarely arrives the way we imagine it. And while we’re waiting, we’re not the only ones who notice we’ve stepped away.

Postponement as a way of staying in it.

Postponement, in its quieter form, is a way of staying connected with the difficult thing. By treating it as so significant that life itself must wait, we give the situation a kind of power. There’s something in the postponement that says: I am not moving on.

Carrying on, by contrast, can feel like a betrayal. Like you’re saying the thing doesn’t matter, like you’re getting ahead of yourself.

But carrying on is not the same as giving up. It’s not pretending things are fine. It’s choosing to remain alive in your own life while the difficult thing is still there.

That’s not avoidance. That’s steadiness.

The people close to us feel it too.

When we’re in holding mode, not quite present but not quite absent either, the people around us pick up on it. Not always consciously. They feel it in the quality of our attention, in the flatness behind the functioning, in the sense that we’re somewhere else even when we’re in the room.

And often, without being told anything, they feel subtly responsible. They infer that things must be serious. They start treading carefully. They carry a small weight they didn’t ask for and don’t know how to put down.

So when we carry on, when we make a plan and keep it, or laugh at something that’s actually funny, or show up with our attention actually here, we’re not just doing something for ourselves. We’re releasing the people around us from something they’ve been quietly holding.

What it actually looks like.

It’s not performing happiness. It doesn’t require pretending. It’s smaller and quieter than that.

It looks like making a plan for next weekend. Going to see something you’ve been meaning to see. Laughing at something that’s actually funny. Cooking a proper meal. Having a conversation that has nothing to do with the difficult thing.

In December 2022, a relationship had ended a little while earlier and I was not in good shape. A friend had invited me to their annual pre-Christmas dinner, a big warm gathering of people who mostly knew each other well. I spent the entire day trying to talk myself out of going.

The story I was telling myself was specific: that I was a pity invite, that I’d be the sad person everyone had to be careful around, that showing up in that state, to something that festive, would make me a burden and the evening worse.

The generous interpretation of this is that I was being considerate. The honest one is that I was considering using it as a reason to stay home, with my sadness for company.

At some point in the late afternoon, I gave myself a pep talk, made a dessert, put on a good shirt, packed some non-alcoholic beers, and went. I nearly turned around several times on the drive. But I kept going, got there, and… had a nice kind of fun.

I met people I hadn’t met before.
I laughed at things that were actually funny, said some things that made others laugh.
I ate well and felt, for a few hours, like a person who was still part of things. Nobody was careful around me, and nobody needed to be.

That friendship has since faded, the way some do. But something from that evening stayed. A small piece of evidence that I could show up before I was ready, and that doing so was exactly what would help me feel ready next time.

The difficult thing was still there on the drive home. But I was better able to observe it and not be captured by it. I arrived home, to the still-present challenge, slightly differently than I’d left.

That’s what carrying on actually is: not triumph, and not pretending.
Just returning to your own life before the difficult thing gives you permission to.

Three things to try.

1. Book the thing.
Identify one thing you’ve been postponing until things feel more settled.
Book it, plan it, or do it this week.
You don’t have to feel ready. The point is returning to your own life before it’s resolved.

2. Notice the difference between functioning and being present.
Functioning is going through the motions. Present means your attention is actually here: in the conversation, in the meal, in the walk.
Pick one moment today and try to be in it, rather than get through it.

3. Take stock at the end of the week.
Ask: what did I do this week that was just for me, or just for the pleasure of it?
If the answer is nothing, that’s information.
Carry on. Not because things are sorted, but because you’re still here.

There’s a particular kind of distress that feels completely present-tense, and isn’t. But we mistake it for the present.

Something happens: someone doesn’t respond when we expected them to, or we get deprioritised in a small but noticeable way, or there’s a silence where we thought there’d be a sound. And our nervous system doesn’t just register it and move on… it floods us.

Our chest might tighten, thoughts race, adrenaline pumping.

Already three steps ahead. Building a case about what this means, what it says, and what comes next.

From the outside, this can look like an overreaction. From the inside, it can feel like an accurate reading of the situation.

That gap is the problem.

What I’ve learned through therapy, study, and paying attention to myself when I’d rather look away, is that the intensity of the flood is hardly ever about the thing that just happened.

