Why We Tend To Make Mistakes — Our Thinking & Feeling Brains

The unbalanced affiliation of our brains hurts our relationships, how can we avoid them?

We often act in a way that makes us regretful. We, later, can’t figure out the motifs for our previous actions. Because in the different periods of our lives, our thinking and feeling brains lose balance. Often the feeling part establishes dominance. This situation afflicts our social and personal relationships.

I’ve read Mark Manson’s recent book titled Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope, which mentions the division between our brains: thinking & feeling. And the book emphasizes the need for both for our decision-making capability.

The balance of the thinking and feeling brains are quintessential to maintain healthy relationships, to be gentle, to care, and to think of our actions before hurting somebody.

I’ve recently lost some tracks of my life. I often thought that I turned into a different person — a worse individual with an evil heart.

I made mistakes that I regretted, but replayed them for such a long time that I believed my mistakes reconstituted my personality. My feeling brain loves drama — she’s a little dramatic b*tch, and she has recently repressed my thinking brain. Long recently.

With Manson’s car metaphor, I’d like to invite you to imagine yourselves sitting in a car through your life, and these two brains are sitting in the front seats. They try to lead your life.

The tricky thing is that your feelings can talk so much that it can exhaust your logic and shuts it down. Your feeling brain-which-tend-to-be-dramatic then takes control of your life, and the disasters follow drunk driving, beating somebody to death, meaningless sexual interactions, an overdose of any drugs.

These don’t have to be the extreme causes, though. Losing yourself, getting violent with your husband, shouting at your wife without any reason, being over jealous at your partner. Feeling insecure, ignoring your best friend, hurting others’ feelings. Not taking your career and life seriously, losing your dignity. All can be counted.

Even though we know what we just did or what we have lately done is wrong, we somehow can’t change our behaviors or don’t want to change them.

According to Manson, this is often the outcome of our brains’ disequilibrium. In other words, we’ve let our feeling brain take the leading and mere control of our actions. Following it through all kinds of stupid and childish consequences becomes inevitable then.

In this matter of crisis (I call it a crisis because the consequences can lead us to some regretful and disastrous events harming our future), we have to encourage the two brains to have a quick and calm chat. It’s often difficult as we’d want to shout, cry, beat — show any sign of anger. Our feeling brain would want to be selfish, the only one to talk to, and its speaking manners may be outrageous.

To prevent this type of rageful monologue, we should teach our feeling brain to listen to our thinking brain.

Do we feel anxious? Let’s make us a camomile tea.

Do we feel insecure? It’s okay; everybody does.

Does this person shake our viability? We can figure out why.

These are the required dialogues between our brains.

We all can think thoroughly and make the best decisions. Since we don’t allow the communication between our two brains, we make the wrong decisions for our lives and blame ourselves: I shouldn’t have sit in that car.

If we don’t work on improving the relationship between two brains, if we don’t learn to create a healthy balance between them, we’ll tend to give make decisions that we’ll regret.

We’ll be hard on ourselves. We’ll hurt our relationships with both our loved ones and ourselves.

Our feeling from the brain tend to be a dramatic living. The only language it understands is mimics, gestures, and overreaction. But because it’s vulnerable. We’re vulnerable, and it’s what makes us humans.

We can’t ignore one of the brain’s existence, either. Believe it or not, our feeling brain is always the driver, and the thinking brain is a co-worker, asserts Manson. If we ignore the thinking brain, we won’t have the directions for a better way; we won’t have the knowledge to move on, to turn the bends, and to stop.

If we ignore our feeling brain; we won’t know which ways would make us feel good, we won’t realize whether we’re happy in our relationships, or whether our journey is meaningful at all.

We need both our emotions and logic, but at balance.

And don’t forget — when we have an accident, we often crash another car. We hurt other persons’ lives as well. We can cause a pileup enchaining their friends and families. We make victims of our behaviors.

We’re not merely responsible for our self-drives.