How Rational Thinking Can Lead to Irrationality: The Hidden Role of Emotion

[00:00:00]and so i encourage all of you to accept responsibility for your situation in life because if you accept responsibility for your situation you also have the power to control it i know it sounds kind of weird but if other people are to blame then i can't do anything about it because i can't change other people you can try but it's not going to work so let's kind of get started so a lot of times people kind of assume that you know if they're highly rational that they're like not emotional so we see this a lot in argument right where people will kind of be like oh you know this person is a is a you know this person is getting emotional and therefore their argument is wrong and it's really tricky because we you know especially like a lot of people of our generation will think of themselves as like rational thinkers and part of the reason that they conclude that they are a rational thinker i am a rational thinker and someone else is not is because this person is displaying emotion and i am not displaying emotion so if this person displays emotion and i am not displaying emotion then i am the more rational thinker therefore my argument is more correct and it's almost like we sort of say that the display of emotion becomes like a point against our rational argument like if i make a rational argument but i make it emotionally you know if i have an argument but i make it emotionally then it becomes not rational which is kind of interesting because that's not really the case so i know a lot of people think of themselves as like very rational thinkers but if you really like engage them in conversation and they don't think of themselves as emotional like you can actually uncover a lot of emotion very quickly and the simplest way to tell you know someone who thinks that they're a rational thinker that they're you know a simple way to elicit emotion is to tell them that their logic is wrong just be like no bro like you're the logical chain that you are outlining is incorrect and if you say that you will see an emotional response the emotion will definitely come right right out right so it's kind of interesting because we sort of think about rationality and emotionality at opposite ends of the spectrum and in a sense that's actually somewhat true and we'll get to the neuroscience in a second but there is reciprocal inhibition between our cortices and our limbic system so our cortices is where a lot of our higher order thinking comes from and there's there's a limbic system is where our emotions come from and what reciprocal inhibition means is that our cortices will suppress our emotions and our emotions will suppress our cortices so there's a reason why some people think that you know if you're emotional you're not going to be thinking rationally so there's some truth to that but that's unfortunately not entirely how the mind works so the first thing that we want to kind of dig into is that skill at argument does not necessarily make you rational so a lot of times i'll see this in couples counseling where like one person is like a better debater than the other person and so anytime they have a conflict like one person is like able to form their arguments more like coherently and therefore they will win the argument and then they assume that because they won the argument that their logic and their rational thinking is superior to the other persons it's kind of interesting right because if i win an argument doesn't that imply that the rationality that i used is more correct than yours but hold on like let's take a step back and recognize that like debate and skill at argument is like a skill so if i had someone who was a master debater and i even like i gave them a uh a bad premise to argue they would be able to like even take something illogical and actually like out maneuver someone who is not as good as a debate right so one way that we sort of justify the rationality of our argument is if we can out argue some or out argue someone else because so if i can convince someone or if i can out maneuver someone using my skill of argument then i must be correct but that's not actually the case right because skillet argument is just skillet argument doesn't actually mean that you're logically correct it just means that you're better at out maneuvering another person and so this is kind of interesting because you know like just because you're able to out maneuver someone doesn't actually make you right but then you kind of scratch your head and you're like but if then what does make me right how do i know if i'm rational if like skillet argument doesn't mean i'm right and so it's kind of interesting because if you really look at it from a neuroscience perspective what you can actually find is that emotions can hijack your skill at argument okay so let's take the the example of like someone who's in denial about being addicted to alcohol so this person people can approach someone who's addicted to alcohol in in denial with the most logical argument and emotionally if this person is not willing to accept that they have a problem their rational mind will come up with all kinds of counter arguments and you will never be able to convince them that they have a problem right unless they are willing to entertain the idea that they have a problem you will never be able to convince them so it's kind of interesting because if you really look at the mind what we find is that your skillet argument can be hijacked by other parts of your mind and so it you know you can kind of get emotional like if you get someone who's like very good at arguing you get them riled up they will argue with you that their emotion will kind of fuel that argument and then like they will you will never be able to convince them that they're wrong and they may even be able to outmaneuver you and they will walk away from that interaction thinking that they're right and so people are kind of confused about that all you have to do is look at politics right because when i hold a