Edouardo Honig
Published: 28 May 2025. Last updated: 28 May 2025.
Have you ever been swept up in a moment? Like something about the event or atmosphere caused you to have an enormous swell of emotions where you turned off your brain? Or have you ever reached the peaks of excitement or "seen red", causing your mind to go blank, only to open your eyes and witness the aftermath.
This kind of state is more common and treacherous than you may think, and I encourage you to avoid it for the benefit of yourself and those around you.
Actually the experience doesn't have to be as extreme as described, but what I'm talking about is this phenomenon of where active thought, planning, and overall metacognition disappear, leaving one essentially as a purely reactive and memoryless agent.
Example: drunk people are generally recognized as potential troublemakers, stemming from their lack of self control. The most obvious, but not best example of this I can refer to is when someone is drunk. There are several known archetypes of drunks, but a commonality among almost all of them is that their mental capacity is diminished. This often leads to distressing situations, such as people saying intrusive thoughts or performing actions that would be unimaginable while sober. And this is not even mentioning the propensity to causing physical messes through lack of coordination or vomiting.
Better example: negative reactions. However, I find that the best and most frightening examples of people losing control are from emotional reactions to perceived injustice. I am particularly cautious of people that are wholly confident of being correct, or on the side of "justice". A classic example of such catharcism can be seen in the short-form video content where some antagonist is taught a lesson. Many people seem to salivate at the desire to put bullies in their place, and derive joy from watching people get their "just deserts".
Regardless of the truth or ambiguity of a situation, the state that one ends up in while reactively enacting justice or vengeance can often be described as one without control. In this instance, one can see the reaction in hindsight to the unintended consequences of a loss of control in a heated moment. Besides in sports, I've also observed this in other competitions such as online or board games, where anger due to a loss begets fiery language and general toxicity.
Additionally, I have recognized many situations where two parties escalate conflict due to both feeling that they are unshakably correct. In such cases, the conflict quickly spirals out of control, as each entity becomes increasingly convinced that they are correcting unfair treatment conducted by the other. Especially when a person is feeling positive emotions, perceived slights can quickly lead to disagreements and outrage.
Hopefully at this point you've been convinced or can at least believe that people losing control often ends poorly. In terms of remedies, I'm still searching for solutions to avoid and defuse such events, as well as the less harmful but incredibly common "autopilot". It's relatively easy to tell yourself to not lose control, but it is often hard to follow such a plan in the moment. A minimal effort might involve recognizing when this is happening to others, and figuring out how to get people to think and act normally instead of impulsively.
This post may as well be titled "You should be calm" or "How to avoid common mistakes".
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