Someone says something that lands wrong. Your heart starts racing. Heat floods your chest. And before you’ve even registered what’s happening, words are flying out of your mouth, or you’ve gone completely silent, or you’re halfway through typing a message you’ll regret in ten minutes.
Then comes that sinking feeling. The wave of “Why did I do that again?” The familiar shame of knowing you’ve reacted instead of responded, that you’ve let the fastest, loudest part of yourself take control when you wanted to be calm, clear, and kind.
Most of us know this pattern intimately. The sharp comment that makes us defensive. The perceived criticism that has us either fighting back or shutting down entirely. The moment of stress that has us snapping at people we love. These reactions feel automatic because they are. They’re wired into your nervous system, ancient survival mechanisms that fire faster than conscious thought.
But here’s what matters: automatic doesn’t mean unchangeable. Between the trigger and your response, there’s a space. It might be tiny right now, barely noticeable. But that space can be widened. And in that widening lies the possibility of choosing how you act rather than being hijacked by instinct.
This isn’t about suppressing your feelings or becoming some impossibly calm, zen version of yourself. It’s about developing enough awareness of what’s happening inside you that you can make choices aligned with who you want to be, rather than being driven by fear, shame, or protective patterns learned long ago.
In this article, we’ll explore the crucial difference between reacting and responding, the neuroscience that drives both, and how past experiences create the triggers that set off automatic reactions. More importantly, we’ll look at practical ways to build that space between stimulus and response, and how Counselling can support this deeply human work of learning to choose.
If you’re tired of feeling controlled by your reactions, if you keep hurting people you care about or saying yes when you mean no, if anxiety or old wounds keep hijacking your ability to act with intention, what follows is for you.
Reacting vs Responding: What’s Actually Different?
At first glance, reacting and responding might seem like the same thing. Someone does something, you do something back. But the internal process and the outcomes are profoundly different.
Reacting is automatic and emotional. It happens fast, driven by the oldest parts of your brain that are designed to keep you alive. Reacting is defensive, protective, focused entirely on immediate relief from discomfort. It’s the sharp retort, the slammed door, the silent treatment, the email fired off in anger. In the moment of reacting, you’re not choosing. You’re being driven.
The focus is short-term: make this uncomfortable feeling stop now. The cost is usually regret later, damaged relationships, outcomes you didn’t actually want, and a growing sense that you’re out of control.
Responding is conscious and intentional. It involves a pause, however brief, between what happened and what you do about it. In that pause, you notice what you’re feeling, consider what matters most to you, and choose an action aligned with your values rather than your immediate impulse.
Responding doesn’t mean you’re not feeling strongly. You might be furious, hurt, or terrified. The difference is that you’re feeling it without being entirely run by it. You’re making a choice about how to express or act on that feeling.
In a workplace conflict, reacting might look like immediately defending yourself or attacking back. Responding might look like taking a breath and saying, “I need a moment to think about this before I reply.”
In a relationship, reacting to feeling hurt might mean lashing out or withdrawing completely. Responding might mean saying, “What you just said really hurt. Can we talk about it?”
With your child, reacting to frustration might mean shouting. Responding might mean taking three breaths, getting down to their level, and setting a firm but calm boundary.
Here’s what’s important to understand: reactions aren’t bad or wrong. They’re protective mechanisms that have kept humans alive for millennia. Sometimes they’re still exactly what’s needed. If you’re in genuine danger, you want that fast reaction.
The problem is that your nervous system can’t always tell the difference between actual threat and emotional discomfort. A critical email activates the same alarm system as a physical threat. Your partner’s disappointed tone can trigger the same survival response as being attacked.
So you’re left with a system designed for life-or-death situations firing constantly in response to everyday stressors. And that’s exhausting, damaging, and increasingly not serving you.
The work isn’t about eliminating reactions. It’s about building the capacity to respond more often, particularly in the situations that matter most to you.
What’s Happening in Your Brain When Reactions Take Over
Understanding what happens in your brain during a reaction helps you meet yourself with compassion rather than judgment when it happens.
The amygdala is your threat detector. It’s constantly scanning for danger, and when it perceives a threat, it triggers your fight, flight, or freeze response within milliseconds. This is often called an amygdala hijack, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: your emotional alarm system takes over.
When this happens, your body floods with stress hormones. Your heart rate spikes. Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. Your muscles tense. Blood flow shifts away from your prefrontal cortex (the thinking, planning, reasonable part of your brain) toward your limbs so you can fight or run.