political belief and someone else holds the opposite political belief both of us within our mind are convinced that our belief is logical and justifiable no one in politics says my belief is idiotic we always try to say oh this other person isn't thinking clearly they're emotional and both sides will say this all the time and if you really like kind of like ask the person is your you know believe logical they'll say of course it is that's why i believe it but if we really get it get into it what we actually realize is that's not the case because logic may exist objectively but when you take logic and you stick it in a human brain some weird stuff starts to happen okay so let's try to like dig into why rational thinkers are actually quite emotional and how unless you understand the emotional aspect of your thinking you will never sort of be thinking properly okay so it starts with this so a lot of people will say okay i'm not feeling emotional therefore i must be rational right and that's kind of interesting but if you look at it some people are alexa thymic and so what that means is that they're they've actually trained themselves or been conditioned to turn down the volume on their emotional signals if you actually look at these people their eq or emotional quotient is like lower than other people who are not a alexa thymic and so i know it sounds kind of weird but just because you don't feel emotion doesn't mean that there isn't emotion that's active in your brain so we all have this part of our brain called the limbic system and the limbic system is how we feel emotion and i know it sounds kind of bizarre but you can even look at you know cases of people and we'll we'll show some papers quickly but you can look at people who have you know neuroscience things going on that suppress their ability to feel emotion and what you actually find is those circuits of the brain aren't turned off they're actually turned on in acting in some way although there isn't awareness that the emotion is present so now it's i know it sounds kind of weird but like if you engage in a logical argument with someone the emotional parts of your brain are not going to be like non-functional they'll be functional and some amount of awareness will be suppressed so one of the places that we actually see this is actually in schizophrenia research so if you look at people with schizophrenia their experience of emotion over time can be like blunted or diminished so people with schizophrenia can develop something called flat affect which means you can't see emotion in their face so even though they could be experiencing emotion their the visibility of their emotion is kind of like there's a there's a break between these two circuits of your brain and similarly what we see in alexa thymia is that the emotion is active on some level in your neuroscience and is actually hijacking your rationality but your experience of it is not present which sounds really really weird but that's because sort of like you you're just not aware of it but it's absolutely there okay so this is where let's kind of turn to a little bit of research okay so we're going to explain this principle a little bit better so inhibition of action thought and emotion a selective neurobiological review so this this review goes into a lot of information that is less relevant for us but is really interesting talks about you know inhibitory circuits for thoughts and actions and emotions but here's the important part for us so emotional dysregulation is a characteristic of a variety of forms of psychopathology and dysregulated fear responses play a prominent role in blah blah blah by studying extinction researchers have made substantial progress in understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the inhibition of conditioned fear responses below we review evidence indicating that the vm that's ventromedial prefrontal cortex amygdala and hippocampus are critical brain regions involved in fear extinction okay so let's just think a little bit about what this is saying and i'll try to translate for y'all what this means if we're talking about inhibition of a con conditioned fear response what that essentially means is that i have a fear response that is activating but there are parts of my brain that are kind of inhibiting it or suppressing it so the fear is there and there are certain circuits of my brain that will actually like go out of their way to try to suppress it from actually happening and this is sort of what we see in cases of like a lexithymian argument is that a lot of people won't feel emotional but there are actually emotional circuits that are active that are being inhibited from like presenting in a particular way by other circuits of our brain so our ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is where a lot of our you know logic and executive function comes from actively will inhibit the experience of things like fear or other kinds of emotions but the really interesting thing is that there's reciprocal inhibition so sometimes what can happen is even though we're trying to inhibit that circuit that circuit can activate and actually shape our rational thinking okay and no it sounds kind of weird but if you have a friend who's very emotional let's say that i'm afraid that my partner is cheating on me then what happens is that emotion drives my rational thought process right and then i start thinking all these things that if my friends try to disprove me i'm like no man like i'm texting her and she's not answering but it's like dude maybe she's asleep it's like 1am no man like she's not answering because this right and you can try to argue with that person as much as you want to but as long as that emotional circuitry is hijacking their rational circuitry they will never like respond to your rational argument right and so this is kind of the tricky thing when it comes to the human mind is we have rational thoughts and we have emotional thoughts and we tend to think that if i don't sort of think if i don't feel the emotion then i must be rational