S1E4 – Mental Wealth_ Why Do We Over-React And Lose Our Wealth – The Muslim Mind Explained

It's mental wealth with Dr. tk Harris. This channel is about becoming more yourself. And the reason we are going through the various parts of the mind is that the better you know the mind, the more you can come to understand yourself as an individual, and to make the best of who you are. The question we're asking now is, why do we overreact? Well, there is one very simple answer. We are designed to overreact all the time, to everything.

This is our basic biological nature.

It's important to get to know the knifes which is where this comes from. Because the more you understand it, the more you can understand both its positives and negatives.

The knifes has four distinctive qualities. First, it's very strong, it can overpower the intellect. Second, it's very rapid, it acts more quickly than the intellect. Thirdly, it's non verbal, it doesn't rely on words. And fourthly, it's often unconscious, you can't help the way you feel about certain things. If we look at this more closely, we'll see how we jumped to conclusions about things, which can sometimes be useful, but can often be troublesome. You can judge a friend or a new person based on their eye contact, or whether they're smiling.

You can judge the quality of something you've bought, based on whether other people approve of it, or whether some kind of celebrity endorsed it.

You can see how these things might be useful, but can often be inaccurate and unhelpful, leading us to be insecure.

Now, it turns out that the enough's has got a number of drives. There's so many drives around that there's too many to list here. And I've outlined them in much greater detail in the two books, which are worth plugging here. Instant actions and instant insights, get the links in the description.

We'll just look at a few qualities here so that we can get a general impression. Firstly, the knifes might have a drive towards safety. If you have a very safety oriented enough, and you'll be trying to not do anything too adventurous and to prevent yourself from getting involved in things which might be risky or untested. Now you can see that this might have a use. But if it's turned up too high, it means you simply never risk any change. This can leave you isolated, and unadaptable. Secondly, the knifes could drive you to seek status and respect. Why is this useful? Well, in a society where we live in groups, it's useful to know where we stand in a hierarchy, and to know our

role. Once there's clarity of role, we can work together to get more things done. However, this need to know where we can stand, if it gets out of control can lead us to become obsessed with status and role and become competitive and petty over the smallest things just because we want to ascend the ranks or to show off.

We have a drive towards possession. We want to acquire things and it's reasonable to understand why we want to have things that will protect us from a time of future need.

But when this gets out of control, we can end up having too many things. And we can all recall how holding things can be unhelpful and lead us to be socially isolated. The next drive of the nuts which is worth looking at is gossip and rumor. Why would gossip and rumor be a dry? Well, it helps to inform people. If something good happens or gets done by someone that information can spread quickly. But the problem is it can be exaggerated, or diminished. And by the time everyone's heard of it, a very different story has emerged. More importantly, it's bad news that travels fast. And the reason why bad news travels fast is we are inclined to want to know about anything that might be

a source of danger. So if somebody has done something wrong, the news of that will spread very quickly. Because we like to know where the danger is. The media always lead with stories of disaster or injury or hurt because they playing on this need for us to understand where the danger is we somehow become caught up in it. Again, these forces are involuntary so we always have to keep an eye on them. Otherwise we can end up convincing ourselves that the world outside is far too dangerous to walk around, which is clearly not a useful way to be. The next drive is that of making extreme decisions. You can either be too cautious or be the opposite, too risky. This happens especially

when people are in crowds. You take an extreme decision because emotions can be contagious. It can help people to stand up for themselves if one of them gets hurt.

The crowd can get angry and rally around that person to defend them. If the crowd is standing up for something important, they can all feel energized and purposeful, without a sense of uncertainty. However, when these things get turned up too high, again, they can lead to very risky decisions or disasters. Because these things are not based on fact, they're just based on instincts, which is all about the knifes. The final drive we can consider here is negative salience. And that is when we focus on the bad to the expense of the good, you only need to fall off a cliff once for it to kill you. So we tend to avoid situations which are perhaps risky, because we'd rather hold on to what we

have.

There are many other drives, which define a person, and different people have different amounts of different drive. And getting to know these drives will help you to understand who you are, and perhaps even help you to understand what makes other people tick. It's true to say that men and women are also given broadly different drives, it doesn't mean that the male nurse is fundamentally different to the female one. And in fact, they're not opposite ends of a spectrum. A person can have both male and typically female drives within them. But for the sake of biology and simplicity, we can broadly make a separation between the two. The male nurse tends to be quite concerned with

possession and with safety and security. So he will patrol what he has, and you'll tend to see what he has around him as his possession. This is quite good because it makes him protective. But if it gets turned up too high, he might end up seeing his children and his wife as his property. This could perhaps explain why so many cultures have treated women so badly, or even resorted to things like slavery, because they wanted to control people. Islam was very good and innovative and risky when it came out because it was the first religion that gave women the rights to have property. The female is more socially aware and more attuned to things like nurturing and caring.

When the female nurse is upset, it tends to blame itself. When the male nurse is upset, it tends to blame others. There is perhaps some truth behind the old adage that men lie and women cry. Again, these are generalities. These are simply broad descriptions of instincts that we see between male and female people. I hope this gives you a bit of an impression of why we overreact to things and in the next video, we will look at the intellect, how we solve problems and how we get things done. inshallah you are gaining a better understanding of yourself. And if you are, then please like and subscribe and tell as many people as possible because the more people watch this, the more we can

create this sort of material for free. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video, inshallah.