Hello, dear friend! Welcome to this new episode of Walk With Johan. It's a pleasure for me to welcome you for this new episode, to spend these 15 minutes with you, approximately, the next 15 minutes, even if I have mosquitoes that are bothering me today. I'm recording on a path, as usual, and there are a few mosquitoes that come to bother me. So, if you hear me typing, don't worry, I'm just trying to chase away the mosquitoes.
Today, we're going to talk about reflection, decision-making, and we're going to talk about the moment when you shouldn't try to think, when you shouldn't try to make a decision. And I can already, right from the start, at the beginning of this podcast, ask what, in your opinion, is the bad time to think. When is it a bad idea to think or to make a decision? I'll let you think for a moment when I arrive, or when I'm walking. Think for 2-3 seconds. When is it a bad time, when it's a bad idea to think? I'll give you a few seconds to think.
So, I don't know what you answered, I don't know. You can ask yourself when you made your worst decisions, if you can't find them. And in my opinion, if you're like me and if you're like the majority of humans, homo sapiens, well you answered: "when I was stressed in fact, when I had negative emotions, when I was stressed, it's at those times when I had trouble thinking well, thinking well, making good decisions."
And actually, that's normal. When we're stressed, the rational part of our brain, the part we reason with, I think it's called the neocortex, well it's put in the background, that means that the blood that circulates to bring oxygen to areas of the brain, which are the ones it needs right away, well this blood is going to be diverted from this neocortex part to the regions of the brain that are linked to our emotions.
So, that is to say that our brain, by its conception, by its design, it is made to first feed the regions, the emotional zones, and only then, the zones with which we reason, because the zones with which we reason are much more energy-hungry and because very often, when we were in an environment in which we had to survive, well we had to act on the emotion. It is the famous… the famous state of fight, save yourself or stop. Fight or flight or freeze, as the Anglo-Saxons say. So, if we fight, either we save ourselves, we flee, or we stop. And these emotional responses, well they take over reason, over reflection.
And that's exactly why, for millennia or probably before, but in any case for a few millennia that are in written history, well there has always been this fight between reason and emotions. It is one japan whatsapp number data of the great constants for example of the Stoic philosophers that I often talk about, who thought that, to have a good life, to be happy, one had to master one's emotions through reason. And although they have a certain number of teachings, techniques, writings that help me a lot to do it, well they have never really managed to find the final key, because emotions will fight, 'end will always be stronger than reason, always.
If… I don’t know, what example could we take? If you lose a loved one and that loved one was suffering, they had a serious illness, for example, and they were suffering, and that person dies, from a purely logical, purely rational point of view, we should say to ourselves: “Well, that’s good. That person was old, they were suffering a lot, that’s good, it’s a good thing that they died.” And yet, we very rarely reason like that. Often, we’ll say it to reassure ourselves, but deep down, the emotions will be so strong that we’ll be very sad to have lost that person, when logically, from a rational point of view, it was the best thing in that given case, for example.
So, we see that emotions always dominate reason and that is, once again, how our brain is made and how it was designed. So, when we are stressed, when we have a lot of negative emotions, well it is not a good time to think.
And I was reading a quote recently from Harry Brown. Now, he was a… I know him as a writer, but I think he did other things. Harry Brown was an American writer among other things, but he wrote about finance, about investing, about a lot of cool, very interesting things. And one of his sentences was: “When you feel strong emotions like anger, hatred or excitement, your capacity to think is generally weak.” So, this is a bad quote… sorry, probably a bad translation of this quote, which I read in English, but you get the idea. He explains to us, as the Stoics did, well that we can’t really think, we can’t think properly when we are stressed or when emotions are strong.