but actually what what i've discovered and this is sort of what the vedic with the yogis discovered as well is that if you are not aware of your emotions if you can't feel emotions that doesn't mean that emotions don't exist that just means that the action of emotions is not visible to you and i would argue that the less emotion you're able to feel the more likely your rational thinking is actually hijacked by your emotions and this is where things like cognitive biases come from right so if we think about these things in psychiatry like cognitive biases denial defense mechanisms projection so what are what what does all this crap mean like why does this happen why do we have a cognitive bias why do we have these psychological defense mechanisms when i am in denial that's a psychological defense mechanism so what am i defending against i'm defending against emotion so we tend to find is that hyper rational thinkers are not actually hyper rational they're actually they're the at the conclusion that they come to is i'm a rational thinker because i don't feel emotion whereas what's more likely and this is what we get trained in in psychiatry is to recognize that there are all these psychological defense mechanisms which manifest as rationality but that person is not able to experience the underlying emotion and if they're not able to experience it it's essentially going to hijack your skillet argument and start disproving people right and left so it's kind of bizarre but at the end of the day what i've seen is that if you want to determine whether your thought process is truly rational or not the main question you need to ask yourself is am i aware of my internal emotional state and until you become aware of your internal emotional state there's a decent chance that your thinking is not actually going to be rational at all but you'll be recruiting all these weird psychological defense mechanisms and like kind of hijacking your skill at argument to prove other people wrong but really you're the one who's like woefully incorrect it's really bizarre but that's kind of how it works so if you want to be become a more rational thinker i know it sounds kind of weird but what you actually need to do is gain emotional awareness right because we when we really think about a rational thinker like someone who makes good decisions it's the person who says oh like emotionally i feel embarrassed going to a party but now that i'm aware that i have that embarrassment i can act in spite of it and kind of do the right thing whereas what will happen if we're not careful is that emotional embarrassment will be like ah it's not worth going to right oh i'm not even going to have a good time oh it's so far away i come up with all of these i know this is a weird word i know you guys have never heard this word before it's it's a very rare sanskrit word rationalizations right and what does that mean like what is a rationalization it's our brains emotion hijacking our skill of argument to come up with a logical response that other people are not able to argue against right it's crazy we even have words in our language where we intrinsically understand this stuff we intuitively get this when we use the word rationalization and what we tend to find is that the more unaware you are of your emotions the more your rational thought process will be filled with rationalizations instead of real logic so that's how you know you got to be careful but if you consider yourself a rational thinker and you don't experience much emotion there's a decent chance and you guys may know people who are like this too that actually your emotions are actually running the show from behind the scenes and that your rational mind is a puppet that's being controlled by your emotions yeah people are mentioning ben shapiro and stuff like that yeah so like i i'm not surprised that people are drawing these correlations i don't really know like i try not to make judgments about people unless i've talked to them personally um but when someone is saying rational is irrationalizing as making excuses absolutely right so this is where um you know if you kind of think about it like why are you making an excuse it's because there's an emotional pain that you want to dodge it's a protective mechanism that's why we call them defense mechanisms so when people are kind of asking the question okay how do i become more aware of my emotions so i know it's kind of weird but like if you just actually sit down and pay attention you may discover that there's a lot of stuff about your life that your your mind is really working hard to avoid right because like if if we open that can of worms if we do say okay like this was my fault or i am an addict holy crap what does that mean it means i'm letting my kids down it means i'm letting my spouse down it means that i'm disappointing the people at work it means that like i have a problem that like i don't know if i can fix because i you know i can fix all of the rational things in my head because my mind is telling me it's just this you can fix that but there's a lot of fear with like letting go of your defense mechanisms and like you know in a raw way like facing your problems because you maybe you can't fix the addiction you can fix all this other stuff which you keep on saying is the problem no it's not video games aren't the problem the problem is i'm just like not disciplined enough i just need to be more disciplined i wish i was more disciplined this isn't the problem this is it's not the marijuana that's the problem like the marijuana helps with my anxiety like i don't you know the problem is that the capitalistic society and student loans and and all this like the world is going to hell it's not marijuana that's the issue it's like look at all of these things this is what happens right once the emotions hijack the rational part of our mind we come up with a lot of evidence which is compelling it's not like our mind thinks false things it's just really selective and it's like no man like the reason that you're not doing well in life