They say, "Think a thousand times before you speak." What about
‘excess of everything is bad’?
So you wish to apologize to your best friend for something
you did wrong, but thinking about it for a little while makes you feel like it
wasn’t your mistake in the first place. Or you feel like confiding a secret in
a close friend because you can’t stand torturing yourself with it anymore, but
you realize that nobody can be trusted, and you better keep it to yourself than
fostering a possibility of getting hurt in the long run. Or you need to tell
your best friend how you actually feel about him(or her), but you’re too sacred to
lose what you have in a drive to chase what might never become of the two of
you. And the misery continues…
All of us make decisions every day. Starting from the first
decision of snoozing the alarm clock and embracing those five extra minutes of
sleep to the resolution of not procrastinating from the next day onwards
(ironically, this resolution is an act of procrastination in itself, by resolving
for a tomorrow- not today) and all these decisions we make affect our life in
ways that we seldom realize.
Making a well processed, well informed decision is always
considered a virtue, but it is interesting to note that nothing in this world
is universally applicable. Last week, while watching a TED talk on ‘How to stop screwing yourself over’ by Mel Robbins, I discovered some very interesting
facts about the human brain. Whenever an unconventional idea occurs to our
mind, the brain has the power to dismiss it if we do not act upon it within
five seconds. In cases where you are trying to go an extra mile to let yourself
out to someone or share your true feelings (and anything else that gives you a
feeling of being possibly vulnerable), if you do not act within five seconds of
the thought’s inception, your brain will reason with itself convincing you to
trust your anxieties.
Spontaneity is an important ingredient for success in most
personal relations. If you keep weighing the pros and cons of apologizing to
your mother for having yelled at her, your ego would eventually take over and
tell you that you weren’t wrong, you were frustrated and hopefully your mother
will understand it. But if you act upon your first instinct immediately, she
would probably sit down and discuss with you her own set of worries which she
tries to camouflage with the big smile on her face because she knows your life
is too occupied with your own set of problems already.
Instinctive actions, hence, are important in numerous
situations, and this doesn’t in any way mean that one should abandon
considering all premises before arriving at a conclusion. It is not wise to
select one side of the conflict and stick by it whether right or wrong. Rather,
it is more reasonable to balance between choosing what is right and knowing
what is not(and in what situation), before the five seconds pass and your brain pulls the emergency
brake.