Most of the time, it’s really about everything that came before it. Previous times that felt similar, and which our body and mind tell us is happening again.

Old wounds leave bruises. New events can match those previous wounds closely enough to set the same alarm off. And the alarm doesn’t care about the difference between then and now, it just fires. That’s its job: to warn us that something we didn’t like might be happening again.

In that moment, it can feel like you’re drowning in three centimetres of water.

Why turning outward doesn’t help.

For a long time, my response to this was to do what the alarm told me to: monitor. Wait, scan for signals, look for evidence that the thing I feared was either happening or not.

The problem is that when we’re looking outward for confirmation that something is wrong now, just like it was in the past, we’re running the alarm whether we need to or not.

We stay in the heightened state and tend to interpret everything through the same fearful lens, which means we’re not actually reading the present situation at all. We’re just finding the past in it.

There was a period not long ago when someone close to me went quiet in a way that felt familiar. Not a fight, not a clear thing I could point to. Just a shift in temperature. A message left on read, a plan that didn’t come together. And something in me responded as though I already knew exactly what it meant, as though the situation had already been decided and I was just waiting for confirmation.

I began composing responses to things that hadn’t been said yet. Already defensive, already hurt, already somewhere ahead of the actual moment.

What was actually happening was ordinary, as it turned out. Life, tiredness, bad timing. But my alarm had matched the bruise of something older, and I was already halfway through a reaction to that older thing before the present one had even been resolved.

The gap between what was happening and what I was feeling was enormous, and I only noticed it when I put the phone down and went and did something else.

What tends to help, I’ve found, is that moment of deliberate stepping back. Not analysing the situation, not building a case. Just noticing that the alarm has fired, and asking whether it’s responding to right now, or to something older.

What turning inward actually looks like.

What I’ve been trying to do instead, and this is genuinely a practice and not a resolution, is turn back toward myself.

I’ve started taking 20 minutes. To do something I was going to do before the alarm went off. Not to distract, and not to prove a point.

But because we tend to feel more settled when we’re living our own lives with some intention, rather than waiting for external confirmation that things are fine. When I do what I said I’d do, something small but real registers: I can rely on myself. That accumulates, slowly, into something that outside signals can’t completely undo.

The walk. The study time. The meal we actually cook instead of ordering in, or not eating. The message we write to someone we love. The book we open, even for twenty minutes.

These are not fillers while we wait to feel better… they are what better is made of.

The other thing that helps, and this one is smaller but I’ve found it true: a phrase short enough to say in a breath.

I’m here.

Not as an affirmation in the poster-on-the-wall sense. Just felt. And said while I do something physical: feet on the floor, a long exhale, the moment of moving from one room to another. Over time, the two things bind together and the phrase starts to work faster.

The flood still comes, as old injuries don’t disappear because we’ve named them.

But our response can change and reflect the present rather than the past. And for anyone who’s been flooded, that’s safety and calm.

Three things to try.

1. Don’t get sideswiped.

   Next time you notice the flood starting, before you reach for the phone or start composing a message in your head, do one small thing you were already planning to do that day first. See what it does to the feeling.

2. Try the phrase “I’m here.”

   Just quietly, to yourself, attached to something physical: the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning, or a long breath before you walk into a room. I’m here. See how it feels.

3. Map it.

   Think back to the last time you were flooded by something that probably didn’t deserve the intensity. Not to relitigate it, but to ask: what did the situation remind you of? What older version of this have you lived before?
   See if you can name it. Knowing where the alarm was built doesn’t stop it firing, but it does make the noise a little less convincing.

Shrinking back can feel safe. In the moment, it can even feel right.

We let something pass. We soften what we were about to say. We adjust ourselves to keep things smooth.

Individually, these choices make sense. We care about the person in front of us, and we don’t want to create tension where there doesn’t need to be any.

But there’s a cost to this that’s easy to miss.

Each time we edit ourselves out of an interaction, we remove something real. And without something real, there’s less to actually connect with.

Closeness doesn’t come from things being smooth. It comes from there being something real to meet.

A thought that hasn’t been watered down.
A preference that actually belongs to us.
A limit that hasn’t been quietly erased.

