One of the most forceful influences on human behaviour is emotion. Emotions are both natural and instinctive.  They are a state of mind derived from one’s circumstances.

Our interractions  with others or things that happen or we think will happen define our mood.  Happiness, sadness, fear, anxiety, anger are just a few examples of the pelthora of English words we use to describe our mood setting emotions.

Regretting your Behaviour

Most often,  the behaviours we regret most are those which arise from strong emotional moods.  A key attribute of emotions is the way they shut down the logical thinking centers of the brain.

This makes it harder to make a good decision because the analytic functions are shut down.  Often the focus of the emotions, (anger, hurt, humiliation etc) result in very focused behaviour, not focused on the root cause but rather on resolving the emotion.

Reasoned analysis enables a weighing of benefits while balanced against negative consequences of your actions.  This is likely to reduce the risk of you having regrets later.

Managing your emotions

For each of us, the techniques best used to allow emotions to subside before responding are unique.  That is ever individual needs to customize their appoach to holding a resonse to circumstaces until it can be a reasoned one.

The commonalities for everyone is to first recognize your emotional state, second deal with your emotions yourself, third consider a reasoned response and finally, act.