This is why, in the heat of a reaction, you literally cannot think straight. Your prefrontal cortex, which would help you consider consequences, regulate emotions, and make thoughtful decisions, has temporarily gone offline. Logic, nuance, and perspective disappear. You’re operating on pure instinct.
Here’s the tricky part: your amygdala doesn’t distinguish well between physical threats and emotional ones. It responds to perceived rejection, criticism, or loss of control with the same alarm it would sound if you were being physically attacked.
A critical comment from your boss can trigger the same physiological response as a car nearly hitting you. Your partner’s silence might activate the same threat response as being abandoned in the wilderness. Your brain is trying to protect you, but it’s using a very blunt instrument.
This isn’t a flaw in you. It’s how human nervous systems work. The problem is that most modern stressors don’t require the responses our biology is offering. Fighting with your colleague, fleeing from difficult conversations, or freezing during important moments usually makes things worse, not better.
The good news is that you can learn to interrupt this process. Not by overriding your neurobiology through willpower, but by working with it. By building awareness of what’s happening and developing skills that help your nervous system calm down before you act.
When you understand that reactions aren’t moral failures but neurological events, you can approach them with curiosity and compassion. That shift alone creates space for change.
Where Your Reactions Actually Come From
Your reactions today aren’t random. They’re shaped by every experience you’ve had, particularly the early ones that taught you how to survive emotionally.
Childhood creates the template. If anger in your home meant danger, you might have learned to shut down at the first sign of conflict. If love felt conditional on being perfect, you might react to any criticism with intense shame or defensiveness. If your needs were dismissed, you might have learned to either suppress them entirely or express them explosively.
These aren’t conscious decisions you made. They’re adaptive strategies your young nervous system developed to keep you as safe as possible in the circumstances you faced. The problem is that these strategies keep running on autopilot, even when circumstances have changed completely.
Unresolved emotions don’t disappear. Shame, fear, anger, grief that never got processed don’t just fade away. They sit in your system, waiting. And when something in the present reminds your nervous system of that old wound, the reaction isn’t just about now. It’s about then too.
This is why small things can trigger big reactions. Your partner’s mild criticism might activate a deep childhood wound about not being good enough. A friend’s cancellation might tap into old abandonment fears. A colleague’s disagreement might touch shame about being wrong or incompetent.
The intensity of your reaction often corresponds to the depth of the original wound. When you react “out of proportion” to what happened, it’s usually because you’re not just responding to the present moment. You’re responding to every time something similar happened before.
Defensive patterns become automatic. The strategies that helped you survive difficult experiences become neural pathways that fire lightning-fast when triggered. People-pleasing, withdrawing, attacking, freezing. These patterns happen before you even register a choice because they’re that deeply wired.
And because they’re largely unconscious, they can feel mysterious and impossible to control. You don’t understand why you keep doing the thing you swore you wouldn’t do. Why you shut down when you wanted to speak up. Why you lashed out when you wanted to stay calm.
This is where counselling becomes valuable. It brings these unconscious processes into awareness. Not to blame yourself or anyone else for how these patterns formed, but to understand them well enough that you can start making different choices.
In my work, I approach this gently and at your pace. We don’t dive into painful material before you’re ready. We build safety first, then gradually explore what’s driving your reactions. The goal is understanding and freedom, not reliving trauma or forcing change before its time.
What It Costs to Live in Constant Reaction Mode
When reactions dominate your life, the costs accumulate in ways that affect everything.
Mentally and emotionally, constant reactivity is exhausting. You’re always on alert, never quite relaxed, perpetually braced for the next trigger. Anxiety increases because you don’t trust yourself to handle situations calmly. Depression can deepen because the shame after reactions feeds beliefs like “I’m out of control” or “I always mess things up.”
The internal critic gets louder. After each reaction, there’s often a painful spiral of self-judgment. You beat yourself up, promise to do better, then react again, which seems to prove that you’re fundamentally flawed. This cycle erodes self-esteem and creates hopelessness about change being possible.
Physically, living in a reactive state means your nervous system rarely settles. Chronic stress hormones affect your sleep, digestion, immune system, and overall health. The body isn’t designed to stay in survival mode indefinitely. When it does, things start breaking down.
Relationally, reactivity damages the connections you care about most. Trust erodes when people feel like they have to walk on eggshells around you. Intimacy becomes difficult when someone expects defensiveness or withdrawal. Conflicts escalate rather than resolve because both people are reacting to each other’s reactions.
Partners feel hurt and distance themselves. Children become anxious, either trying to manage your moods or developing their own reactive patterns. Friends drift away. Colleagues avoid working with you. Even when people love you deeply, reactivity makes closeness painful and exhausting.