is absolutely because of capitalism which is fair like it's you can say that there's a predatory work environment you're not logically incorrect there it's just blaming you know the universe is an awesome way to give a pass to yourself right because then it isn't your fault yeah like everyone else is wrong you know and i see this a lot with like people who are you know i i don't want to get into this but there there you know there are some things that are medically you know we know are like medically dangerous right so there are certain aspects of the self and in our desire to be like an accepting society what what some people have started to do is normalize or even promote things that are like scientifically medically dangerous and they say like oh my god like i don't want to deal with the shame of a particular aspect of myself therefore i'm going to demonize all of society instead of like take care of myself right and as a scientist like is medical doctor like there there's clear you know there's like a clear right answer about what's healthy and what's unhealthy and then what once we get into these like psychological like games of like i don't wanna deal with the shame that i feel internally therefore i'm gonna play a really cool trick y'all ready for it i don't have to be ashamed if there's nothing wrong right so i have an op op technique to deal with internal shame just blame society and normalize the way that you are it comes back to if you don't deserve me you don't if you can't handle me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best like why do i need to grow as a person like people need to be more accepting it's not my problem that i'm an [ __ ] people need to be more compassionate it's their problem everyone is so mean and cruel nowadays like i don't need to improve people need to be nicer to me and now everyone so be careful be careful be careful because now everyone's like oh like you're taking your particular the people that you dislike or you disagree with and what is your mind doing yeah the people that disagree with me they're the ones that do what dr k is talking about they're the idiots that he's talking about yeah that's them that's the take your pick conservatives liberals this person that person take your pick whichever side of the argument you're on what are you doing right now you're putting the other people that you argue against you said dr k that's these people no bro like you could be that people that's what we're saying we're not talking about the people you argue against we're talking about you it's crazy do you see how your mind does that it's so damn quick because now it has a justification to disprove the other person's point it's like yeah i'm right dr k said so be careful okay be careful we're not here to talk about other people this stream is here to talk about you right why do you take this piece of juicy juicy evidence because damn it's a good piece of evidence do you guys see that scientific paper man oh man it's definitely this person and it could be you could be right right i'm not saying that they're not like that but just be careful about how your mind what does your mind emotionally feel when you assign this idiocy to your opponents oh my god doesn't it feel so good feels so good oh look at these noobs they're like this and then look at that emotion and what do you think that emotion is doing it's hijacking your rational circuitry and it's saying like oh look now i get to feel better than them that is my favorite thing to do is i need to be better than that person oh that feels so damn good be careful be careful okay be careful so we're not saying and this is the key thing to remember when your emotions hijack your rational circuitry your rational circuitry never comes up with stuff that's wrong okay this is the tricky thing because you think oh doesn't that mean my rational circuitry is wrong incorrect it's selective huge difference it's incomplete right so if i ask a girl out girl says no then i feel hurt rejected and ashamed oh my god until i start dissing her and it's like oh she doesn't deserve me oh then i don't have to feel ashamed her loss oh my god i get to feel better about myself i was doing it as a favor it was charity on my part if she doesn't want to accept the charity i'm too cool for her beautiful she wasn't even that attractive right it doesn't have to be i'm just saying that because you know my experience when i you speak in the first person i adopt a heteronormative masculine perspective because these are the thoughts that i had when i was like 19 years old a freshman in college asking a girl out and we when she turned me down that's what my mind did came up with all these reasons that protected me from feeling ashamed of myself right it goes the other way like dudes can do this with dudes women can do it with dudes women can do it with women it doesn't matter doesn't even have to be romantic right it can be like a job interview it can be like uh you can invite a friend to a social event and then they can turn you down and then you feel rejected and like you're not good enough for them and then the mind flips over and says oh like it's his loss right so where i'm not trying to demonize y'all i'm y'all are great y'all are fantastic let's understand these parts of ourselves right and let's understand that it's actually okay to feel shame it's okay to feel rejected because sometimes we get rejected and as we start to look into that right as we start to face our problems and we face like oh wow like i really feel like shameful and rejected as we start to acknowledge those emotions then we can leverage our truly free rational thinking on it and then we'll discover one of two things i know it's crazy we're gonna discover one of two things one is oh crap maybe i deserve to be rejected maybe there's something here that i need to get better at right like maybe like i'd do a better job at romantic relationships and people would say yes if i you know groomed myself so you that's how you make progress right you sort of notice that there