And hello to you. Today's bonus episode is all about finding a balance between too much logic and too much emotion.

Because being able to feel what you feel at the same time as logically processing it is a really great skill.

If we can listen to our emotions and understand why we feel the way we do and then use our

logical brain to come to a decision about what to do, then we all live happily ever after.

But that's really hard because our brain is evolved far too slowly to make that natural.

If you see a picture of the human brain, you'll see the prefrontal cortex where we do our thinking,

and right underneath it is the ancient limbic system that controls emotional drives, but they aren't

connected. Not directly anyway, so it's really slow, meaning it's easier to experience the world in extremes.

To either live in the rational, logical brain full of worries and catastrophes, or live in the emotional brain, full of sadness and grief.

And if you want to be happy, we need to be using both parts of our

brain, our conscious and our unconscious, our logical and our emotional brain. Sometimes people

call that the wise mind. It's a phrase that comes out of dialectic behaviour therapy. Whatever you call it,

it's about being emotional and rational. Respecting the way that we feel as something that shows us

our values, but also respecting logic and reason as a way of actually implementing those values.

Getting both parts of us to be working together at the same time

means implementing all of these different ramblings that you hear from me each week

because it's about having some understanding about why you feel the way that you feel,

accepting the way that you feel, and then acting appropriately.

You might have heard me say this quite a few times.

That means we need to lengthen the gap between being stimulated, angered, upset, whatever you want to call it, and then acting on it.

Like that time-honoured, take a few deep breaths and count to ten thing.

Only instead of counting to ten, you're asking yourself, what's really going on here?

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