The Perils of OverReaction.

 The great Rumi said, ' When the wind of Personal reaction comes I do not go along with it." How many of us actually lead reactive lives? I guess most of us. There is a big problem with that..While we homo-sapiens have evolved from our hunter-gatherer days to ultramodern societies, our genes have not evolved since the 1300 centuries. As hunter-gatherers, we roamed the forests and our Amygdala that controls our flight or fight response was our guide. It controlled all our reactions and saved our life in reaction to the intensity of the threat. It was a natural and noncomplex world out there then and Amygdala served us very well. But now the same Amygdala in the complex modern world is of limited use or rather harmful in many situations while we indulge in fight or flight response. I will explain how.

             The prefrontal cortex is thinking part of our brain. While crossing a road if you see a car coming towards you its normal to react and run to safety. But in important and highly complex social-economic political-legal health spheres of our lives we have to think of long term effects our decisions and most of the effects are second-order and third-order effects. The amygdala is inept for this task and this is the domain of the prefrontal cortex, the thinking and rational part of our brain This is why it is important to be Proactive and take decisions that serve us well, is in accordance with our value system and the society at large. If you introspect your reactive decisions you may like to revisit them if you could. In the current complex world, it is very very difficult to make a positive change and doing no harm or negative if often the new positive. To give a few examples, the Death rate has come down in the state of Delhi in COVID era due to less intervention by the doctors as people did not react by going to the doctors and cured themselves through non-intervention. Second, the declaration of sudden lockdown in reaction to COVID by Indian leadership has thrown India into the biggest economic crisis in more than 100 years. In a complex system, very deep thinking is required. If we lead reactive lives we are doomed.