Conflict’s Hidden Cost: Reflections on Stress, Sleep and the Human Price of Disputes

AAA article under review: Is Conflict Affecting your RAM and REM? How Stress Disrupts Executive Function and Sleep in Disputants

One of the strengths of the AAA Mediation Magazine is its willingness to engage with dimensions of conflict that practitioners see every day but do not always name directly. Dr. Clare Fowler’s article, “Is Conflict Affecting your RAM and REM? How Stress Disrupts Executive Function and Sleep in Disputants”, is an example of this. It takes a subject often treated as peripheral, the physiological and cognitive toll of dispute and moves it to the  centre of effective mediation practice.

The article’s core proposition is both simple and important. Conflict is not merely a legal, strategic, or relational event. It is also a neurological and bodily event. Sustained stress changes how people think, how they process risk, how they remember, how they regulate emotion, and how they sleep. In Dr. Fowler’s framing, prolonged conflict compromises executive function, meaning the brain’s capacity to plan, recall, regulate, prioritise, solve problems, and make long-term decisions. This, over time, disrupts restorative sleep, particularly REM sleep, which is essential for emotional processing and cognitive integration. The result is a feedback loop in which unresolved conflict depletes mental clarity, poor sleep deepens reactivity, and the decision-maker becomes even less able to engage constructively in resolution.

That insight will resonate with experienced mediators. We have all seen parties who are not merely angry, but exhausted; not merely positional, but mentally overburdened; not merely reluctant to decide, but genuinely unable to think with their usual clarity. A party forgets key facts, fixates on one perceived injustice, swings quickly between determination and despair, or reacts to an ordinary question as though it were an attack. Dr. Fowler’s contribution is to explain that these are not always signs of bad faith, poor preparation, or tactical obstruction. Often, they are signs of a nervous system under sustained strain.

The article is effective in the way it translates research into practice. The discussion on impaired working memory, reduced cognitive flexibility, diminished creativity, weakened emotional regulation, and heightened threat perception gives mediators a useful vocabulary for describing what they are already observing. So too does its discussion of sleep disruption. The suggestion that many disputants arrive in mediation not only legally or commercially stressed, but physiologically depleted, is a reminder that conflict resolution depends on human functioning at a far more basic level than we sometimes acknowledge.

The article is more than an interesting piece of conflict science. It has practical implications for process design. If stress narrows cognitive bandwidth, then mediators may need to slow pace, break issues into smaller parts, reduce unnecessary complexity, and create enough calm for parties to regain access to reflective thinking. If poor sleep is feeding emotional volatility, then what appears to be irrationality may in fact be depletion. In that sense, mediation is not only about facilitating negotiation; it is also about creating conditions in which good decision-making becomes possible again.

That point deserves particular emphasis in the commercial dispute resolution space. Commercial practitioners often speak as though business disputes are somehow more objective, more analytical, and less personally costly than family, workplace, or community disputes. In one sense, of course, commercial cases are framed differently. They are usually argued through contracts, numbers, project records, valuation models, and legal rights. But that external framing can obscure the reality that commercial disputes can also take a heavy human toll.

For business owners, executives, project leaders, professionals, and in-house lawyers, serious disputes often mean far more than a contest over entitlement. They can bring months or years of uncertainty, impaired sleep, damaged confidence, relentless rumination, financial anxiety, strain on families, deterioration in health, and the exhausting burden of carrying conflict while trying to maintain ordinary professional and personal life. People still need to lead teams, run companies, manage cash flow, deliver projects, look after children, care for parents, and present calm judgment to others, all while internally depleted by the dispute itself. The cost is frequently hidden because commercial culture encourages composure and performance.

This hidden cost matters because a party who is tired, stressed, and cognitively narrowed will often make poorer decisions. It matters because unresolved conflict does not stay neatly inside a case file; it leaks into management, relationships, morale, and health. It matters because the human burden of a dispute may exceed, in lived terms, the legal issue that first triggered it. And it matters because mediators, counsel, and clients alike can underestimate how much of the apparent difficulty in a negotiation is driven not by legal complexity alone, but by stress physiology and emotional exhaustion.

Dr. Fowler’s article also invites a broader professional reflection. If we accept that conflict materially affects executive function and sleep, then mediator self-awareness becomes important too. Mediators are repeatedly exposed to high-conflict situations. So are counsel, experts, claims consultants, and internal dispute managers. A profession that takes the human cost of conflict seriously should be attentive not only to the parties’ condition, but also to the cumulative effect on those who work inside these systems every day.

None of this means mediators become therapists, nor should they. Dr. Fowler is careful, and rightly so, to frame the proposed responses as process tools rather than treatment: structured pacing, grounding strategies, clearer issue separation, reality testing, validation, and careful communication. That distinction is important. The mediator’s role is not to medicalise dispute, but neither should it ignore the reality that human cognition and emotion are profoundly affected by prolonged conflict.

For readers of the Kluwer Mediation Blog, this article is a valuable reminder that the quality of dispute resolution depends not only on legal framework, mediator technique, or institutional design, but also on the condition of the people in the room. We can design sophisticated procedures and still fail if the participants are too depleted to process options properly. Equally, small process adjustments can add significant value if they help restore enough cognitive space for better judgment to emerge.

The article is available on the AAA Mediation Magazine website here: Is Conflict Affecting your RAM and REM? How Stress Disrupts Executive Function and Sleep in Disputants.

More broadly, this is a topic that deserves much more attention across the mediation field. The human cost of disputes is often discussed in relation to family conflict, trauma, or community harm, but it is often understated in commercial dispute resolution. That is a mistake. Commercial conflict can be isolating, and health-affecting, even where the language of the dispute remains formal and somewhat impersonal.

It would be valuable to hear from other mediators, advocates, in-house counsel, academics, psychologists, and researchers on this question. What have you observed about the human cost of disputes in practice? What does research tell us about the cognitive, emotional, relational, or physical burden of prolonged conflict? And how should mediation processes evolve in response? Contributions and reflections on this theme would be warmly welcomed.

Editorial invitation

The Kluwer Mediation Blog would welcome short responses, practitioner observations, and research-led reflections on the human costs of disputes, including in commercial and cross-border settings.