Practically, reactivity keeps you in crisis mode. You’re constantly putting out fires instead of moving toward what matters. Decisions get made impulsively. Opportunities are missed because fear or defensiveness drove your response. You look back and realise you’ve been living someone else’s life, driven by reactions rather than conscious choices.
If you’re dealing with grief, work stress, relationship difficulties, or mental health struggles, reactivity often intensifies. The triggers multiply, the capacity to pause shrinks, and the costs compound.
This isn’t about judging yourself for reacting. It’s about acknowledging honestly that living this way hurts, and that another way is possible.
Finding the Gap Between Impulse and Action
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies your power to choose. This insight, often attributed to Viktor Frankl, is the foundation of moving from reaction to response.
The pause is that space. It’s the moment, however brief, where you interrupt the automatic pathway from trigger to reaction. And in that interruption, choice becomes possible.
The pause doesn’t require that emotions disappear. You’re not trying to calm down entirely or talk yourself out of what you’re feeling. You’re simply creating enough space to notice what’s happening and consider your options.
Even three seconds can be enough. One deep breath. A moment of acknowledgement: “I’m really angry right now.” That tiny gap between impulse and action is where your prefrontal cortex can come back online, where wisdom can enter, where you can remember what actually matters to you.
Practical ways to create a pause:
Breathe intentionally: Slow, nasal breathing directly calms your nervous system. Try box breathing: in for four counts, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Or simply make your exhale longer than your inhale. This sends a signal to your body that you’re not actually in danger.
Count: The old “count to ten” advice exists for a reason. It creates time. You can count breaths, count backwards from ten, count objects in the room. The counting itself occupies your mind while your nervous system settles.
Notice your body: Clench and release your fists. Feel your feet on the ground. Unclench your jaw. Place a hand on your chest or belly. Physical grounding interrupts the mental spiral and brings you into the present moment.
Name what’s happening: Simply saying to yourself “I’m having a strong reaction” or “I notice I’m feeling defensive” creates that observer perspective that’s essential for choice.
Request time: “I need a minute.” “Can we come back to this?” “Let me think about that and get back to you.” These phrases buy you the space you need without requiring you to respond before you’re ready.
The pause isn’t easy, especially in the beginning. Your nervous system is screaming at you to act now, to defend, to escape, to do something. Building the capacity to pause is like strengthening a muscle. It starts small and grows with practice.
Talking Therapy provides a safe space to practice pausing. In session, we can slow down moments when you reacted, examine what happened, and explore what a pause might have looked like. You build the skill in safety before needing to use it in the heat of real life.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor Frankl
Learning to Notice and Name What You’re Actually Feeling
You can’t respond consciously to emotions you don’t recognise. Emotional awareness, the ability to notice and name what you’re feeling as it’s happening, is the foundation of everything else.
For many people, emotional awareness is surprisingly limited. You might only use a few labels: good, bad, fine, upset, stressed. This isn’t your fault. Many of us weren’t taught emotional literacy, and some actively learned that feelings were dangerous or shameful.
Expanding your emotional vocabulary creates choice. The more precisely you can name what you’re feeling, the more options you have for responding to it.
Anger is a broad category. But within it: irritation, frustration, rage, indignation, resentment. Each might call for a different response. Fear shows up as anxiety, dread, panic, unease, worry, terror. Sadness includes disappointment, grief, melancholy, despair, loneliness.
The practice Daniel Siegel calls “name it to tame it” is powerful. When you can say “I’m feeling ashamed” rather than just being flooded with unnamed discomfort, the intensity often decreases. Naming creates that tiny bit of distance between you and the emotion, the space where you can relate to it rather than being entirely consumed by it.
Body awareness is equally important. Emotions show up physically before you consciously register them. Tight shoulders, clenched jaw, heat in your face, heaviness in your chest, churning in your stomach, shakiness in your hands. These physical sensations are your early warning system.
When you learn to notice them, you can catch reactions before they fully take over. “Oh, my chest just got tight. I’m feeling defensive.” That awareness gives you a chance to pause before you say something you’ll regret.
Barriers to emotional awareness are common. Some people experience alexithymia, difficulty identifying and describing emotions. This isn’t a permanent state; it’s something that can improve with practice and support.
Others fear that if they start paying attention to emotions, they’ll be overwhelmed. If you’ve spent years pushing feelings down, the prospect of letting them surface can be terrifying. What if you start crying and can’t stop? What if the anger is too big to contain?
This is where the safety of the therapeutic relationship matters. We practice emotional awareness in small, manageable doses. You learn that feelings, even intense ones, have a beginning, middle, and end. That you can sit with them without being destroyed. That acknowledging emotion doesn’t mean acting on every impulse it creates.