When those things are missing, the interaction still works, but it feels thinner. We’re there, but not fully.

A quiet distance.

Over time, that gap can become noticeable, and it often feels like a quiet distance. We can see it in small, ordinary moments.

We’re sitting with someone and they suggest a plan we don’t really want. We hear ourselves say yes anyway.

We have a different opinion in a conversation, but it feels easier to nod and move on.

We start to say something honest, then stop halfway through because it feels inconvenient.

Nothing breaks in these moments. The interaction stays comfortable, and on the surface, everything is fine. But it can also feel slightly thinner.

If we repeat that pattern often enough, something starts to shift internally. It becomes harder to tell what we actually think or want, because we’re used to letting those things go before they fully form.

We get very good at reading the room and responding to what’s around us. At the same time, we can lose some connection to what we’re bringing in.

This is where relationships can start to feel a bit flat and like they’re lacking depth. It can be confusing because there’s no obvious problem to point to. Everything looks functional, but it doesn’t feel as full, or deep, as it could.

Pausing instead of disappearing.

What seems to make a difference isn’t suddenly saying everything that comes to mind or forcing ourselves to be more assertive. It’s quieter than that.

It’s noticing the exact moment where we’re about to step back from ourselves, and staying there a little longer.

Letting a thought exist for a second longer before we edit it.
Letting a preference be spoken without immediately softening it.
Letting a limit be understood before we remove it.

This isn’t about pushing our thoughts onto other people, or making every interaction heavier. It’s about staying part of what’s happening. Because when we do that, something tends to shift.

The moment might feel slightly less smooth, but it becomes more real. There’s more to respond to, more to understand, and more of us to actually meet.

This is where depth tends to come from. Not constant agreement and perfection, but the presence of something real on both sides.

Making ourselves smaller doesn’t actually make things easier in the way we hope. It makes them simpler on the surface, but thinner underneath.

Over time, that trade-off becomes harder to ignore.

Three things to try.

1. Notice when you’re about to pull back
   Catch one moment where you’re about to go quiet or let something slide just to keep things easy.

2. Pause, don’t disappear
   Take a moment to gather your thoughts if you need to, but stay in it. Don’t step back from yourself altogether.

3. Say one small, honest thing
   Share something you’d usually keep to yourself, in your own way and in your own time. Nothing big, just something real.

I want to tell you about the worst apology I ever gave…

It lasted about twelve minutes. By the end of it, I had covered:

• What had been going on for me at the time

• Why I said what I did

• What I’d actually meant by the thing I said

• What I thought had been misunderstood, and

• Some broader context the other person may not have known.

I finished feeling like I’d been quite thorough and all would therefore be resolved.

But the other person looked like they’d just sat through a press conference about someone else’s feelings. It wasn’t an apology… it was a broadcast.

The hard thing I had to acknowledge was that I’d meant well but had come up short. I genuinely wanted them to understand, but as I learned, understanding isn’t what an apology or repair requires. Acknowledgement is.

Why we explain instead of apologise and repair.

Our inclination to explain comes from a real place, usually from caring about how we’re perceived and a belief that if the other person had the full picture, things would resolve.

But, explanation before acknowledgement shifts the focus from their experience to ours. It makes the apology about us, and not the other person. We may not intend it that way, but that’s how another person usually receives it.

Explaining is a lot easier than real accountability and ownership. It keeps us in the role of narrator, which is much easier than being the person who caused an impact. Even when we dress it up as openness, explanation is a form of self-protection and a barrier to repairing.

I have been that person many times. Protecting myself more than opening myself.

What repair actually sounds like.

Healthy repair can be short and straightforward, because when we are genuinely taking responsibility, there isn’t that much to say: I see what happened, I understand the impact, and I’m not going to defend it.

It might sound like:

• ‘I can see that was off. I’m sorry.’

• ‘That came out harder than I meant it to, and I understand how that impacted you.’

• ‘I made that about my intentions, not the impact on you.’

Genuine acknowledgement is what opens the door and creates space for a fuller conversation to hear the other person’s experience, share context, and build understanding. This can only happen after the impact on someone is acknowledged. Not before.

The hardest part?

Sitting with being misunderstood for a little longer than feels comfortable.

