I am a firm believer in space and pause – whether in work, in relationship, in friendship or anywhere in between. Pause is powerful. I’ve leaned on it for years without ever having a name for it.
And then I came across this in my Organizational Behavior class: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It’s credited to Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it in his book – Man’s Search for Meaning.
I’d been living by the idea. Seeing it written out plainly, in a classroom of all places.
What the space actually is
Something happens — a stimulus. Someone says something sharp in a meeting. A message shows up that ruins your afternoon. A plan falls apart at the last minute. And then there’s a response — what you say, what you do, the version of you that shows up next. That is so important.
Most of us live as if the stimulus and the response are welded together. Something happens, and the reaction just follows, automatic, like a reflex. No pause, no gap, no choice, just cause and effect.
The line is arguing something quieter and harder to believe: there’s a space in between. It’s small, sometimes barely a breath, but it’s real. And whatever you do with that space is where your actual freedom lives, not in controlling what happens to you, which you mostly can’t, but in what you do after.
Where I actually see this
I don’t think this is a lofty, once-in-a-lifetime idea. I think it shows up constantly, in small, unglamorous moments.
A colleague sends a message with an edge to it — maybe real, maybe just how they type when they’re stressed. The stimulus lands, and for a second there’s a hot, obvious response sitting right there, ready to go. The space is the half-second before you hit send on the reply, where you can still choose the version that actually helps the situation instead of the version that just discharges what you’re feeling.
A plan you worked hard on gets rejected, or reshaped by someone with more authority than insight. The stimulus is real. The frustration is not manufactured, its real. The space is what happens between feeling that frustration and deciding whether you respond with resentment that leaks into every meeting for the next few hours or days, or with the harder, more useful question: What does this feedback actually mean, and is there some value in it that I should use.
Even something as small as being interrupted mid-sentence has a space in it. You can bulldoze back in, or you can let the half-second pass and decide, deliberately, whether it’s worth reclaiming the floor.
None of these are dramatic. That’s exactly why the space is so easy to lose. Dramatic moments make us careful. It’s the small, constant ones — the message, the interruption, the offhand comment — where we’re least likely to notice we had a choice at all.
Why the space closes
The space isn’t always there in equal measure. It shrinks under exhaustion, under repeated provocation, under real fear. That’s not a moral failing — it’s just true. Frankl’s actual life is the extreme proof of this: he was writing from inside circumstances designed specifically to close that space entirely, to reduce a person to pure reaction. That he found any space left at all, under those conditions, is the whole reason the idea carries weight decades later.
Most of us will never face anything close to that. Which is exactly why it’s worth taking his words seriously – because if the space can survive that, it can certainly survive a difficult email or a difficult reaction.
What actually widens it
I don’t think the space gets bigger through willpower alone. Being conscious in that moment helps. Being self-aware helps. A few things seem to genuinely help:
- Naming what you’re feeling before you act on it. Even silently. “I’m angry right now” creates a half-second of distance that “I am my anger” doesn’t.
- Physically pausing. Stepping away from the screen or the room for a minute. The space is easier to find when you’re not staring directly at the thing that triggered it.
- Asking what response you’ll respect later. Not what feels justified right now, but what you’ll be glad you did once the heat is gone. Just asking that question to yourself helps a lot.
I don’t think this line is really about big, philosophical freedom. I think it’s about the ordinary kind, the freedom to not let every stimulus write your response for you. Most days, nobody around you will ever know that space existed. They’ll just see what you did with it. Its up to you to find that space.
That’s probably the most honest measure of who someone actually is — not what happens to them, which they rarely control, but what they do in that small, quiet space right after. So – Pause, and find your freedom.