Thursday, March 5, 2020

What do You Mean, I'm not Being Rational?

Having our emotional brain take over is quite normal. So what can we do about it?

Sometimes, it’s obvious. You’re in a conflict or a stressful situation, and you just know that your rational brain has turned off.

But sometimes, you think you’re being rational, logical, clear-headed, strategic—even smart. And only later do you look back and realize that you did maybe have a blind spot and were actually much more emotionally and personally invested in your thinking than you realized at the time.

There’s a reason why you think this way. Our brain, simply described, has three main parts:

1. The lizard brain keeps the lights on (keeps us breathing without thinking about it).

2. The limbic brain gives us emotions and that wonderful amygdala, the almond-shaped gland deep within our brain that triggers our fight or flight response to threats.

3. The thinking brain, including the prefrontal cortex, is supposed to manage and interact with the emotional brain. It’s here that we make logical decisions.

Our brain can’t really tell the difference, on a chemical level, between getting attacked by a bear and being told something hurtful. It interprets both instances as threats and releases a barrage of chemicals that suppress the thinking brain and empower us to action.

When we are under stress, the weaker side of our personality kicks into gear. For most of us, our lifestyle generally doesn’t actually involve very many physical threats. But it does include many emotional and psychological threats, and we struggle to acknowledge just how powerful they are.

We can easily live in the delusion that we’re acting very rationally in response to a situation. But in reality, we’re reacting using our limbic brain, not our thinking brain. It’s like our brain’s version of using our nondominant hand to try to defuse a bomb.

In The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene, the author suggests that we all have beliefs about ourselves that are at the centre of conflict and irrationality. We believe we are autonomous (our thoughts are our own, and we are not easily influenced or duped by others), we are good, and we are intelligent. If any one of those beliefs is threatened, we’ll start to react in a way that reinforces that belief.

For example, she says, “Hey, you hurt me!” Your unrecognized thoughts tell you that you can’t have hurt her, because that would make you a bad person.

You respond, “You misunderstood me. You’re just too sensitive.”

And it’s responses like this that can quickly escalate into conflict.

So where’s the hope? First, we can think about our thinker, which is very cool. We actually have the power to become an observer of our self, like in the movies where the dead person floats up to the ceiling and looks down on the situation.

Imagine yourself in a stressful situation asking yourself, am I thinking clearly right now? I think, maybe I’m not.

Second, we can do some very basic things that give our brains a chance. Like the following:

Breathe – Develop a breathing practice. Become aware of how you might hold your breath while under stress. Let all your air out. Try holding it out, slowly replacing it, and holding it in consciously for a bit. Feel your brain calming.
Sleep – The REM cycles matter. A full night’s rest acts like a wash/rinse cycle for the stress chemicals in the brain.
Exercise – A half hour of somewhat hard aerobic exercise is like magic-grow fertilizer for the brain and helps to chemically balance it. Check out the book (or YouTube summary of the book) Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John Ratey.
Perspective – Get some perspective from someone you trust if you suspect your emotional brain or your ego are getting in the way of being rational. Put your pride on the shelf and acknowledge that nobody is immune to getting hooked into a conflict and making the wrong decision.

Finally, there’s compassion. We’re all much too hard on ourselves—and often on each other. Of course we make mistakes.

Having our emotional brain take over and hook us is really quite normal. It doesn’t make us weak or lame.

When we’re compassionate, it’s easier to let go if we, or the other person, have been hooked by our emotions. Compassion enables us to move on and embrace the rational again.

What do You Mean, I'm not Being Rational?

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