High-pressure situations at work, like an important meeting, are often the backdrop for our most reactive professional moments. In 2025 nearly two-thirds (60%) of employees who spent more than 15 hours a week in meetings reported experiencing severe stress levels, according to a Wiley Workplace Intelligence report.
When conflict arises, our bodies often react before our brains. You might lose your temper, lose your words, or find yourself anxiously agreeing to something that you don’t actually have capacity to do. It can feel deeply frustrating, and even shameful, when your responses feel impulsive and out of your control.
But is it the stressful meeting itself that causes our reactivity, or are we bringing it into the room before the meeting has even started?
In today’s “infinite workday” (the term coined by Microsoft in their 2025 Work Trend Index) of constant emails, meetings, and notifications, staff are already stressed and on the back foot. In this reactive state, you’re expecting the worst—listening out for annoyances, slights, and irritations. In my experience as an executive coach, our reactivity can go even deeper than that. It’s a survival response laid down long before you got your current job title.
What does reactivity look like?
Reactivity in high pressure meetings manifests as freeze, fight, or fawn. Freezing doesn’t always look like paralysis. It’s going quiet when you have something to say. Fighting doesn’t always look like aggression. It’s a sharpness in your voice that you catch a beat too late. And fawning is agreeing when you don’t, accommodating when you’re seething, making yourself smaller in a room where you have every right to take up space. What starts as occasional reactivity can become reflexive, meaning that your body has learned this response as the path of least resistance.
There’s a gap between what high-achieving leaders expect of themselves and what they actually have available when it counts.
What I’ve noticed in nearly two decades of coaching senior leaders is that the ones who describe themselves as reactive in meetings are actually “pre-reactive.” In other words, the meeting isn’t where the story starts; it’s where it surfaces.
High performers don’t always feel depleted and that’s the problem. You’ve recalibrated so gradually to mental pressure that the state you’re in feels normal. It’s not. You’re thinking about work when you’re nominally off, checking messages the moment you wake up and cycling through tomorrow’s agenda at midnight. This state is often described as conscientiousness but it results in a nervous system that never fully stands down.
Superficially you might feel okay, but in the meeting room when the pressure spikes, you discover there’s nothing left in the tank. You’ve got no capacity to regulate your emotions and decide how to react.
According to the neuroscientist Nicole Vignola, when our brains are “always on” it becomes much harder to shift away from a state of vigilance. This state is increasingly becoming the norm when, according to a 2026 study of over 1,000 organizations, artificial intelligence is adding to workloads rather than redistributing them.
Why reactive moments aren’t really about what triggers you. . .
Reactivity is less about what’s triggering you and can be more about how old the response feels. The answer might reveal that the current agenda item isn’t really the problem. That’s because our most reactive moments often feel younger than us. Suddenly you’re not the 50-year-old in the room but someone earlier. Someone for whom being challenged in front of others carried a cost, long before this meeting existed.
When a colleague says something cutting, when someone takes credit for your idea, when the conversation shifts in a direction you didn’t anticipate—your body responds before your brain catches up. That doesn’t mean you’re insufficiently senior or experienced. It means your nervous system is running software considerably older than your job title.
Freeze, fight, and fawn aren’t adult responses. They’re survival responses—circuits that were laid down before you had a leadership team or a P&L. In a high-stakes meeting, those circuits don’t distinguish between a real threat and a passive-aggressive peer. They just fire.
A 4-step system to reduce your reactivity in meetings
Here’s the 4-step system I use with senior leaders before they go into a challenging meeting, especially if they’re not at optimal energetic capacity. It creates a shift that allows you to be more intentional and considered.
Always remember that your response isn’t being generated by the meeting. It’s been activated by it. It was already there. That recognition—even partial, even mid-meeting—creates a pause that provides enough time to choose differently and have a moment of authorship over what happens next.
1. Before the meeting: reset BEFORE you walk in
Prior to the meeting, your aim is to get to a neutral place from which you can respond instead of react. There are three steps: First, name your current state (it might be “tense,” “rushed,” “defensive”). Then look at something in the distance to widen your focus. Finally, do a few rounds of baseline breathing, which is the name I’ve given to the physiological sigh. Inhale deeply, then, without exhaling, take a top-up breath and hold for a beat before a long, slow exhale.
2. Before the meeting: decide on your pattern override
Under pressure, you’ll default to old patterns unless you’ve consciously chosen and rehearsed an alternative. For instance, if you know you agree to things too quickly, your pattern override might be to say, “May I get back to you?” In this case, your goal is to avoid committing to something in the meeting itself. You can revisit a considered answer but it’s harder to undo a reflexive one.
3. During the meeting: slow yourself down
Reactivity loves speed. Leadership moves in a more considered way. Slow yourself down by anchoring into your body. Feel your feet in your shoes, where they make contact with the floor. Feel the pen in your hand. Practice speaking at a slower pace, and in a lower tone. If you need space in the heat of the moment, go slow and low. Say “Let me think about that.” Or use a phrase like, “Can you say more about that?” If you say something that felt reactive, having a phrase at your fingertips that you’ve rehearsed is helpful—for instance, “That came out more strongly than I intended. Let me reset.”
4. After the meeting: clear the residue
Resetting after the meeting is a power move. First capture any actions to minimize open loops in your mind. Then clear the whiteboard of your brain— ideally by doing something different for a short time to shift mental gears. Walk around the building. Grab a coffee. Do something away from your screen. As you’re doing this, say to yourself, “That’s done now.”
Whenever possible, structure a buffer between meetings to minimize one call bleeding into the next, with no chance to reset. Try booking 25- or 55-minute meetings and you’ll be surprised how little pushback you get.
Becoming less reactive doesn’t mean you have to stop reacting altogether. It means recognizing it earlier, understanding your own patterns and designing a system that better serves you.
The meeting doesn’t create the reactivity. In all likelihood, you brought it with you. That knowledge is more liberating than you think.
