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In the moment emotions can lead us to make illogical decisions

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The way we field outcomes is path dependent. It doesn’t so much matter where we end up as how we got there. What has happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much more than how we are doing overall. That’s how we can win $100 and be sad, and lose $100 and be happy. The zoom lens doesn’t just magnify, it distorts. This is true whether we are in a casino, making investment decisions, in a relationship, or on the side of the road with a flat tire. If we got a big promotion last week and have a flat tire right now, we are cursing our lives, complaining about how unlucky we are. Our feelings are not a reaction to the average of how things are going. We feel sad if we are breaking even (or winning) on an investment that used to be valued much higher. In relationships, even small disagreements seem big in the midst of the disagreement. The problem in all these situations (and countless others) is that our in-the-moment emotions affect the quality of the decisions we make in those moments, and we are very willing to make decisions when we are not emotionally fit to do so.

Because poker players are in a constant struggle to keep in-the-moment fluctuations in perspective, their jargon has a variety of terms for the concept that “bad outcomes can have an impact on your emotions that compromise your decision-making going forward so that you make emotionally charged, irrational decisions that are likely to result in more bad outcomes that will then negatively impact your decision-making going forward and so on.” The most common is tilt. Tilt is the poker player’s worst enemy, and the word instantly communicates to other poker players that you were emotionally unhinged in your decision-making because of the way things turned out.* If you blow some recent event out of proportion and react in a drastic way, you’re on tilt.

By recognizing in advance these verbal and physiological signs that ticker watching is making us tilt, we can commit to develop certain habit routines at those moments. We can precommit to walk away from the situation when we feel the signs of tilt, whether it’s a fight with a spouse or child, aggravation in a work situation, or losing at a poker table. We can take some space till we calm down and get some perspective, recognizing that when we are on tilt we aren’t decision fit. Aphorisms like “take ten deep breaths” and “why don’t you sleep on it?” capture this desire to avoid decisions while on tilt. We can commit to asking ourselves the 10-10-10 questions or things like, “What’s happened to me in the past when I’ve felt this way?” or “Do I think it’s going to help me to be in this state while I’m making decisions?” Or we can gain perspective by asking how or whether this will have a real effect on our long-term happiness.