You’ve been under so much pressure that you’re getting through the day by concentrating on whatever is directly in front of you. By the time you join the project meeting, you’re already mentally spent and hoping the conversation stays simple enough to finish without opening up another problem.

Then Luke from marketing asks whether the submit button should be red instead of blue, even though you thought the team settled that last week. Before he’s finished explaining why he’s asking, the thought is already there: Seriously? We’re doing this again? What might have sounded like a basic question on another day now sounds like resistance.

On a less stressful day, the same question might lead somewhere else in your mind. You might wonder whether Luke heard something after the last meeting, whether testing uncovered an issue, or whether he simply forgot what the group decided. You wouldn’t necessarily work through each possibility consciously, but you’d have room to recognize that there could be more going on than you know.

That room is critical because empathy depends on it. When you can still consider that Luke has information, concerns, pressures, and experiences you don’t know about, his question doesn’t automatically become something he’s doing to you. Under stress, those other possibilities become much harder to see, and the explanation closest to your own frustration can start to feel like the only one that makes sense.

Highly sensitive leaders often tell me they’re good at reading a room. They notice when someone’s expression shifts during a presentation, when a response comes a beat later than usual, or when the mood changes after a particular comment. That awareness can be incredibly useful, especially when much of what happens between people is communicated without being said outright.

But seeing something accurately and understanding what it means are two different things. Suppose you’re presenting a recommendation and your boss squints slightly while looking at one of your slides. You may have seen the expression perfectly, but the moment you think, She doesn’t agree with me, you’ve moved from observation into interpretation.

She might disagree with you. She might also be concentrating on one of the numbers, remembering something she meant to ask, or thinking about the argument she had with her teenager before work. Her expression gives you information, but it can’t tell you which explanation is true.

When you aren’t under much stress, that uncertainty is easier to tolerate. You can notice that something changed without immediately making it about you, because empathy still leaves room for the fact that another person has an entire experience happening on the other side of the table and most of that experience is invisible to you.

Stress changes the balance. You may still notice every shift in tone or expression, but you have less room to consider what might be happening beyond your own immediate experience. Instead of wondering what your boss is thinking, you find yourself thinking, She hates this, and reacting before you’ve learned anything more.

That doesn’t mean your sensitivity has stopped serving you. It means perception can give you the signal without giving you the explanation.

This distinction is important because many highly sensitive leaders have years of evidence that they notice things other people miss. They’ve learned to pay attention to pauses, facial expressions, changes in tone, and subtle differences in behavior, so when something feels different, they often trust that instinct.

The problem comes when confidence in what you noticed gets transferred to your explanation for it.

Imagine that Priya usually gives detailed answers to your questions, but today she responds with a few words and stops. You accurately noticed that her response was shorter than usual. If you decide that she’s annoyed with you, however, you’ve added information that wasn’t actually present in what she said.

On a day when you have more room to think, you’re more likely to leave that question open for a while. Priya could be irritated, but she could also be late for another meeting, worried about something unrelated to work, or simply answering the question as directly as she can. Her shorter response doesn’t tell you which explanation belongs to it.

Empathy helps you remain aware that Priya has an experience of her own that you don’t yet understand. It doesn’t require you to invent the kindest explanation for her behavior, because doing that would still be guessing. Telling yourself, She must just be tired, isn’t necessarily more accurate than deciding she’s upset with you.

A better place to be is, I noticed something different, and I don’t know yet what it means. That can be uncomfortable when you’re used to trusting your read of people, but it gives you a much better chance of responding to what’s actually happening instead of responding to an assumption.

Under stress, staying in that uncertainty becomes harder. Your mind is already trying to get through too much, so holding several possible explanations at once takes effort you may not have available. One interpretation rises quickly, and because there aren’t many alternatives competing with it, that interpretation can feel far more certain than the evidence warrants.

You can notice the right thing and still get the meaning wrong.

Stress doesn’t only affect how you feel. It also changes the conditions under which you’re trying to understand everything happening around you.

In Energy Reset for Leaders, I use the T.E.M.P.R. framework to help people notice five areas that tend to change as stress rises: tolerance, emotional state, mental state, physical signs, and reactivity. As pressure builds, delays and mistakes can become more irritating, thoughts can race or get foggy, the body can show signs of strain, and reactions can come faster than usual.

Those changes don’t sit in the background while you continue interpreting everyone around you in exactly the same way. They become part of how you make sense of what you see.

Imagine asking someone on your team a difficult question during a meeting and watching them sit silently for several seconds before answering. When you’re doing well, the pause may simply look like thoughtfulness. You asked a difficult question, so they’re taking a moment to think.

When your patience is already gone, those same few seconds can feel completely different. Instead of seeing someone thinking, you start wondering why they don’t have an answer ready, why this is taking so long, or why they weren’t better prepared. Their pause hasn’t changed, but several reasonable explanations for it have dropped out of view.

