Think back to some of the stupidest decisions you’ve ever made. Chances are, most of those decisions were motivated by you being an emotional wreck. Maybe you were angry and in a fit of rage, smashed your keyboard against your desk, causing you to get fired. Maybe you were so sad from your break up that you drank yourself into a stupor, blacked out, drove home and woke up in a jail cell. Maybe you were so anxious that you passed up on a huge career opportunity that you’ve always wanted.
A pretty epic way to get fired.
Whatever it is, we’ve all been there. Our emotions hijack our sense of reality and suddenly something that is clearly a good decision, feels like a horribly scary, icky bad decision. Or, what is obviously a terrible idea, draws us in with an irresistible force, until we wake up in a pool of our own vomit wondering what happened.
The problem is that our emotions operate separately from our thoughts. One way to think about it is that we all possess two brains, a Thinking Brain and a Feeling Brain. Our Thinking Brain is our higher-level human brain — it’s the intelligent, thoughtful, patient part of ourselves. But our Feeling Brain is our animalistic side — it’s our cravings, our urges, and our desires.
Sadly, the Feeling Brain is much stronger than the Thinking Brain. In fact, our Feeling Brains tend to bully our Thinking Brains around in our heads. Our Thinking Brains are like, “Oh hey, there’s that person we’re attracted to, it’s a great opportunity, we should go talk to them.”
And our Feeling Brain starts screaming things like, “FEAR! SHAME! LOSER! YOU’RE A PIECE OF SHIT! THEY WILL NEVER LOVE YOU! NOBODY WILL EVER LOVE YOU!” until our Thinking Brain is cowering in a corner, shaking, and capitulates, “Okay, okay, okay, you’re right, they probably wouldn’t like us anyway.”
What is, on paper, a proposition to risk $1 to make $50 — talking to them takes all of 10 seconds and you literally lose nothing by trying — starts to feel like an incredibly risky and terrifying proposition. So, we sit there, sipping our warm beer, watching the love of our lives quietly walk out of the room, wondering for the next week what could have been.
But how do we overcome this? How do we develop an ability to manage our emotions? How do we gain a little bit of separation between what we feel and how we act?
Well, it’s hard. And I don’t know if you ever completely master it. The first step is to develop greater self-awareness — to see your emotions as they happen. Many people don’t even realize they’re sad or mad until long after the fact, thus causing them to make poor decisions without knowing.
Once you’ve developed a bit of self-awareness, the next step is to develop a habit of reasoning by working through important decisions, either out loud or on paper, before saying or doing something drastic. I’ll talk a bit more about these ideas in a section below, but this can mean journaling, talking to someone you trust, or even running your decisions by a coach or therapist before committing to them.
Great