I sat down with Dr. Jane Bormeister to talk about what happens to us under pressure.
Jane is a speech scientist. I teach Food as Medicine.
On paper, these are two different subjects and people usually assume they meet somewhere vague, in the general neighborhood of “wellbeing.”
They meet at lunch, and you can feel it by 3pm.
About ten minutes into the conversation, I asked Jane about the things we know we want to say but don’t:
Where does the voice go? People know what they want to say. But under pressure, it doesn’t come out. Where does it go?
Not to Nirvana, apparently. It’s blocked.
What Jane hears in an exhausted person
First, she describes the moment it starts.
Different pressure shows up in different segments of the body.
A tense jaw, a tight neck, shoulders that crept up toward the ears.
A pinched, higher pitch. Sometimes the frog in the throat.
And sometimes the opposite: you push it down until you’re speaking in a low monotone.
Every person leaks pressure differently.
But something leaks, every time, and the people closest to you can hear it in your first sentence.
Second: tone cannot tell you whether she’s under pressure because we each have a temperament, a natural speed, a way of being that’s ours.
I talk fast because I’m Savitree.
I also talk fast when I’m under pressure.
The two are not the same, and they don’t feel the same from the inside,
but from the outside they can look identical.
Which means fast talkers have a particular problem.
We use speed as a personality. It’s also the first symptom.
“Speak only when you know what you’re talking about”
Jane named a rule most of us absorbed without ever agreeing to it:
we speak when we know it.
When we don’t know it, we think first, and then we speak it out.
But that isn’t how speaking works, Jane said.
We aren’t actors with a text. Most of us are improvising.
We create our speech and think while speaking.
You don’t know how you’ll finish the sentence until you’re in it.
So the cultural rule sets an impossible condition, and here’s what that does under pressure:
The bigger the pressure, the longer the distance between the brain and the mouth.
You stand there waiting for enlightenment while the room waits with you.
The thing you were going to say gets further away the harder you reach for it.
Speaking begins before you open your mouth
She said speaking starts long before we open our mouths.
That’s essentially my whole work, in her sentence.
The pause you take at lunch doesn’t make you a better speaker in some loose, poetic sense.
It does something specific and physiological.
It gives your nervous system one honest signal in the middle of a demanding day: that it’s not under siege.
From there the breath deepens.
From there you have access to the things you know how to do.
Jane calls the missing piece the window between action and reaction.
Under pressure that window looks like nothing.
A speaker drinks a glass of water on stage and everyone thinks she’s thirsty. She isn’t.
She’s buying herself two seconds to breathe, and to widen the window back to where she can choose.
You don’t need a stage to need that window.
A conversation with your partner.
A meeting where you have to say the hard thing.
A call you’ve been putting off for a week.
Any moment where someone else is in the room and you’re no longer fully in control of the pace.
Comfort is not the compass
This is my favorite exchange, and it might be the most useful thing in the whole hour for someone who’s been told to just be themselves.
Jane described a woman in a workshop who was struggling in Zoom meetings, coming across flat and bored.
They experimented with changing only her subtext. Not her words, not her voice, just the thought underneath: it’s so interesting, guys, what I’m talking about.
Everything shifted. Her delivery, her energy, the room.
And she said it felt strange. Not like her.
Then she asked her audience, and every single person said that was the version they wanted to hear.
So we can’t just say, “I want to be authentic,” and stop there.
There’s a real gap between how you feel from the inside and how you land with someone else, and it’s worth knowing about.
We have different voices with our friends, our bosses, our siblings.
The one that feels most familiar isn’t automatically the one that reaches the room.
Jane’s word for the way through it was play.
Be a little more playful with yourself and your audience.
Notice we don’t ask children whether they feel authentic before they speak.
They just do it, and we feel them.
And this was the part I needed to hear.
Sometimes you have to speak against your immediate feeling,
not to fake anything,
but to get yourself into a state where the real thing can come out.
What I’d have you do this week
I’d rather this conversation do something more than just be interesting.
So here’s the smallest version I see, in this order.
Days 1 through 7: have one warm lunch. Pick the time now, and don’t renegotiate it tomorrow.
Warm food, sitting down, screen off, at least 15 minutes.
Not at your desk. Not in the car.
This is less about what you eat than it is about the fact that you stopped.
That’s the whole point of it.
If it’s cold and you ate it walking, it didn’t happen.
Then, once a day: act on one thing from Jane. Pick one:
Before you say something that matters,
Exhale before your first word, so you arrive before you speak.
Or pause before your next sentence and let the silence do its work.
Or when you feel the pressure rising mid-conversation, reach for a glass of water.
Everyone will assume you’re thirsty. You’re widening the window.
If you want more than a week
Jane and I built the 21-Day Eating & Speaking Challenge out of this.
This is the structure we both needed and couldn’t find:
21 days, one unchanged anchor and one daily focus.
The warm sit-down lunch is the constant.
Every day adds a single prompt that makes the connection between your body and your voice visible: the pause, the pace, the breath, the softening words, the day you stop apologizing for taking space at your own table.
It’s $47. That’s deliberately small, because the whole premise is that you don’t need to change everything. You just need one thing to hold.
If you want it: 21-Day Eating & Speaking Challenge
And if a week of warm lunches tells you something you didn’t expect, please tell us.
That’s how the next conversation gets built.
Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.
— Savitree
