When I'm stressed, my hands give me away first. They start wringing — one washing over the other, slow and steady, like I'm trying to scrub something off. I've done it in difficult sessions, before I've spoken at a conference, the morning my father was in hospital. That is my nervous tell. It is mine. It might mean nothing on you.

This is the thing people don't want to hear when they message me asking, "Kanan, just tell me how to decode a lie." They want one gesture. The crossed arms, the touched nose, the eyes that dart left. And I understand the appeal — it would be so tidy if humans came with a single button marked deception. We don't. A lie isn't one signal. It's a cluster, in context, against a backdrop. And the backdrop is the part everyone skips.

The backdrop has a name: baselining

Baselining simply means watching how a person behaves when nothing is wrong. How fast do they normally talk? Do they always fidget, or only sometimes? Where do their hands rest when they're comfortable? Do they touch their face when they're relaxed and telling you about their weekend?

Until you know that, you cannot read a deviation. Because reading body language is the study of deviations — the moment someone moves away from their own normal. If a man wrings his hands during a hard question, that tells me a great deal. If he wrings his hands the entire conversation, including while ordering chai, it tells me almost nothing about that one question. It's just how he is.

Everyone's stress dialect is different

Over years of clinical work I've learned that nervousness, defensiveness and discomfort each speak in a personal dialect. One client of mine goes completely still under stress — most people imagine fidgeting, but she freezes, like a deer. Another laughs, a small nervous laugh, at exactly the wrong moments. A third clears his throat. A fourth presses his lips into a thin line and bounces one knee under the table.

If I had walked in with a checklist that said "stillness equals calm," I'd have read my frozen client as serene while she was actually in the middle of a panic she couldn't name. The checklist would have failed her, and me.

  • Closed body language in one person is a habit of sitting; in another it's genuine withdrawal.
  • A throat-clear can be a dry throat or a swallowed truth — you only know which by knowing the person.
  • A lip-press in someone who never presses their lips is loud. In a habitual lip-presser, it's furniture.

This is also why the famous numbers are misused

You've probably heard that communication is "7 per cent words, 38 per cent tone, 55 per cent body language." That figure gets thrown around as if body language always overrides speech. It doesn't. Albert Mehrabian's research was about a narrow situation — feelings and attitudes, when the words and the tone contradict each other. It was never a universal law of all communication. Treating it as one is exactly the same mistake as the one-gesture lie detector: taking a finding out of its context and pretending it applies everywhere.

What I actually do before I interpret anything

In a first session I'm not analysing. I'm collecting. I notice the resting face, the natural rate of blinking, the default posture, the comfortable hand position. I ask easy, neutral questions on purpose — what they ate, how the traffic was — and I watch how they answer when there's nothing at stake. That ordinary footage is my reference. Everything later gets measured against it.

Only then do I watch for the shifts. A hand that goes to the neck. A genuine smile that doesn't quite reach the eyes. The wringing hands — if wringing hands aren't already this person's normal.

Body language gives you patterns, not verdicts. A deviation tells you something changed; it doesn't tell you why. Stress, grief, attraction, a full bladder and a lie can all produce the same shift. Your job isn't to convict. It's to notice — and then, gently, to ask better questions. The gesture is never the answer. It's only the place to start looking.