That’s what acknowledging our impact before explaining our intention involves. It’s hard to get used to, but it’s powerful.

Fifteen years of public speaking and a decade of performing have shown me that people very quickly work out whether we’re trying to convince them, or genuinely having a discussion.

The growth opportunity for us is to get better at trusting that there will be room for the fuller discussion later, once the person in front of us feels like a person rather than an audience.

I still get this wrong at times, more than I wish. It is hard, but it works.

Three things to try.

1. Next time you need to repair from something, set a rule for yourself: your first response can be no more than two sentences. Acknowledgement only, without explaining context and intention. See what happens when you stop there.

2. Notice the moment the urge to explain arrives. It’s usually physical, a kind of pressure, pulling us toward speech. When you feel it, pause. Ask: is what I want to say for them to feel heard, or for me to feel better?

3. Think of a repair attempt you made recently that didn’t work. Where did the explanation start? What would it have sounded like if you’d stopped two sentences earlier?

Urgency is a feeling that disguises itself as a fact.

When we feel urgent, really urgent - the kind that tightens the chest and speeds up the speech, it doesn’t feel like an emotional state. It feels like an accurate reading of the situation. It feels like: this actually is time-sensitive, this actually does need to be dealt with now, there actually isn’t room to slow down.

Sometimes that’s true, as genuine urgency exists. Some situations require quick action, and there’s nothing wrong with moving fast when the moment calls for it.

But a lot of the urgency most of us carry day to day, with the restlessness and the sense of always being slightly behind, isn’t a response to actual emergency.

It’s a habit. A resting state. A way of being that we’ve carried for so long it no longer feels like a choice.

And habits, unlike genuine emergencies, spread.

Urgency is contagious.

When we operate at pace, talking fast, moving fast, thinking three steps ahead of every conversation, the people around us feel it. Not as pressure, necessarily. Not consciously. But they feel it in the rhythm of the exchange, in the sense that there isn’t quite enough room, in the quiet conclusion that this probably isn’t the moment to bring up the slower, harder things.

I’ve worked in communications for a long time, and in that world pace is often treated as a virtue. Quick turnaround, sharp thinking, always across it. And those things are genuinely useful. But I’ve also sat in enough meetings and had enough honest feedback over enough years to know that pace without presence has a cost. The person who seems to have already formed the view before the conversation is finished, can make other people feel like they’re there to confirm a decision rather than contribute to one.

I’ve been that person. The urgency wasn’t false. I genuinely felt the pressure of the clock, the project, the competing priorities. But the effect of it in the room was real, and it wasn’t helpful.

In my work in mental health training, I’ve sat with people who were burning through their own resources and those of everyone around them, all in the name of getting things done. The urgency felt necessary to them. To the people beside them, it felt like a wall.

The difference between fast and urgent.

Fast isn’t the problem. Fast, when it comes from clarity and competence, is often an asset.

Urgent is different. Urgent comes from anxiety rather than clarity. It has a slightly pressured quality, an edge to it that makes other people feel they need to keep up or get out of the way.

I can tell if I’m doing this by examining whether I’m actually listening in the conversation, or just waiting for enough information to act. When I’m genuinely present, I’m curious. When I’m urgent, I’m efficient.

A good pause isn’t about slowing down for the sake of it. It’s about checking which mode we’re actually in, and whether the situation actually calls for it.

What a good pause actually is.

A pause doesn’t have to be long. A genuine pause is usually five or ten seconds. Most people, once they stop being afraid of silence, find it much shorter than they expected.

It signals to the person you’re with that you heard them. That what they said was worth a moment. That you’re not just processing their words absent-mindedly.

The response that comes after a good pause is more useful than the one that fires off the back of urgency. You don’t have to feel calm to pause. You just do it.

Three things to try.

1. In your next significant conversation, try the one-breath rule: before you respond to anything, take one full breath. Notice what changes in what you say next.

2. At some point today, when you feel the pull of urgency, ask yourself: is this an emergency, or a habit?
If you can’t immediately name what would go wrong if you waited five minutes, it’s probably a habit.

3. Pick a regular meeting or conversation where you tend to move fast. In that one context only, try going second instead of first. Let someone else open. See what you learn from waiting.

