By Lisa Ventura MBE FCIIS, Chief Executive and Founder, Unity Group Solutions
I had air conditioning fitted in my home office during the June 2026 heatwave. The one that saw temperatures reach 37.7°C in Norfolk and left large parts of the country baking under amber alerts for days on end. It was, if I am honest, overdue. I had been putting the decision off for years, telling myself I could manage with fans, blinds and curtains drawn at midday.
That week made it clear I could not.
The install took most of a week, and while it was happening I carried on trying to work. Client calls, writing, thinking, all of it, in a room that was doing everything it could to defeat me. By the time the system was running and the July heatwave arrived, I was one of the lucky ones. My office was cool. My concentration held. But I could not stop thinking about everyone in our industry who does not have that option.
That is three heatwaves in 2026 already, on top of the record breaking summer of 2025 that preceded them. The Met Office has told us the pattern is not going away. What has not changed nearly as much as it needs to is the way our industry, cyber security, thinks about what heat and sensory conditions do to the people we ask to make careful, consequential decisions under pressure.
What Sensory Load Actually Is
For a lot of people, heat is uncomfortable, but it stays firmly in the category of things you can push through. You drink more water. You move to a cooler room. You get on with the day. That description of heat, as a nuisance rather than a cognitive event, is embedded in most of our workplace policies. It is why our guidance during hot weather tends to be limited to hydration reminders and dress code relaxations.
Sensory load is a different concept. It describes the total amount of sensory input your nervous system is processing at any given moment, and how much of your available cognitive capacity is being used to filter that input into something usable. In a cool, quiet, softly lit room with predictable background noise, most people’s filtering happens automatically and cheaply. In a hot, humid room with a whirring fan, a spinning tower fan across the corridor, sunlight glaring through half drawn blinds and the persistent smell of warm asphalt drifting in through an open window, the filtering costs a great deal more.
The result is that the person in the second room is more than uncomfortable. They are running with less capacity. Less capacity for attention, judgement, memory, communication and mood regulation. All of which are the exact capabilities we rely on in a cyber security function.
Why Cyber Teams Are Particularly Exposed
Cyber security work is, on a good day, cognitively expensive. Analysts are triaging alerts, holding several possible interpretations of a signal in mind at once, and deciding whether a benign looking anomaly is worth escalating. Incident responders are managing time pressure, technical complexity and stakeholder communications simultaneously. Engineers are looking for subtle patterns in log data that will not shout to be noticed. Consultants and advisers are absorbing new environments, cultures and risk pictures at speed.
None of that work goes well when sensory load is high.
The environments many cyber teams work in do not help. Traditional security operations centres are often designed for the kit rather than the humans. Large screens throwing off heat and light. Servers or workstations running loudly enough to require raised voices. Open plan layouts that maximise density and minimise acoustic control. Shift patterns that leave people trying to concentrate at 3am under fluorescent strips that were never intended to be looked at for eight hours at a stretch.
Add a heatwave to that baseline and the effect on decision quality is not marginal. It is the difference between an alert being properly investigated and an alert being closed because the person looking at it simply does not have the bandwidth to hold the pattern in mind.
The Neurodivergent Dimension
Everything I have described above is true for most people, to some degree. It is more acute, and often much more so, for neurodivergent colleagues.
Autistic staff, ADHD staff, colleagues with sensory processing differences, colleagues with chronic conditions that affect regulation, colleagues on the menopause pathway, colleagues managing anxiety or the effects of past trauma. All of them are running with less automatic filtering to begin with. Heat, noise, light, smell and unpredictability all cost more. What looks like a bad afternoon from the outside can, on the inside, feel like being asked to hold a full time job together with your hands while someone gently sets fire to your chair.
The response inside a lot of organisations is still, quietly, that these colleagues need to toughen up. That is not toughness. That is capacity. And when the environment eats capacity faster than the people in it can replenish it, the outcome is the same as it would be for any other resource. You run out. You make mistakes. You leave.
What Good Looks Like
None of this requires a new department or a large budget. It requires that cyber leaders start treating sensory conditions as an operational variable that affects the quality of the work, not as a personal weakness in the people affected.
Some of the practical adjustments are simple. Give people permission to move to cooler, quieter rooms without having to justify the request. Look at the shift pattern during a red or amber heat alert and see whether the most cognitively demanding work is scheduled at the worst time of day. Ask whether the SOC needs to be quite as loud, quite as bright and quite as densely populated as it currently is. Provide fans, blinds, ear defenders and desk lamps as standard rather than as a special request. Check that dress codes do not force people to add layers they do not need.
Some of the adjustments are cultural. Model taking breaks in the heat. Do not schedule client calls at 2pm in a heatwave when everyone knows the afternoon is where the cognitive drop off lives. Ask neurodivergent colleagues what they need, once, in advance, in writing, rather than making them explain themselves individually every summer.
Some of the adjustments are strategic. Include sensory conditions in incident response planning. If a major incident hits during a heatwave, the people you are asking to handle it will be operating with reduced capacity. Plan for that. Rotate people through more often. Have someone whose job is to look after the responders, not just the response.
And some of the adjustments are simply about honest conversation. In cyber security we are, as an industry, very good at telling each other how important the human factor is. We say it in keynotes. We put it in vendor decks. What we are much less good at is admitting that our humans have limits, and that those limits are shaped by the room we ask them to sit in.
Why This Matters Beyond the Weather
Heatwaves make sensory load impossible to ignore. But sensory load is present all year, in every SOC, every consultancy office and every open plan floor where security work gets done. Winter comes with its own version. Fluorescent lighting, overheated buildings, dry air, the low grade misery of the post lunch slump in a windowless meeting room. What the heat does is take conditions that are quietly costing us capacity all year and turn the dial up until we can no longer pretend it does not matter.
If we are serious about looking after our people, and about the quality of the work they do on our behalf, sensory conditions belong on the same list as workload, on call rotas and psychological safety. Not as a nice to have. As a lever that directly affects security outcomes.
If you would like to talk about how your organisation could take sensory load more seriously, whether that means rethinking your SOC environment or having a more honest conversation with your team about what the summer is doing to them, we would be glad to hear from you. You can reach us at hello@unitysolutions.org.uk.
