Brain Wreck — Part I: When Feelings Pretend to Be Facts

A Field Guide to Bad Decisions and Why We Make Them

February Is for Bad Decisions

February is a strange month. It’s cold, it’s dark, and it’s wedged awkwardly between January’s “New Year, New Me” optimism and the whole “springtime, renewal, rebirth, winter storm that knocks out your power for three days” crap of March.

It’s also the only month where VD can refer to either Valentine’s Day or the consequences of celebrating it recklessly.

And because Valentine’s Day is basically a day dedicated to emotionally charged decision‑making, February is the perfect time to talk about why humans fall apart the moment feelings get involved. If history is any indication, most of us are about to make at least one questionable choice this month.

Like setting aside some of your precious free time to read this blog.

Maybe your February disaster is buying a Valentine’s Day gift strictly to avoid a dirty look. Maybe it’s deciding this is the month you’ll get in shape, only to land on your head eleven feet into your two‑mile run when you slip on some ice. Or maybe it’s going on a warm holiday to an all‑inclusive resort and then being banned from returning because your bar tab forced the hotel to lay off three maids, two chefs, and Paco the pool boy.

Whatever the case, February is a reminder that you are not the rational, logical being you pretend to be.

You are, at best, a well‑intentioned disaster — with either a $110 credit card receipt for roses that’ll be dead in under a week, a traumatic brain injury and an ego on life support, or a liver locked in a grim standoff with cirrhosis.

Or maybe all three. I’m not here to judge — or even educate, for that matter.

And nowhere is our ridiculous behavior more obvious than in the monumentally stupid decisions we make when emotions take the wheel — at work and at home — and our brains confidently lead us astray.

So let’s take a tour through the biases, fallacies, and emotional landmines that shape our lives. Because if we’re going to make bad decisions — and we are — we might as well understand why.

Your Brain: A Great Employee and Terrible Manager

Your brain is a marvel of evolution. It can recognize faces, remember song lyrics, and keep you alive without you having to consciously think about breathing — which is good, because many of us would forget. I’ve misplaced everything I own at least once.

But as impressive as everyone else’s brain is, it becomes a complete gong show the moment emotion enters the chat. Your brain is like that coworker who’s brilliant at one thing but completely incompetent at everything else — the kind of Rainman who can code an entire app in an afternoon but still has a VCR flashing 12:00.

To save energy, your brain relies on shortcuts — heuristics — because consciously processing every piece of information would be exhausting. And while these shortcuts helped our ancestors survive (“Hey, that lion looks hungry… I should probably run”), they’re less helpful in modern life (“Hey, that email looks urgent… I should probably panic”).

These shortcuts go from “useful survival tools” to “emotional toddlers with scissors.”

A few of the classics:

Confirmation bias

If you believe someone is lazy or selfish, you’ll ignore every moment they’re helpful or generous. And if you believe you are the helpful and generous one, you’ll ignore the evidence that you’re an incompetent loutish oaf. Emotion decides the story; your brain just edits the footage.

Availability heuristic

You believe the elevator is “always broken” because it broke once during move‑in day and you had to schlep a futon up four flights of stairs. (“PIVOT!!!”) Your frustration becomes the data point.

Sunk cost fallacy

You stay in a job, relationship, or at a blackjack table because you’ve already invested so much — time, energy, money, or emotional pride. Logic leaves the building; emotion keeps feeding the meter.

Families aren’t immune either. Every holiday gathering is basically a live demonstration of cognitive bias in action. Everyone remembers events differently, convinced that their version is correct, and no one has any evidence. It’s like watching a courtroom drama where all the eyewitnesses are blind, half of them are related to you, and the judge is on their third glass of wine.

Mints & Dough Roundup Ripple

A few years ago, someone discovered trace amounts of glyphosate — a herbicide commonly referred to as Roundup — in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Overnight, people became convinced it was safer to lick the production floor at Monsanto than eat a pint of Cherry Garcia.

But once you looked at the actual numbers, that panic vanished faster than that cheap friend of yours when it’s their turn to buy a round.

Chocolate Fudge Brownie had the highest levels of glyphosate — a terrifying 1.74 parts per billion.