I’ve started doing a test on myself. Not often, just when I remember to.

Before I walk into a room, before I sit down at the table or arrive at my desk or get in the car with someone, I ask:

What am I bringing with me right now?

Not what I’m feeling. What I’m radiating.

Because there’s a difference. Feelings are internal, they’re yours. But mood (or ‘vibe’) has a way of escaping. It gets into the temperature of a room. It changes the way people sit, the speed at which they talk, what they decide to say and what they quietly decide to leave out.

Most of us know this in theory. We’ve been in rooms with someone who’s clearly carrying something. They have the tense jaw, offer clipped answers, and exude a kind of tightness in the air around them, and we’ve felt ourselves adjust to be little more careful. A little more contained. And shared less of ourselves and our good ideas. If we’re honest, we know we’ve been that person, too.

That’s why it’s really helpful to start noticing what we bring with us into a space or interaction.

The static we don’t know we’re broadcasting

The most damaging way we conduct ourselves isn’t through the visible stuff: the raised voice or the door closed too firmly, those are obvious. People know what happened. They can name it, address it, move past it.

The costly version is quieter. It’s the ambient signal we send when we’re stressed but holding it together. When we’re kind of present but not really. When we’re answering questions but not quite listening to them.

I’ve spent a number of years running a mental health training organisation, working with people in workplaces and community settings who were carrying enormous weight and genuinely believed they were hiding it.

The research is clear on this, and my experience confirmed it repeatedly: we are far less opaque than we think we are.

The people around us, especially those who know us well, are reading signals we aren’t aware we’re sending. They may not be able to name exactly what they’re picking up, but they feel it, and they respond to it.

During a particular period at work many years ago I was managing a lot of pressure all at once: workplace issues, a project that wasn’t landing, some big things going on at home. I thought I was handling it because I was getting things done by turning up and being professional.

What I didn’t know until someone told me, carefully, was that people had stopped coming to me with things. Not because I’d been unkind. Just because I’d been slightly unreachable, a degree or two colder than usual, and that was enough. They’d quietly decided this wasn’t the moment.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, exactly. I’d just been broadcasting weather I didn’t know I was sending.

What other people are doing with our signal

What tends to happen in families, in workplaces, in any space where people have ongoing relationships, is people respond to our signal, and they calibrate.

We notice patterns. We learn, often without ever consciously deciding to, that some moods are safe to interrupt and some aren’t. That when someone goes quiet in a particular way, it’s better to give them space. That certain topics are easier to raise on certain days.

This calibration is adaptive. It’s how humans protect ourselves in close quarters. But it also means that the people nearest to us are spending real cognitive and emotional energy reading us, tracking us, adjusting to us.

That’s a tax. A quiet one paid in small amounts, but cumulative.

And the thing about a tax like that is people don’t usually tell us they’re paying it. They just get slightly tired. Slightly more distant. Slightly less likely to bring us the things that matter.

The question that changes things

I’m not suggesting we should perform calmness we don’t feel. Performed calm is its own kind of static. People can feel the effort underneath it, and it’s unsettling in a different way.

What I’ve learned through years of working in this space, and from the slower work of paying attention to my own patterns, is that the goal isn’t to hide the weather. It’s to know what we’re walking in with.

What I’m suggesting is a brief moment of honest self-assessment before we enter shared space:

What’s actually going on for me right now,
and is any of it going to leak into this room uninvited?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and that’s fine. We can name it:

‘I’m a bit flat today, nothing to do with you.’

That one sentence does more to protect the people around you than a half-hour of careful management.

Other times, the noticing is enough. Just registering that we’re carrying something can create a small but real separation between what we’re feeling and how we move.

We don’t have to fix our weather. We just have to know what we’re taking with us into a space or interaction.

Three things to try

1. Before you enter a shared space today (home, work, a call, a car), pause for ten seconds and ask: what am I bringing in with me right now? You’re not trying to change anything. Just notice.

2. If you’re carrying something that might affect others, name it out loud in one sentence. Not to explain or process it, just to externalise it. ‘I’m a bit stretched today.’ That’s enough.

3. At the end of the day, think of one room you were in. What was the temperature when you left it? Not a judgement, just a data point. Start building the habit of looking.