When someone hears it before you do
How stress hides drift, and what it costs your self-governance
I wanted to start this issue wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and happy holidays 🎅!
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Has this ever happened to you mid-conversation?
You’re talking normally. You feel normal. You’re even making a point you care about.
Then your partner pauses and asks:
“Why do you sound mad?”
That question lands like a mirror you didn’t agree to look into.
Because you weren’t trying to be sharp. You weren’t trying to escalate. You didn’t even notice your tone changed. And now you’re stuck defending a version of yourself you didn’t consciously choose.
This is where a lot of unnecessary conflict begins.
Not with an argument.
With a state shift that went undetected until it leaked.
The latency problem
Dysregulation is not a moral failure. It’s a change in state. The nervous system starts prioritizing protection. Your patience shrinks. Your tolerance for ambiguity shrinks. Your need to be understood starts feeling urgent.
That is drift.
And drift is data.
The frustrating part is that drift is rarely loud at the beginning. It starts as a small tilt. Your body changes gears first. Your mind keeps narrating continuity, so you assume you’re still operating from the same place you were five minutes ago.
That delay is the hidden variable behind so many blowups.
When detection latency is high, self-governance decays.
I describe self-governance as autonomy. The ability to choose your response on purpose. The ability to realign with intention when you drift. If the drift goes unnoticed long enough, choice narrows. You still feel like you’re choosing, but your options get smaller.
Your autonomy gets hijacked silently.
My first leak is sarcasm
When I’m regulated, my default mode is talkative, goofy, thoughtful. I can communicate freely. I can disagree without trying to win.
My earliest signal that I’m drifting isn’t anger. It’s not yelling.
It’s being snarky.
A comment that lands with a bite while still giving me plausible deniability. Someone asks me something simple and a line slips out like: “Is that even a question?”
In the moment it can feel efficient. It can feel like clarity. Sometimes it even feels funny.
Then I look back and realize what actually happened.
That wasn’t me choosing.
That was drift driving.
My triggers are consistent: stress in the environment, stress in me, and that internal friction I tend to experience when I feel misunderstood or disrespected. The last two are the dangerous ones because they flip the switch tacitly. I can still believe I’m being fair while my tone is already tight.
I’m still learning this. I still miss it sometimes. That’s part of why I’m writing this. Dysregulation hides inside competence. It hides inside “I’m fine.”
Stress changes what your brain can access
There’s a reason detection gets harder under pressure.
Under stress, catecholamines like norepinephrine and dopamine rise, and the prefrontal cortex becomes more fragile. At moderate levels, those chemicals support focus. When they climb too high, especially under uncontrollable stress, prefrontal networks that support working memory, inhibition, and flexible choice weaken1.
That matters because the prefrontal cortex is where you do the things you think of as “being your best self” in a conversation: holding context, interpreting generously, pausing, choosing words or noticing the impulse and refusing to act on it.
So dysregulation isn’t just “feeling emotional.” It’s a state shift that changes what you can reach in real time.
This is also why dysregulation can feel like righteousness. When you’re activated, your mind can produce explanations at full speed, even as your ability to stay flexible drops. A sharp tone doesn’t feel sharp from the inside. It can feel like precision. It can feel like truth.
There’s a name for this state blindness. Loewenstein described hot–cold empathy gaps: when you’re in a hot state, you underestimate how much that state is steering you, and you struggle to imagine the calmer version of yourself2.
So yes, you may honestly believe you’re fine.
But your nervous system may disagree.
Your body sends the memo first
Most people treat self-awareness like it’s purely mental. It isn’t.
Your earliest signals are often physical: jaw tension, heat in the chest, breath getting shallow, shoulders climbing, a subtle urgency to end the conversation instead of stay present. The body tells the truth earlier than the story does.
That channel has a name too: interoception. Your ability to sense internal signals and integrate them into awareness.
The insula is one of the key hubs involved in processing and integrating bodily signals with emotion and motivation3.
If you aren’t practiced at noticing those signals, you don’t get an early warning. You get a late notification delivered through consequences: tone, sarcasm, defensiveness, withdrawal, impatience.
This is also why two people can read the same moment differently. One person dysregulates into heat and sharpness. Another drifts into silence, numbness, over-explaining, or people-pleasing. Different outputs. Same mechanism: a state shift you didn’t catch early enough.
Now add the cultural baseline. The modern world keeps people in load. Gallup reported that 49% of Americans say they frequently experience stress4. The American Psychiatric Association’s 2024 poll found 43% of U.S. adults said they felt more anxious than the year before5.