To understand how microscopic that is, here are two ways to think about it:

A. 1.74 parts per billion is like dissolving a single teaspoon of glyphosate in an Olympic‑sized swimming pool. But (I hear you yell), glyphosate is toxic! Small amounts can be deadly! Fine. Let’s look at it another way.

2. Toxicologists use something called an LD₅₀ to compare acute toxicity — the lethal dose for 50% of test animals, expressed in milligrams per kilogram of body weight. The acute oral LD₅₀ for glyphosate is 4,900 mg/kg. That means an 80‑kg person with a death wish would need to consume 392,000 mg of glyphosate in one go.

At 1.74 parts per billion, a pint of ice cream weighing 424 grams contains 0.00074 mg of glyphosate. So to reach that theoretical LD₅₀ dose, our 80‑kg guinea pig would need to consume about 530 million pints of Chocolate Fudge Brownie. That’s like eating 1,000 pints of ice cream a second for almost a week. And even the most woebegone Hallmark Christmas movie heroine — the one who’s been single for twenty years and tells her dog between sobs that she has “everything she needs, right here” — couldn’t manage that feat.

For comparison, the LD₅₀ for sugar is 29,700 mg/kg, and because sugar is present at concentrations more than 150 million times higher than any glyphosate that might be present, about 21 pints would be enough to kill that same 80‑kg person from the sugar alone.

In other words, if you’re determined to kill yourself with ice cream, you may want to give your pancreas a courtesy call first.

This is a perfect example of how emotion steamrolls logic. We assume disaster first and check the facts and the math later — if we do at all.

The good news is that now that the numbers are straight in your head, you no longer have to worry about whether your apple pie is Roundup Ready.

How Not to Excel at Economic Policy

In 2010, two American economists — Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — published a paper called Growth in a Time of Debt. Their key finding was that once a country’s debt reached 90% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), economic growth dipped below zero to -0.1%. In other words, cross the 90% threshold and your economy starts to shrink.

It felt obvious that massive debt must be bad for economic growth. And when something feels obvious, our brains stop asking questions.

But government economists didn’t just nod knowingly and stroke their chins — they acted. Countries with high debt‑to‑GDP ratios used the paper to help justify sweeping austerity measures in the aftermath of the 2007–2009 global recession. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, the UK — all slashed spending and raised taxes, citing Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper as one of the tent poles holding up their argument.

Then along came Thomas Herndon, a grad student simply trying to replicate the paper’s results for a class assignment. He spent weeks trying, but no matter what he did, his numbers wouldn’t match.

Finally, in April 2013, Herndon found the problem.

The Excel spreadsheet used in the original paper had an error.

Specifically, the formulas excluded the first five countries alphabetically — including Canada — from the calculation. Once Herndon added them back in, the results changed dramatically: countries with debt above 90% didn’t experience negative growth. They averaged +2.2% growth instead.

That’s it. That was the whole issue. A range‑selection error in Excel.

And yet, governments had been using this flawed data — at least in part — to justify real‑world economic policies affecting millions of people.

When a conclusion feels right, we accept it as is. It’s a perfect example of how emotion — in this case fear of debt, fear of markets, or fear of political backlash — can make us unquestionably accept bad data.

So the next time you make a mistake at work, just remember: a spreadsheet error once helped shape national economic policy that was unnecessary (perhaps), ineffective (arguably), and that made wide swaths of Europe deeply unhappy (definitely).

To Be Continued…

So that’s fear and plausibility — the emotional shortcuts that convince us danger is everywhere, and that anything sounding smart must be true. But emotions aren’t the only saboteurs lurking in your skull.

Next time, we’ll look at the disasters that happen when math gets involved.

Because if you think feelings can derail your decision‑making, wait until you see what happens when probability, intuition, and spite join the party.

Like what you read? I write, rewrite, overthink, rewrite again, and eventually post these things in hopes they resonate. If something struck a chord, sparked an idea, or — most importantly — made you laugh, please drop a comment below. Sarcasm is welcome, cruelty is not. So be honest, and be nice. It’s possible to do both.

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