The decision after cooling down

A strong emotion narrows the field of view.

In anger you see the injustice and almost nothing of the consequences of your reply. Being in love shows you the virtues and temporarily reclassifies the faults as charming quirks. Hunger turns a shop into an exhibition of urgently required goods.

An emotion does not automatically make a decision wrong. It reports values and needs that dry calculation may miss.

But an irreversible action is better kept away from the emotional peak.

A pause is especially useful before you:

• send an angry letter;
• end a relationship;
• make a large purchase;
• agree to a long-term commitment;
• accuse someone publicly;
• resign without a plan;
• promise something that will be hard to deliver.

You can write the draft straight away. That preserves the thought and takes off some of the pressure. Sending it can wait.

The pause must not become a way of never mentioning anything unpleasant. “I’m waiting for the emotions to settle” sometimes means “I hope the problem will disappear on its own”.

The emotion deserves attention. The send button deserves a separate decision. Once you have cooled down, go back to the message and check:

• what I want to achieve;
• what is a fact;
• what is an interpretation;
• which part can be worded without accusation;
• what action is expected from the other person;
• whether I am ready for them to refuse.

A technical device works better than persuasion: write the letter in full, with every phrase, and do not send it until morning. In the morning it turns out that three of the five paragraphs were addressed not to the recipient but to yourself, one contained a fact genuinely worth reporting, and another contained a threat the author never intended to carry out. What goes out is a rewritten six-line version, and it works better than the original. The draft, though, is worth writing at once and in full, including the part that will never be sent: it relieves the pressure better than trying to calm down by force of will.

The reverse is worth checking too. If a day later the text still seems just as necessary and the wording just as right, the emotion was not an obstacle but information: it spotted the violation before the calculation did.