The inbox fills up. The schedule, already tight during summer, now grinds to a halt. September is the moment when workload comes rushing back for a lot of organisations.

According to Ashwin Taneja, body language expert and founder of Body Signals Academy, workload is one of the signals people voice relatively late. “Ask someone ‘how's it going’ and most people automatically answer ‘good, busy but good’. That's not a lie, it's a social habit. The body tends to show tension before the words do.”

For an individual employee, that's a matter of having a timely conversation. For an organisation, it's more than that. When workload builds up across several people at once, without anyone saying so out loud, small signals stack up into a team that's running on edge - while that's still invisible from the outside. By the time someone burns out or makes a mistake, the underlying tension has usually been building for weeks already, for that person and possibly for the colleagues around them too.

Self-Soothing Behaviour: What Rising Tension Looks Like Physically

Behavioural scientists have a name for it: self-soothing behaviour. Small, automatic movements the body uses to calm itself, often before someone is even aware of it themselves. It can show up when someone:

  • regularly rubs the back of their neck
  • repeatedly plays with a pen, ring, watch or necklace
  • licks their lips, or presses them together more often and more firmly
  • rubs their own arm or wrist
  • wrings or clasps their hands during a conversation

“The more often and more intensely those movements occur, the higher the underlying tension,” Taneja explains. “The behaviour itself is usually so small and automatically driven that someone is barely aware of it.”

The Difference Between Incidental and Building Up

Not every signal points to a problem. Taneja offers a few things to look out for to tell the difference:

  • Context. Someone who's just had a difficult conversation can reasonably show more tension. Behaviour that's structurally present, regardless of the situation, is a different matter.
  • A change in behaviour. It's not the behaviour itself but the deviation from someone's normal self that's most meaningful. A sudden shift - someone who's normally relaxed and suddenly comes across as closed off - says more than behaviour that was already there to begin with.
  • Clusters of signals. One isolated signal proves little. Only when several signals appear in succession or together - say, a closed posture, shorter eye contact and self-soothing within the same minute - does the picture become more reliable. Interpreting isolated signals on their own leads to wrong conclusions faster than looking at the pattern as a whole.

Why Paying Attention to This Pays Off

A conversation about workload usually happens only after someone has burned out, made a mistake, or raised it themselves. By that point, the tension has usually already been there for a long time. Watching for physical signals lets you start a conversation earlier - as a check-in, rather than as a reaction to a problem that's already happened.

At an organisational level, that makes a real difference at moments when pressure is already running high somewhere. A team that has to be back at full capacity in September within a short space of time benefits from managers who recognise tension early, before it turns into sick leave, mistakes or delayed decision-making.

How to Put This Into Practice

Taneja advises using these signals as a prompt for a conversation, not as grounds for a judgement in themselves:

  • Gather a pattern first, not an incident. One moment tells you little. Several signals over several days give a clearer picture.
  • Open with an observation, not a conclusion. “I've noticed our team has seemed pretty overloaded lately, how does that feel for you?” invites a different kind of answer than a direct question about workload.
  • Ask what's weighing most heavily, specifically. That makes it easier to look together at whether something can shift in the planning or division of tasks.

Looking Before the Conversation

September is the moment when workload builds up quickly for a lot of organisations. Anyone who recognises the signals of self-soothing behaviour can start a conversation before someone raises the alarm themselves or gets stuck - and in doing so, prevents small signals in several employees at once from going unnoticed.