This is the second in a series of four posts about thriving in change. In the first post, I explored why change can feel so hard, how it touches our fundamental needs, and how our feelings are signals about those needs. In this post, I look at what happens when the pressure of change starts to affect our behaviour, and how that behaviour ripples outward to the people around us.
Change always disrupts our needs, and as results stirs our emotions. Our feelings, in turn, impact how our brains work and how we act. What happens inside us inevitably shows up in how we interact with each other.
And this is where things can get complicated. The very moment we most need a good connection with others is often the moment when our capacity for it is at its lowest. In short, we’re at our worst when we would need to be at our best.
Stress shrouds our perception and empathy
A small amount of stress helps us focus and mobilise energy. But when stress builds, our stress reactions kick in. And while everyone's reactions are a little different, there are some common patterns.
Under significant stress, our ability to feel empathy for others diminishes. So does our capacity for self-reflection. We become more self-centred because the brain narrows its focus to what feels most urgent: our own survival, our own needs, our own perspective. This is an ancient mechanism that has helped humans survive in short-term, dangerous situations. But when stress lasts for a longer time, its effects run deeper.
Our thinking also changes. Under pressure, we tend to become more rigid in our perceptions. We are more likely to interpret situations negatively, assume the worst about other people's intentions, and see things in black-and-white. The nuance and complexity that we can normally hold and the ability to see multiple perspectives can shrink considerably.
Even though this is what tends to happen to human beings under sustained pressure, we are often not conscious of these changes in ourselves. Our brains like to pretend that everything is as per usual and kind of trick us into believing that we are operating at our full capacity, while in fact our capacity has diminished.
Stress locks us from connecting with others
This is where the inner experience of stress becomes visible to others.
Some people under stress become more guarded or withdrawn. Others become more irritable or reactive. Some become controlling, wanting to manage every detail. Others disengage, pulling away from conversations and decisions.
Whatever form it takes, the effect is often the same: our ability to interact well with others is diminished at precisely the time when it matters most. Communication becomes harder. Misunderstandings multiply. Small things that wouldn't normally bother us start to feel significant.
And here is the painful part: as our ability to connect with others diminishes, our need for that connection increases. We are social beings. We deal with stress and uncertainty much better when we feel we are in it together, with a sense of shared experience, mutual support, and trust. When that sense of togetherness is missing, the isolation can add another layer of difficulty to an already hard situation.
A spiral of social pain builds
In my work with teams going through change, I've noticed a recurring pattern. I think of it as a vicious circle, and it can start running before anyone realizes it's happening.
Pressure builds, which creates stress. Stress changes how we behave, which creates friction or distance in our relationships. Our need for good interaction and support from others increases, while our ability to provide it diminishes. This happens especially when the whole team or organisation is under pressure simultaneously.
This friction creates a kind of social pain, the feeling of not being understood, not being supported, not being in this together. And social pain feeds back into a sense of threat, which increases the stress further. Round and round it goes.
What makes this spiral so difficult is that everyone in it is usually doing their best to cope with a difficult situation. People are not behaving badly on purpose. They are reacting to pressure in ways that human beings do. But when those reactions meet, when one person's withdrawal meets another's irritability, or when one person's need for control clashes with another's need for autonomy, the friction can escalate without anyone intending it.
Stress erodes the quality of our interactions
There is another layer to this that I think is important. We each see the world literally through our own lens: we see the image our brains create, and our brains are wired differently. We observe the same events but interpret them differently, based on our needs, our earlier experiences, our temperament, and what is happening in our lives at that moment.
In times of change, these differences can become sharper. What feels like a reasonable decision to one person can feel like a threat to another. What one person sees as moving forward, another may experience as a loss of something important. These differences in perspective reflect the fact that we are all navigating the same situation from different starting points and with different maps.
When we are under stress, and our empathy and self-reflection are diminished, it becomes much harder to see this. We tend to assume that our perspective is the correct one, and that others who see things differently are either uninformed or unreasonable. This is one way stress quietly erodes the quality of our interactions.
Naming what's happening stops the spiral
Recognising these patterns doesn't make them disappear. But in my experience, it can help.
When a team or a group of colleagues can name what is happening — "we are under a lot of pressure, and it's affecting how we are with each other" — something shifts. It creates a small opening to see each other as human beings and to be human, a moment of shared honesty.
It also opens the door to a different kind of conversation. It becomes possible to talk about what is underneath it: the needs that are not being met, the feelings that are driving the reactions, the perspectives that are different but all valid. The more we feel heard, the better we can hear, too. It only needs a small opening to share what is inside us.
It requires the courage to share what is happening to us and a willingness to pause and consider that what we are seeing on the surface, the difficult behaviour, the friction, the withdrawal, is not the whole story.
In the next post, I'll explore what it can look like to reclaim a sense of agency in the middle of all this, not by pushing harder, but by making small, conscious shifts in how we relate to what's happening.
