The weather in the room
On what you put into spaces without realising.
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.
The most damaging way we conduct ourselves isn’t through the visible stuff.
It’s the ambient signal we send when we’re stressed but holding it together.
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.