High baseline stress makes it easier for dysregulation to become background noise. If you live slightly activated most days, drift starts feeling like home.
What dysregulation breaks first
Dysregulation rarely breaks the relationship in one dramatic moment. It breaks the small regulators that keep relationships safe.
Curiosity. Timing. Gentleness. The willingness to clarify instead of assume. The ability to hold a neutral question without hearing attack inside it.
That’s why people react to “how you said it.” They are responding to the state, not just the content.
And because this happens in relationships, it propagates.
Physiological linkage and synchrony research in couples shows that partners’ bodies can become linked during stress and conflict, and those patterns matter for relationship functioning over time6.
So drift doesn’t stay private.
You bring it into the room. The room changes. The other nervous system responds. Now you’re not managing one state shift, you’re managing an interaction between two.
This is why the latency problem matters so much.
If you catch the drift early, you can steer before the room heats up.
If you catch it late, you’ll spend the next hour arguing about tone while both of you swear you’re talking about respect.
Repair is part of discipline
I used to think the goal was to catch it before it happens. Then I had enough real conversations to accept reality.
Sometimes you catch it early.
Sometimes you don’t.
What helped me stop turning every drift into damage was learning that discipline includes repair.
When I catch the snark as it’s happening, I try to interrupt the chain. I step away. I change context. I break momentum long enough for my nervous system to settle.
When I miss it and conflict starts, I try to slow down enough to understand impact. Then I let things cool. Then I come back and own it cleanly.
The apology that lands is specific:
“My answer was subpar. That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”
No courtroom defense. No long backstory. Just ownership.
Not because I enjoy apologizing.
Because trust erodes faster than logic.
Repair is how you protect the relationship from your temporary state.
It’s also how you protect your own identity. The person you want to be doesn’t emerge only when you’re calm. That person shows up when you’re accountable after you slip.
Why this can be trained
Here’s the reframe that made all of this workable for me.
Dysregulation is not proof you lack discipline.
It’s proof you have a nervous system.
So the question isn’t, “Why am I like this?” The question is, “What is my earliest leak, and how quickly can I notice it?”
That’s where discipline belongs. Discipline as deliberate practice.
Not control. Not suppression. Practice.
Neuroplasticity is the nervous system’s capacity to change through repeated experience. Stress reshapes you over time, and training reshapes you over time. Those are both true7.
This is why I call dysregulation drift. Drift can be observed. Patterns can be learned. Latency can shrink. Returns can become cleaner.
You don’t need to become a monk. You don’t need a perfect emotional vocabulary. You need enough awareness to notice the first crack in your default mode before it becomes a fight.
What I hope you take from this
Dysregulation is drift, and the reason it causes so much unnecessary damage is that it’s often detected late, after it already leaked into tone and interpretation. Stress biology makes that lateness more understandable than people admit, because the same state that pushes you toward reactivity also weakens the brain systems that help you pause and choose. Your body often knows first, which is why learning your physical cues matters.
In relationships, drift propagates, which means small state shifts can become shared spirals. The work isn’t to never drift. The work is to notice sooner, return sooner, and repair cleanly when you miss it. That’s the supposed path back to autonomy.
In our next paid companion, we will work on a sequence that will help us detect, return, and realign faster each time when we detect dysregulation.
Now, go with your family and enjoy the holidays!
Ho-ho-ho, have a wonderful week!
✨ Ideas Worth Exploring
If this piece resonated, here are a few more that go hand-in-hand.
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. doi:10.1038/nrn2648.
Loewenstein, G. (2005). Hot–cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychology, 24(4, Suppl), S49–S56. doi:10.1037/0278-6133.24.4.S49.
Critchley, H. D., Wiens, S., Rotshtein, P., Öhman, A., & Dolan, R. J. (2004). Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 7(2), 189–195. doi:10.1038/nn1176.
Fioroni, S., & Foy, D. (2024, April 15). Americans sleeping less, more stressed. Gallup.
American Psychiatric Association. (2024, May 1). American adults express increasing anxiousness in annual poll; stress and sleep are key factors impacting mental health (News release).
Timmons, A. C., Margolin, G., & Saxbe, D. E. (2015). Physiological linkage in couples and its implications for individual and interpersonal functioning: A literature review. Journal of Family Psychology, 29(5), 720–731. doi:10.1037/fam0000115.
Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., Schuierer, G., Bogdahn, U., & May, A. (2004). Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature, 427(6972), 311–312. doi:10.1038/427311a; Tang, Y.-Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–225. doi:10.1038/nrn