Jake Burhans explains why you send harsh emails and make snap judgments you regret: your prefrontal cortex shuts down when your nervous system is in survival mode. A 2-3 minute pause, like a walk, brings you back to regulated so you can actually think before you act.
You continue to fly off the handles because you're not regulated before you're making a decision. You are in an emotional state, you're making an email, you're sending a message. You need to learn to relax before you're sending these messages and you won't say something that you regret. Because when you're in a dysregulated nervous system state, your prefrontal cortex is off, which is where all your emotional regulation and thinking and problem solving and perception lives. So when you're in that survival mode, in that animal mode, you're making decisions you don't want to make. So the question becomes not, How quickly can I act? But am I in the right state to act? If you are regulated enough, great. Think, decide, act, do the thing. If you're not regulated enough, you need to make sure that you are regulated. So relax, go on a walk, do what you need to do, even for 2, 3 minutes, so you can avoid doing things or saying things that you will regret.
