We have a lot of labels for people whose behaviour we find difficult.

Drama queen. Attention seeker. Martyr. Complainer. Control freak. Too sensitive. Argumentative. Difficult.

As humans, we love a good label.

Our brains love patterns. Predictability is one of the ways our nervous systems create a sense of safety, and when we’ve seen someone behave a certain way often enough, the label can start to feel like an explanation.

Of course she cried when she got that feedback. She’s too sensitive.

No surprise he’s arguing about this. What did you expect from someone so difficult?

Obviously she’s checking in on the project again. She’s a micromanager.

The behaviour becomes evidence of the label, and the label becomes the explanation for the behaviour. Around and around we go.

But here’s the trap we can get caught in: a label might describe what we see, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what we’re dealing with.

One of the biggest shifts that happens when we begin to understand the nervous system is realizing just how much of what we call “personality” may actually be protective responses.

Fight and Flight Don’t Always Look the Way We Think They Do

Most of us have heard the words fight and flight so many times that they feel self-explanatory.

If something big, bad, and scary happens, we either fight it or run away from it. Right?

Except that’s not how these protective responses show up in most of our everyday lives.

Our nervous systems aren’t only responding to physical danger. They’re constantly scanning our internal and external environments and assessing whether we have the resources and capacity to navigate what’s being asked of us.

The modern workplace rarely requires us to outrun a physical predator, but the protective biology we evolved with is still very much along for the ride.

A passive-aggressive email, an unexpected restructuring announcement, tension with a manager, uncertainty about job security, or a mountain of unread messages can all activate protective systems designed to help us respond to perceived threat.

The response, however, may be far less obvious than we expect.

What Fight Can Look Like at Work

Fight doesn’t always look like aggression or someone flipping a table.

Sometimes it looks like arguing over something that seems insignificant. It can show up as becoming defensive the moment feedback is offered, correcting everyone, blaming, gossiping, or trying to control every detail of a project because letting go of any piece of it feels impossible.

It might look like the person who becomes combative every time their idea is questioned. The leader who needs to know where everyone is and what they’re doing at every moment. The colleague who seems to turn every disagreement into a battle they need to win.

From the outside, these behaviours can easily become personality descriptions.

They’re argumentative.

They’re controlling.

They’re impossible to work with.

But a nervous system lens invites us to look beyond the behaviour itself and become curious about what may be happening underneath it.

What Flight Can Look Like at Work

Flight doesn’t always look like running out of the room either.

It can look like overworking, overexplaining, talking quickly and filling every moment of silence, avoiding a conversation you know you need to have, or jumping between six different tasks because slowing down enough to focus on one feels uncomfortable.

It can look like saying yes to another project when you’re already overwhelmed because disappointing someone feels more threatening than adding another thing to your plate.

It can look like constant motion, relentless productivity, or a calendar with no room to breathe.

Sometimes the person who looks incredibly productive is running too.

In Labels, We Lose Context

We do something similar with other protective responses.

We call someone disengaged when their system has moved toward shutdown. We call them indecisive when they can’t access clear thinking under pressure. We call them a people pleaser when they’ve learned that staying connected and keeping other people happy is the safest strategy available to them.

We call someone an attention seeker when their bids for connection become louder because the quieter ones haven’t worked. We call them a drama queen when their system moves into activation more quickly or takes longer to settle afterward.

A necessary caveat: none of this means we can look at a behaviour and confidently announce which nervous system state is behind it.

Human beings are far more complicated than that.

Crying isn’t always a nervous system response. Gossip doesn’t automatically mean fight. Working long hours doesn’t necessarily mean someone is in flight. The same outward behaviour can have many different roots.

The point isn’t to replace one set of labels with another.

It’s to recognize that behaviour has context.

This may sound obvious, but we don’t always act as though it’s true when push comes to shove.

We love explanations that make people predictable.

They’re just like that.

He’s always been difficult.

That’s her personality.

They’re a control freak.

Once we decide who someone is, we stop having to wonder what’s happening.

But we also stop seeing anything else.

The Stories We Tell About People Shape How We Treat Them

The stories we tell ourselves about someone’s behaviour shape the way we show up and interact with them.

If I think my colleague is an attention seeker, I may start withholding attention because I don’t want to reward the behaviour.

If I decide someone is too sensitive, I may become more abrupt with them, dismiss their reactions, or stop giving them meaningful feedback altogether.

If I believe someone is controlling, I may stop communicating proactively because I resent having to account for myself.

If I believe someone is argumentative, I’m already bracing before I’ve even walked into the meeting.

And, of course, other nervous systems notice when we brace.

This is where workplace dynamics get especially interesting, because we’re rarely looking at one person’s nervous system in isolation.

We all have “difficult” people in our lives. And, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, each of us is also a difficult person for someone else.

One person’s urgency can contribute to another person’s shutdown. One person’s need for control can create another person’s resistance. One person’s defensiveness can make someone else communicate more cautiously, which can then be interpreted as dishonesty or withholding, creating even more defensiveness.

One person’s anxiety can increase another person’s anxiety.

Before long, we’re talking about two difficult personalities when we may also be looking at a relationship between two protective systems that keep activating each other.

Nervous System Awareness Gives Us a New Lens

Bringing nervous system awareness into the workplace gives us more places to look.

It doesn’t ask us to excuse harmful behaviour or pretend impact doesn’t matter. Accountability is still accountability. Boundaries are still boundaries. Sometimes behaviour causes harm or discord and needs to change.

But understanding gives us more options than judgment does.

When we stop asking only, “What’s wrong with this person?” we can start asking better questions.

What happens right before this behaviour appears?

When does it become more intense?

When does it soften?

What conditions help this person access more flexibility?

What might they be protecting?

And perhaps one of the most important questions of all: What happens in me when I’m around this behaviour?

Because we’re all in this system together.

The person we’re calling difficult has a nervous system. So does the person sitting across from them. So does the leader trying to navigate the conflict. So does the HR professional trying to help.

So do I. And so do you.

Psychological Safety Starts Beneath the Behaviour

This is why psychological safety is about so much more than encouraging people to speak up.

Our ability to communicate, collaborate, receive feedback, navigate disagreement, take interpersonal risks, and trust one another is deeply connected to what our nervous systems are experiencing in the environments we create together.

Fight and flight aren’t rare emergency states that appear only in dramatic moments. They’re part of the protective wiring we all carry with us into our workplaces every day.

When we learn to recognize their quieter, more ordinary expressions, we may find ourselves seeing some familiar behaviours very differently.

The goal isn’t to become better at labelling people or ourselves.

It’s to become more curious about what behaviour is trying to tell us.

The more I learn about human behaviour, the less interested I become in deciding who people are based on what they do in their hardest moments.

We’re all more complex than our most protective patterns.

And sometimes, a new lens doesn’t just change what we see in other people.

It changes the stories we’ve been telling about ourselves, too.

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