How to Stop Reacting and Start Responding

You ever get an email that makes you want to immediately scream and reply “f*** you” out loud?

The one that hits your chest before it hits your brain. You read it once, twice, three times, and each time the temperature goes up. You can feel your jaw clench. You can feel your fingers wanting to type something fast and sharp just to get that energy out.

I’ve got a client in the middle of a heated negotiation with their board right now. They’re going through a sale process and everyone is fighting for every dollar. One particularly sharp (obnoxious?) and pointed email came through and my client’s reaction was pure anger and a desire to snap right back.

The disagreement and intense negotiations aren’t the hard part. This is the big leagues. It’s part of the job. The hard part is what happens inside your body the moment you feel accused or cornered. Your pulse jumps. Your breath shortens. You feel misunderstood, or disrespected, or just plain done with the whole thing. And everything in you wants to react. That urge feels righteous. It feels like strength.

But it isn’t strength. It’s your lizard brain taking over.

The lizard brain sees threat, not context. Attack, not information. It is fast, dumb, and loud. Useful if a bear jumps out of the woods. Terrible when you’re negotiating with people who control your company’s future.

There’s research that backs this up. When you’re under stress, the part of your brain you actually need goes offline. Stress floods the prefrontal cortex and shuts down the place where judgment and planning live. Your thinking brain goes dark. Your survival brain runs the show.

That’s why the first draft of that angry reply always feels so good. And why sending it always feels so stupid an hour later.

Reacting feels like motion. Responding feels like leadership. There’s a reason for that.

I’ve seen this over and over with clients and in my own days as well. A hard challenge about strategy. A note from a board member that comes in hot. The moment the spike hits, the instinct is always the same. React. Fix it. Push back. Make it go away. Do something now.

But reacting almost never gets you the outcome you want.

Waiting, thinking, processing, and then responding isn’t soft. It’s controlled and strategic. It’s often the difference between a good CEO and a great CEO.

We used to preach the 24 hour rule. Sleep on it. Let the chemicals flush out. But that was 10 years ago. Today everything moves too fast. Waiting a whole day feels like ignoring the issue. So maybe it’s the 24 minute rule now. Long enough for your heart rate to drop, for your lizard brain to quiet down so your actual brain can come back online.

If you’re following along, you know there’s research behind this too. James Gross at Stanford has spent years studying cognitive reappraisal. Pausing long enough to reframe a situation reduces emotional reactivity and leads to better decisions. Viktor Frankl talked about the space between stimulus and response. That space is your actual power. And most CEOs blow right past it.

So what I coach my clients to do is simple. Put down the phone. Walk away from the keyboard. Breathe. Call your coach and vent! Acknowledge the feeling and give yourself time to let it wash through you. Then think. You’ll often find more information and clarity in the aftermath of the reaction.

Here’s the real point. You get hit all day. Investors. Employees. Markets. Board members who wake up with ideas. Every input feels like a demand for speed. But nobody pays you to be fast and wrong. They pay you to stay calm when everyone else is losing the script. They pay you to be right (and fast). They pay you to respond, not react.

Your reaction lasts ten seconds. A bad reaction can last ten weeks or longer.