Do you know that feeling you get when you see a 15-minute meeting with your boss pop up on your calendar at the end of the day with the headline “Quick Chat”? The one that causes your stomach to drop, your heart to race, and your mind to spin with only two little words?
You open the email, desperately searching for context about the meeting. You scroll through your inbox to see if you did something to provoke this meeting. Nothing. You look through your chats for any clues you may have missed. Still nothing.
You start asking yourself questions like:
What did I do wrong? Who did I piss off now? Did I make a mistake? Was my tone in the meeting too sharp? Am I going to lose my job?
You start replaying every conversation with your boss in your mind, looking for even the slightest hint of displeasure, fatigue, disappointment, or anything in your manager that might provide a clue. But still...nothing.
Your mind is running a million potential scenarios, some of which have happened in the past and some of which are worst-case scenarios that you are simply imagining. It doesn’t matter if this was a brilliantly successful day up until this point. Your nervous system is on high alert.
And here’s the part that makes this situation complicated: in the past, I was blindsided by a restructuring I didn’t see coming, and I actually lost my job. I’ve attended meetings like that before where I found out I was being demoted because of a leadership-team restructuring. I’ve attended meetings where I learned that a beloved manager had decided to leave the company.
I was unprepared, and I was devastated.
So when another “Quick Chat” appears on the calendar, my nervous system isn’t responding to something it invented. It remembers. It remembers that sometimes the meeting really does change things. Sometimes the thing we’re afraid is going to happen actually happens.
And when we’ve experienced trauma, those moments can become more than unpleasant memories. They can become evidence our nervous system uses the next time something feels even remotely familiar. The message becomes: Pay attention. Something might be wrong.
That constant watching, scanning, anticipating, and preparing for what might happen next has a name: hypervigilance.
What Happens When Our Nervous System Has Receipts?
Hypervigilance isn’t stupidity. It isn’t our nervous system randomly manufacturing ridiculous scenarios. It’s pattern recognition.
The difficulty is that a system designed to protect us can become so sensitive to patterns associated with previous danger that possibility starts to feel like probability.
A 15-minute meeting could mean restructuring. A change in someone’s tone could mean they’re unhappy with us. A terse email could indicate a problem. A certain look could mean trouble.
But could isn’t the same thing as is.
The problem is that our nervous system may have evidence to support those possibilities. We may have been fired before. Demoted. Blindsided by a restructuring. Bullied by a manager. Publicly embarrassed in a meeting. Given feedback we weren’t expecting. Or watched a workplace that once felt safe change almost overnight.
Those experiences become the receipts.
Our nervous system remembers what happened right before things went wrong. It remembers the facial expression, the change in tone, the unexpected meeting, or the subtle shift in someone’s behavior. It learns which signals might mean we need to prepare ourselves, and when something in the present resembles something from the past, it takes notice.
And if we grew up in environments where noticing subtle changes in the people around us helped us anticipate what might happen next, we may have been practicing this kind of pattern recognition long before we ever entered the workplace.
That’s why simply telling ourselves, “There’s nothing to worry about,” may not be helpful. Sometimes there is something to worry about, and sometimes our nervous system has very good reasons for paying attention.
The goal is to develop enough awareness that we can ask a different question:
Is something happening right now, or is my nervous system responding to something it recognizes from before?
Sometimes the answer may be both.
That’s where we can begin to change our relationship with hypervigilance. Not by shaming ourselves for noticing potential danger or telling ourselves we’re overreacting, but by learning to recognize the pattern, understand where it comes from, and create more choice around what we do next.
The Hidden Cost of Hypervigilance at Work
One of the most complicated things about hypervigilance at work is that it doesn’t always look like a problem. Sometimes it looks like being prepared, highly observant, reading the room, anticipating problems before they happen, noticing subtle changes other people miss, thinking three steps ahead, or double-checking our work.
Some of these behaviors may have even helped us become successful. But when they are being driven by a need to constantly watch for what might go wrong, they can require more from us than we realize.
The Physical Cost: What Constant Vigilance Takes From Us
Hypervigilance doesn’t just happen in our thoughts. Our bodies are involved, too. Think back to that “Quick Chat” invitation. Nothing has actually happened yet, but our stomach may drop, our heart may start racing, our muscles may tense, and our breathing may change. We might feel restless, shaky, nauseated, or suddenly unable to concentrate on the work sitting right in front of us.
Our body is preparing us to deal with a potential threat before we even know whether a threat exists, and that response requires energy.
Now imagine that the “Quick Chat” isn’t the only thing our nervous system is monitoring during the day. We may also be watching our manager’s mood, analyzing a coworker’s tone, thinking about whether we said too much in a meeting, checking for changes in how people are interacting with us, worrying about an unanswered email, or preparing ourselves for the next thing that might go wrong.
