A friend of mine once worked with someone who became quite a well-known prime minister in a European country. This person had a habit: rigorously, between every meeting, he would return briefly to his desk for just two minutes. My friend didn’t understand why. When he finally asked, the answer was simple. He said he was resetting himself — moving cleanly from one meeting to the next.

At the time it looked like a quirk. With what we now know about the nervous system, it looks like one of the smartest things a leader can do.

Most leaders don’t move between meetings. They leak between them. The unresolved tension from a difficult conversation, the half-finished decision, the email glanced at in the corridor — all of it is carried, uninvited, into the next room.

The body doesn’t reset on its own just because the calendar says the next slot has begun. And the cost is rarely visible in the moment. It shows up as a sharper tone than intended, a decision made faster than it should have been, or a point missed entirely because attention was still three rooms back.

What the body is actually doing

In our work measuring leaders’ physiology, one signal tells this story more clearly than any other: heart rate variability, or HRV. HRV is the natural variation in the time between heartbeats, and it is a reliable window into the state of the autonomic nervous system — the system that governs whether we are in ‘threat’ mode or ‘recovery’ mode.

When HRV is healthy and responsive, the body is regulated. The thinking parts of the brain — the prefrontal cortex, responsible for judgement, perspective-taking and weighing options — have the resources they need.

When the nervous system tips into a stress state, HRV drops, and the brain quietly narrows. It becomes faster, more reactive, more binary. Useful if a tiger appears. Less useful when chairing a budget discussion or giving sensitive feedback.

Here is the part most leaders underestimate: a back-to-back day spent without any reset keeps the nervous system in a low-grade activated state for hours. You don’t notice it, because it becomes the baseline. But you are making your most important decisions of the day on a brain that has not been allowed to settle.

Why breathing is the fastest lever

The good news is that this state is not fixed. The nervous system can be shifted deliberately — and the quickest, most accessible lever is breath.

Breathing is the one autonomic function we can consciously control, and it works as a direct line into the rest of the system. Slow, extended exhalations activate the vagus nerve and signal safety to the body. The result, measurable within a minute or two, is a rise in HRV and a shift out of reactivity. The brain comes back online.

This is why a short practice between meetings is not indulgent. It is the difference between arriving regulated and arriving leaking.

The two-minute reset

Borrow the prime minister’s habit. Before your next meeting, take two minutes — at your desk, in the corridor, or in the thirty seconds before you join the call.

First, close the last meeting. Take one breath and acknowledge, silently, that the previous conversation is finished. Whatever is unresolved will still be there later; it does not need to travel with you.

Then, lengthen the exhale. For about a minute, breathe so the out-breath is noticeably longer than the in-breath — roughly a count of four in, six or seven out. You don’t need to count perfectly. The longer exhale is what does the work, prompting the nervous system to settle.

Finally, set one intention. Ask yourself a single question: what does this next meeting actually need from me? Presence? A decision? To listen? Naming it gives the freshly settled brain a clear direction.

That’s it. Two minutes, three steps, no equipment. Done consistently, it changes the texture of a day — not because each meeting becomes easier, but because you arrive at each one as yourself, rather than as the residue of the last one.

Leaders spend enormous energy preparing the content of their meetings: the agenda, the slides, the numbers. Almost none preparing the instrument that will deliver it — their own nervous system.

The prime minister understood, perhaps without the language for it, that the quality of his thinking depended on the state he was in when he walked into the room. Two minutes was his way of choosing that state, rather than inheriting it.

You can make the same choice. The next meeting can wait two minutes. Your brain will use them well.

Chris Tamdjidi is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Awaris, an international leadership development and cultural transformation company, and co-author of The Resilient Culture (Kogan Page)