Impulse

It may be inevitable that we let our emotions cloud our judgment. In the heat of the moment, in the face of someone shaming us and shouting at us, deriding our thoughts and feelings—our consciousness aroused as it is bombarded by this torrent of intense stimuli—it can be notoriously difficult to countervail our impulses to fight back, or to cower away. 

We can always try to remind ourselves to eschew the temerity and impudence of the lizard brain, to instead make incisive rational arguments and put aside our personal feelings, but reminding only goes so far in the face of overwhelming, uncontrollable emotion. Like many facets of our lives—perhaps it is the meaning of life for all we know—we fight an uphill battle against ourselves and our very nature to do what we know is right. So many of us fall prey to our selfish desires and impulses, whether porn or sex, drugs or alcohol, social media or gaming. As it turns out, the pathway to addiction looks eerily similar to the pathway to ignorance.

In the same way we strive to address the clearly unhealthy addictions of our lives—which fundamentally is an exercise of self-awareness and impulse control—we can simultaneously strive to combat our irrationality and intolerance.