Trauma particularly affects emotional awareness. Traumatic experiences can create either numbness (feelings shut down completely as protection) or flooding (feelings come in overwhelming, undifferentiated waves). Both need gentle, gradual work to restore the capacity to notice and name emotions in helpful ways.
In my practice, we build emotional awareness collaboratively. I might notice things in your body language or tone that you’re not consciously aware of, and I’ll gently offer that observation. Over time, you develop your own capacity to notice, and the work becomes yours to take into daily life.
Ways to Start Responding Instead of Just Reacting
Building the capacity to respond rather than react requires both understanding and practice. Here are frameworks and strategies you can begin using immediately:
The STOP Method
This simple acronym provides structure in moments of activation:
S – Stop: Pause your automatic response. Don’t speak, don’t act, just stop.
T – Take a Breath: Breathe slowly and deeply. Make your exhale longer than your inhale.
O – Observe: Notice what’s happening. What am I feeling? What am I thinking? What’s happening in my body? What’s actually happening around me (vs what I’m assuming)?
P – Proceed: Choose one action aligned with your values. This might be speaking calmly, asking a question, stating a need, or deliberately choosing to stay quiet.
Cognitive Reappraisal: Questioning Your Assumptions
Reactions are often based on interpretations, not facts. Your colleague frowned during your presentation. Your interpretation: “They think I’m incompetent.” Your reaction: defensiveness or shame.
Cognitive reappraisal means pausing to ask: What else could this mean? Maybe they’re stressed about their own work. Maybe they’re concentrating hard. Maybe they have a headache. Maybe they always frown when thinking.
This isn’t about forcing positive thinking. It’s about recognising that your first interpretation, especially when you’re triggered, is often distorted by fear or old wounds. Opening to alternative explanations reduces the intensity of your emotional response and creates space for a more measured reply.
Mindfulness Practice
Regular mindfulness practice builds the muscle of awareness and pause. Even five minutes daily makes a difference. Sit quietly and notice your breath, sounds around you, sensations in your body. When your mind wanders (which it will), gently bring it back.
This isn’t about achieving perfect calm. It’s about practicing the skill of noticing without immediately reacting. That skill transfers directly to emotional moments in daily life.
Responding in Conversations
When someone says something triggering:
Instead of: Immediately defending, explaining, or counter-attacking
Try: “Help me understand what you mean by that.”
Or: “Can you say more about that?”
Or: “I’m noticing I’m having a strong reaction. Can we slow this down?”
Curiosity is one of the most powerful alternatives to defensiveness. When you genuinely want to understand rather than immediately defend, entire conversations shift.
Self-Compassion After Reactions
You will react. Even with practice, triggers will hit and you’ll respond in ways you regret. What you do next matters enormously.
Instead of: Spiralling into shame and self-criticism, which actually makes future reactions more likely
Try: “I reacted. That makes sense given what triggered me. What can I learn from this? How can I repair if needed?”
Self-compassion after reactions is crucial. Shame and self-criticism don’t motivate change; they entrench the very patterns you’re trying to shift.
Preparing for Known Triggers
If you know certain situations, people, or topics trigger you, prepare in advance. Write down a reminder of how you want to respond. Visualise handling it calmly. Have a plan: “If they say X, I’ll take three breaths before responding.” “If I feel that rising heat, I’ll excuse myself for a moment.”
This advance work means you’re not trying to access wisdom and calm in the heat of the moment. You’ve already decided how you want to show up.
How We Work Together on This
While self-awareness and practice help, therapy accelerates and deepens this work in ways that are difficult to achieve alone.
Counselling provides a non-judgmental space to explore what’s driving your reactions. Why does that particular thing trigger you so intensely? What old wound does it touch? What belief about yourself or others does it activate?
Understanding the roots of your reactions creates compassion and makes change more possible. When you see that your defensiveness protects against shame about not being good enough, you can address the shame rather than just trying to white-knuckle better behaviour.
The therapeutic relationship itself teaches something crucial: you can be seen, including the parts you’re ashamed of, without being rejected or judged. That experience directly contradicts many of the core fears driving reactions. It provides a felt sense of safety that slowly rewires your nervous system.
In therapy, we practice response skills in real time. When something I say triggers a reaction, we can pause together, explore what happened, and try different responses. This contained practice with a supportive witness builds confidence that transfers to outside relationships.
Together, we explore your patterns. Sometimes having another person present means noticing things that are hard to see from inside your own experience. You might not register the moment defensiveness appears, or notice your body language shifting. I might gently offer what I’m observing, and you decide what feels true and useful. This collaborative exploration builds awareness in ways that are difficult to achieve alone.