By the time the workday ends, we may be exhausted even though it’s difficult to point to exactly what made the day so exhausting. We worked. We attended meetings. We answered emails. We did all the things we normally do. But underneath all of that activity, our nervous system may have been doing another job entirely: trying to keep us safe.
And sometimes that job doesn’t end when the workday does. We may replay conversations on the drive home, think about an email while making dinner, wake up during the night thinking about something that happened at work, or start preparing ourselves for tomorrow before today is even over.
That’s part of the physical cost of hypervigilance.
Our bodies can spend enormous amounts of energy preparing us to respond to things that haven’t happened yet.
But there is another cost that may be even easier to overlook.
The Opportunity Cost: What That Capacity Could Be Doing Instead
Every bit of capacity we use monitoring for potential threats is capacity that isn’t available for something else. When we spend an afternoon analyzing why our boss scheduled a 15-minute “Quick Chat,” we aren’t only experiencing stress. Our attention has been redirected. We may be physically sitting at our desk, but part of our cognitive capacity is now occupied with figuring out what might happen next.
And that raises a question I think is worth asking:
What might become possible if we didn’t have to spend so much of our capacity on threat detection?
What if some of that capacity became available for creativity, strategic thinking, building relationships, learning new skills, solving complex problems, and taking thoughtful risks? What if we had more capacity to speak up in meetings, advocate for ourselves, pursue opportunities, or prepare for the promotion instead of preparing for the possibility of losing our job?
What if we had more space to think about what we actually wanted from our careers instead of devoting so much energy to protecting ourselves from what might happen to them?
For those of us with CPTSD, career advancement may not only be about adding more skills, more certifications, more productivity, or more effort. It may also be about reclaiming capacity. When so much of our energy is devoted to protecting what we have, there may be less available to imagine, pursue, and build what could come next.
The goal isn’t to stop noticing potential problems or to convince ourselves that nothing bad will ever happen at work. Sometimes our instincts will be right. Sometimes there will be a difficult conversation, a restructuring, a disappointed manager, or an unexpected change.
The goal is to develop enough awareness that we can recognize when our nervous system has sounded the alarm, understand what may be driving that response, determine what is actually happening in the present, and create more choice around what we do next.
Because the goal isn’t to stop our nervous system from protecting us. It’s to help it learn that protection doesn’t always have to require all of our capacity.
Moving From Threat Detection to Choice
So what do we do when the “Quick Chat” appears on our calendar and we feel that familiar drop in our stomach?
The goal isn’t necessarily to make the reaction disappear. We may not be able to prevent that first surge of fear, especially when our nervous system has learned from experiences that actually happened.
What we can begin to change is what happens next.
This is part of why I developed the 5 R Framework: Recognize the Pattern, Root Out the Cause, Rebuild the Response, Rehearse It Live, and Reinforce for Good.
The framework helps us create space between what happened, what our nervous system remembers, and how we choose to respond.
We can learn to recognize when an old pattern has been activated and begin to root out what may be underneath it. From there, we can work on rebuilding a response that reflects what is happening in the present, rehearsing that response in the situations where we actually need it, and reinforcing what we’re learning so we aren’t starting from scratch every time our nervous system sounds the alarm.
This isn’t about convincing ourselves that the “Quick Chat” is definitely harmless. We don’t know that.
It’s about getting to a place where we can notice the meeting invitation, acknowledge the alarm going off inside us, and resist allowing everything that has happened before to determine what we believe is happening now.
Because resilience isn’t never feeling the stomach drop.
It’s developing more choice about what happens after it does.
Want Support Putting This Into Practice?
Understanding the pattern is an important first step. Learning how to recognize it when it’s happening, understand what’s underneath it, and practice a different response in the moments that matter takes time.
That’s the kind of work we do inside the Resilient Career Academy (RCA).
The RCA is a community for professionals navigating the ways trauma and CPTSD can show up at work. Through tools, conversations, Q&As, workshops, and other resources, we explore how these patterns affect our careers and practice building the awareness, regulation, communication, boundaries, and resilience that can help us navigate work differently.
If this article helped you recognize something you’ve been experiencing at work, and you’re ready to go beyond understanding the pattern, I’d love to welcome you inside.
When the Pattern Is Personal
Sometimes understanding the pattern isn’t enough because the situation we’re navigating is specific to us.
It may involve a difficult relationship with a manager, a workplace that doesn’t feel safe, a career decision we’re struggling to make, a pattern that keeps showing up, or a response we understand intellectually but still have difficulty changing when we’re in the moment.
That’s where individualized support can be helpful.
Through 1:1 career coaching, we can look at what’s happening in your specific situation, identify the patterns that may be affecting how you’re navigating it, and work together to develop responses that support both where you are and where you want to go in your career.
If you’re looking for support that is tailored to you, your workplace, and your career, you can learn more about working with me below.