Why It's So Hard to Make the Right Decisions

Why making the right decisions so difficult?

Empathy gaps can manifest in our lives

Remember a time when you think you can speak up for yourself but when the time comes you ended up staying silent? This is a cold-to-hot empathy gap.

Remember another time when you finish a huge project and get a promotion? You feel elated, and are asked to take on another demanding project, then you briefly reflect on the life of the past few months and think: "well, it's not that bad". So you say yes to another few months of sleep deprivation. This is a hot-to-cold empathy gap.

The empathy gap impacted both my vacation and work trips

Empathy gaps make us difficult to predict our behaviors.
We failed to account for the emotional state when a future event happens.

One obvious example for me is when I decided to have a month-long travel abroad this summer, including a week's working holiday with colleagues. I thought of things that could happen, the activities, the accommodations, the cultural differences, etc. I feel I can handle that even though I have a social anxiety disorder. I prepared many solutions to ease my nerves, but when in the situation, I became too uptight to realize I was suppressing. My reactions even tricked my cognition that I was improving in social outings. I underestimate the struggle when I made plans for the trip, and the cold-to-hot empathy gaps result in a massive anxiety outbreak when I was sitting on the bathroom floor, crying.

Empathy gaps cause friction in my relationship

Empathy gaps also occur when we predict the behavior of others.

I remembered the fight that I had with my manager and I was told that I was not grateful enough. I was sad, upset, and pissed. I became defensive and couldn't understand the perspectives that he held. I was in a hot emotional state with an egocentric bias, his reactions were just unreasonable and insensitive to me at that time. The hot-to-cold empathy gaps result in a month-long conflict and broken trust. I finally can feel the reasoning behind the statement after I started practicing meditation.

Tips to mitigate empathy gaps

Empathy gaps are tricky to deal with because we are humans, and emotions are elements that make life abundant.

However, we can still try our best to make the right decisions for ourselves by mitigating empathy gaps and increasing the probability to achieve our goal.

A few techniques can help reduce empathy gaps:

1. Try to visualize the situation, instead of what you will do, imagine what you will think and how you will feel.

2. Think about what others will do if the same situation happens, and avoid overestimating or underestimating. It would be even better if you can consider past actions.

3. Some general techniques that are used a lot in meditation, such as acknowledging the existence of empathy gaps, slowing down the reasoning process, increasing self-awareness, and increasing accountability.
   

The empathy gaps are designed to add sparkles to our life journey. It reminds us to be kind to ourselves and others and slowing down can also be beneficial in this fast-paced world.