The same thing happens with mistakes. When you have more room to think, you may wonder what happened before deciding what the mistake says about the person who made it. Under enough stress, “careless” can arrive almost instantly because another problem feels intolerable and you want a reason for why it happened.

This is why I don’t think stress simply fills in missing information for you. It does something more fundamental first. It removes perspectives that you might otherwise have considered, leaving fewer explanations available when you try to understand what another person is doing.

Once only one explanation remains, it stops feeling like an interpretation and starts feeling like fact.

Stress can remove perspectives that you might otherwise have considered.

Go back to Luke and the submit button. If you’ve decided he’s resisting a choice that was already settled, you won’t answer him as though he’s simply asking a question. You might say, “We already went over this last week,” with enough irritation that he hears what sits underneath the words: Why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Luke reacts because he wasn’t trying to restart an old debate. The analytics team found a problem with the blue button during testing and asked marketing to raise it before launch. By the time he explains that, the conversation already feels tense because you responded to resistance that wasn’t there.

Now Luke looks irritated, which makes your original interpretation seem even more convincing. You thought he was being difficult, and now you can see frustration on his face. What’s easy to miss is that his frustration may be a response to the way you treated him after deciding what his question meant.

That’s how a mistaken interpretation can begin creating evidence for itself.

There’s nothing especially selfish or uncaring about this. When stress is using most of your attention, your own experience becomes much louder because it’s the experience you’re trying to get through.

You need the meeting to end because your next obligation is waiting. You don’t want another change because you’re already struggling to finish what’s on your plate. You don’t want to revisit a discussion because you thought that part of the work was done, and you don’t have much left for doing it again.

From that position, other people’s behavior starts getting translated through what it means for you. Luke’s question means more work. A colleague’s pause means waiting. Someone’s mistake means another problem that will take time you don’t have.

Empathy becomes difficult because empathy requires enough room to remember that another person’s experience exists alongside yours. When stress has taken up most of that room, the other person’s reasons, pressures, and concerns can become almost invisible even while you’re paying close attention to their behavior.

That doesn’t mean every generous interpretation is correct. Luke might be reopening the issue because he still wants the red button. Priya might actually be irritated. Your boss may dislike the recommendation you’re presenting.

Empathy isn’t about talking yourself out of those possibilities. It allows you to hold them as possibilities rather than conclusions until you know more.

That difference protects you from another problem I’ve seen with highly sensitive leaders. When they’re usually good at picking up on interpersonal cues, getting a read wrong can make them question whether they should trust themselves at all. But the lesson isn’t that they failed to see what happened.

They may have seen the signal exactly as it was. What stress took away were some of the other ways they might have understood it.

Once you’ve reached a conclusion about someone, trying to force yourself into a nicer interpretation doesn’t help much. You’re still making up an explanation for information you don’t have.

Curiosity changes the situation because it gets you information.

When Luke asks about changing the button, you could defend the previous choice, remind him that everyone agreed, and explain why the design shouldn’t change this late in the process. All of that makes sense if you’ve already decided he’s reopening the debate.

Or you could ask, “What changed since last week?”

That question doesn’t concede anything. It doesn’t promise that the team will change the button, and it doesn’t assume that Luke has a good reason for asking. It simply creates a chance to learn why the question is being asked before you respond to it.

Luke may tell you about the testing issue. He may admit that nothing changed and he simply forgot what the group decided. He may even tell you that he still disagrees and wanted to make his case one more time.

Any of those answers gives you something more useful than an assumption.

Curiosity works because it separates what you saw from what you decided it meant. If someone pauses after you ask a question, you can give them a few seconds before concluding they’re disengaged. If your boss’s expression changes during a presentation, you can finish what you’re saying before deciding she rejects the idea.

Sometimes your first read will turn out to be exactly right. The value of curiosity isn’t that it proves your instincts wrong; it’s that it lets the evidence catch up with them before you act.

Your own stress level belongs in that calculation too. If ordinary delays are making you furious, every question sounds like pushback, or you’re desperate to end a conversation before the other person has finished explaining, that information matters when you decide how much confidence to put in your first interpretation.

It doesn’t prove that your interpretation is wrong. It does give you a reason to ask for more information before settling on it.

You might think, I could be right about this, but I’m stressed enough that I want to check.

That pause can change the entire conversation because you haven’t committed yourself to a story yet. You still have room to find out what’s happening on the other side.

I’m drawn to adrenaline, whether it’s NASCAR, skydiving, or parasailing, partly because speed and intensity can be exhilarating when you choose them. But some of the moments I remember most are the ones when everything seems to slow for a beat and I can take in where I am before the rush starts again.

Work has those moments too. Sometimes the brief pause between what you notice and what you decide is where empathy has a chance to shine.