We work at your pace. This isn’t about forcing vulnerability or pushing you into territory that doesn’t feel safe. Person-centred work means you lead. We explore what you’re ready to explore, work with what matters most to you, and build skills that fit your life.
What I Offer
I provide person-centred counselling both in-person in Cornwall and online throughout the UK. My approach is warm, non-judgmental, and collaborative. I work with individuals dealing with anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, work stress, grief, and the impact of past trauma.
For anxiety, we focus on calming your nervous system, understanding your triggers, and building capacity to sit with discomfort without reacting compulsively.
For depression, we work on reconnecting with feeling (when numbness has taken over) and responding to internal experiences with compassion rather than judgment.
For trauma, we build safety first, then gently process what’s driving intense reactions. We pace the work carefully so you’re never overwhelmed, and we develop grounding skills that help you stay present when triggered.
For relationship difficulties, we explore how your reactive patterns affect connection and practice ways of communicating that build rather than damage trust.
For everyone, we challenge the harsh internal critic and build self-compassion, because lasting change requires treating yourself with kindness rather than punishment.
I offer flexible sessions with no long-term commitments required, and reduced rates for those on lower incomes. I also work with business leaders and employees who want to develop steadier, more conscious ways of responding under workplace pressure.
The work isn’t about becoming perfect or never reacting again. It’s about reacting less often, catching yourself sooner, and recovering more quickly. It’s about building the life you actually want rather than being driven by fear and old protective patterns that no longer serve you.
What Changes When You Can Choose Your Responses
When you develop the capacity to respond rather than react, the effects ripple through every area of life.
Internally, you experience more peace. The constant hypervigilance eases. Anxiety decreases because you trust yourself to handle situations skillfully. Self-respect grows because you’re living according to your values rather than being hijacked by impulse.
The harsh internal critic often softens. When you’re not constantly beating yourself up for reactions, there’s more mental space for self-compassion and clarity. Decisions become easier because you’re not caught in emotional storms.
Relationally, trust deepens. People relax around you because they don’t have to manage your reactions. Conflicts still happen, but they resolve more quickly and cleanly. Intimacy becomes possible because vulnerability feels safer.
Others often respond to your steadiness by becoming steadier themselves. Children learn emotional regulation by watching you. Partners feel more secure. Colleagues appreciate working with someone who stays calm under pressure.
Practically, you’re no longer spending enormous energy on damage control after reactions. You can focus on what actually matters: meaningful work, deep relationships, the life you want to build.
Each responsive choice makes the next one easier. Neural pathways strengthen. Your nervous system learns that pause and reflection lead to better outcomes than immediate reaction. The work compounds over time until responding becomes increasingly natural.
This isn’t magic. It’s the gradual rewiring of patterns through awareness, practice, and support. And it’s absolutely possible, regardless of how long you’ve been living reactively or how intense your triggers feel now.
Your Power Lives in the Choice
Reacting is human. It’s ancient wiring designed to protect you from danger. Responding is also human, but it requires conscious development of capacities that don’t come automatically: awareness, pause, choice, compassion.
You will react sometimes. The measure of growth isn’t perfection; it’s reacting less often, catching yourself sooner, and responding to your reactions with kindness rather than shame.
The space between trigger and response is where your power lives. That space can be built, widened, strengthened through practice and support. And in that space, you can choose who you want to be rather than being driven by fear, old wounds, or survival mechanisms that no longer serve you.
This work takes courage. It means facing what you’ve been avoiding, feeling what you’ve pushed down, and building new skills when old patterns feel safer even as they hurt you. But the alternative is continuing to live at the mercy of your reactions, damaging relationships you value, and feeling increasingly out of control in your own life.
Professional support can make this journey less overwhelming and more effective. In therapy, you’re not alone with your patterns. You have a steady presence helping you see what you can’t see from inside your experience, holding space for difficult emotions, and supporting new ways of being until they feel natural.
If you’re ready to stop being run by your reactions, to build the capacity to respond with intention and compassion, I’m here to help. You can start today with one breath, one pause, one moment of choosing differently.
That’s how responding instead of reacting becomes your new normal: one conscious choice at a time, with support and compassion for the very human process of change.
Reach out when you’re ready. The work isn’t easy, but it’s possible, and you don’t have to do it alone. I’ll ask about your experience with reactive patterns, what triggers you, and what you’ve already tried. There’s no pressure to have everything figured out or to dive into painful material immediately. The first session is about beginning to build a relationship where you feel safe enough to explore difficult territory.