are particular things you could do wrong other option maybe you'll discover that they're a toxic [ __ ] right because some people reject you and it's really not fair like some people reject you because they've got an ego thing going on they've got emotional crap going on maybe you'll discover that there's someone in your life that persistently makes you feel a negative way and that that actually isn't fair but you're not gonna know the answer to that until you authentically and calmly look at it and face what you feel oh wow this person routinely makes me feel really bad about myself so then like once you're like oh and then it's kind of tricky i i know we're kind of going off on a tangent here but if you're not careful what that'll turn into is like all kinds of things to make yourself feel better when you have a toxic person in your life and they reject you what do you actually do to suppress that emotion you bend over backwards for them right oh like this person rejected me let me oh do you want to go out to dinner on friday oh you said no and i feel hurt and rejected oh it's my treat i just got a bonus and i'm looking to celebrate i'll pay for your food and then the person is like uh okay fine and then they come out right and then it's kind of interesting because then what happens is you start engaging in all of this behavior to avoid that feeling of rejection and propagate the toxic relationship right it's really it's really tricky but that's where once again the solution is still the same as long as you're able to notice that shame notice that rejection be aware of it even start to tolerate it because that's a big part of it not even being aware of it awareness is like 50 intolerance to be honest and so as you're able to do that then you're like oh actually like i feel ashamed and once you acknowledge the shame once you feel the shame it's no longer secretly working behind the scenes to like manipulate your behavior into propagating toxic relationships does rationalizing ultimately feed a negative self-image absolutely so remember the goal of rationalizing is to support whatever you feel right so if you look at like doomers okay like doomers actually maybe doomers is not a good example let me think about this so does rationalizing ultimately feed a negative self-image absolutely let's look at someone who's depressed so in the mind of a depressed person they have a core feeling of low self-worth okay and then like rationally they'll give you a thousand justifications why there's low self-worth and you can argue i can i can argue with my patients there's so much reason to live like you literally have three kids that are telling you that they hope you get better and they want to see you again and they love you very much and they don't want you to go anywhere they're literally telling you that and then the stronger the emotion the stronger the rationalization they're just saying that they don't understand that like i'm causing them so much pain by being sick they would be so much better if they could like worry about people who deserved their love it's like the strength of the rationalization supports the emotion it's crazy right and so it absolutely can reinforce the negative self-image and that's why talking to people logically about why they should live doesn't work very well i mean it can help some and that's where you got to acknowledge the emotion first then you can talk to them logically about it someone's asking how do you deal with a string of toxic relationships by looking at the common variable i'm not trying to be mean there but like what is it that you do what are the emotional needs and this is the really tricky thing because people who wind up in strings of toxic relationships there's something really powerful that's drawing you to that person that's what you need to understand okay it's a fantastic question but it's this kind of thing where like i know it sounds kind of weird but if you look at people who are routinely in toxic relationships the person in the toxic relationship makes you feel the way makes you feel the way that you feel about yourself that is why people wind up in toxic relationships over and over and over again they confirm what you believe about yourself and so human beings will go for like confirmation and order over pain so you will like human beings are just wired this way it's like the way that we've evolved we'll accept a pain that we understand and are familiar with because there's a part of your mind that's like we can survive this we've done it 10 times before this is home field advantage and so if you believe something about yourself and then the toxic person reinforces that belief it fits it's like oh that that's that's i knew it i knew it so it's really tricky but that's the problem because i mean it could be circumstances and stuff like that like maybe just literally your social circle is filled with people who are toxic but generally speaking what i find is that people who engage in toxic relationships over and over and over again i know it sounds kind of weird but when they come into my office we don't work on the people that they're dating we work on them and so i encourage all of you to accept responsibility for your situation in life because if you accept responsibility for your situation you also have the power to control it i know it sounds kind of weird but if other people are to blame then i can't do anything about it because i can't change other people you can try but it's not going to work but if you accept responsibility for your situation that also means that if it's your fault that you're here you could have done things differently which means that you can do things differently so it's really tricky but responsibility and empowerment come hand in hand with great power comes great responsibility is absolutely right because that's the only way it works so if you all feel if you if you're saying to yourself it's all your fault that also means that it's within your power to change it and that's just like are you willing to carry that burden you