In my sessions, I talk A LOT about the art of the pause, and the regularity with which it shows up in conversation tells me it means something rather bigger than simply ‘take a breath before you reply to that email’ (although, to be fair, sometimes taking a breath before you reply to that email would save everyone a great deal of admin).

The opposite of the pause, for me, is urgency. It’s that internal alarm bell that goes off when something has happened and suddenly it feels absolutely essential that I do something about it RIGHT NOW. Someone has misunderstood me. Something is unfair. Something needs correcting. There has been an injustice and apparently I have been personally appointed Head of Emergency Clarification.

And I think this can be particularly powerful for neurodivergent people because many of us are very, very good at reacting. There is an intelligence in that. We can be extraordinarily present in the moment, fast at spotting what is happening, fast at responding to danger, inconsistency, unfairness, emotional shifts. That reactivity may have served us extremely well.

The problem comes when urgency becomes indistinguishable from necessity. Because the feeling that I need to respond immediately does not necessarily mean that responding immediately is the right thing to do.

Film and television have not helped us here. We have been taught the fantasy of the perfect response: somebody says something appalling and the other person, without so much as pausing to locate their inhaler, produces the devastating sentence that explains the entire situation, establishes an impeccable boundary, destroys the villain and possibly wins an Emmy. Real life is generally less well scripted, and there’s biology to back that up.

When we are properly triggered, our calm reasoning brain is not operating at full capacity. The alarm system has taken over. The amygdala is having its moment. As I often put it, the crocodile is talking.

And yet that is precisely the moment when we often demand that we produce our wisest, most nuanced, emotionally intelligent response. Bit unfair on the crocodile, really.

This is where the pause matters.

The pause is not about suppressing the feeling. It is not about becoming endlessly calm, polite and reasonable. It certainly isn’t another opportunity to abandon yourself in order to make everyone else comfortable.

It is simply enough space to ask: Is this the right thing?

Sometimes that space is literally a few seconds. Sometimes it is stepping out of the room. Sometimes it is writing everything you want to say somewhere else before deciding what actually needs sending. Sometimes it is sleeping on something. Sometimes it is simply refusing to accept the nervous system’s insistence that if you do not sort this out in the next four minutes civilisation will collapse.

What the pause gives us back is choice.

I had a conversation recently where I found myself saying: how do we give ourselves the grace of literally one second to go, ‘I have a choice’?

I think that is much of what regulation is about.

Feeling trapped is profoundly dysregulating because trapped means no autonomy, no choice, no way out. Even very small acts of autonomy can begin to change that. You may not be able to change the situation immediately, but you can remind your nervous system that you are still in there. You still have some say.

And I think that is why all these different kinds of pause feel related to me. Leaving the room. Delaying the reply. Taking a proper break. Giving yourself a little distance from something before deciding what to do.

They are all versions of coming back to yourself.

They are acts of self-trust.

Instead of immediately servicing outwards in ‘What do they think? Do they understand? How do I make them understand? How do I fix this’, the pause gives us a moment to turn the attention back around.

What do I think? What do I need? What would support me here? How do I not abandon myself?

And importantly, the pause is a pause. It is not disappearing for six months and calling it emotional regulation. If it becomes avoidance, shutdown or procrastination, then we are talking about something else. A pause is a temporary space that allows us to come back into relationship with the decision.

Because very often, without that space, we go straight for what I think of as snacking behaviour: the thing that gives us the quickest hit of relief.

Send the message, post that comment, get straight into that argument. Prove the point and correct the injustice.

Do the thing that feels incredibly satisfying for approximately thirty seconds and considerably less satisfying at 3.17am.

The pause gives us the chance to check whether the thing that feels righteous in the moment is actually the thing that will support us in the longer run.

And sometimes, rather wonderfully, we discover that we don’t have to do anything at all.

There is something in this about conserving energy. So much of our energy can disappear into reacting, explaining, correcting, pursuing, replaying, defending. The pause can be an act of damage limitation, not only in terms of what we might do to a relationship or situation, but what we might do to ourselves.

Do I really want to spend tonight on this?

Does this person actually need to understand?

Will saying this help me?

Is there anything here that genuinely requires action?

The pause does not guarantee the answer will be no. Sometimes we pause, come back to ourselves and decide that yes, something absolutely does need saying. The difference is that we are now saying it from a place with a little more access to ourselves.

Which brings me back to something I said, apparently quite casually, during a coaching group:

‘The art of the pause is the art of living.’

I’m not entirely sure what I meant at the time.

But I think I might now.

Perhaps the art of the pause is really the art of resourcing ourselves. Moving from survival, where every alarm requires an immediate response, towards a life in which we can trust ourselves enough to stop for a moment and check.

I’ve got this. I don’t have to decide from here.

And sometimes that one tiny moment is enough to change what happens next. Worth a try I reckon. Worth taking a pause over, right?