Tazwell's Razor
Never act on a thought born from emotion; wait for the feeling to pass first
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 82%
Tazwell's Razor is a simple decision rule: emotion is both a source of bias and a source of motivation, so we are most driven to act at exactly the moment our judgment is least reliable. The mechanism is to insert a deliberate pause between feeling and action. Gurwinder argues the self that acts under emotion is your 'most animal self' running on the reptilian brain, and that almost every decision made while emotional turns out suboptimal. Because most emotions last only minutes, the fix is to wait for the feeling to pass, then compare the hot action against the calm one. The gap between the two is usually enormous, which is why building a reflexive pause prevents a lifetime of avoidable regrets.
Origin
Gurwinder Bhogal coined 'Tazwell's Razor' in his mega-threads of concepts on Twitter/X, drawing on the affect heuristic and his own experience of writing spiteful things online a decade ago and later regretting them once calm.
Core principles
- 01You are not one self but a collection of selves; the emotional one is not your core self.
- 02Emotion evolved for motivation and for low-information snap decisions, not for good judgment.
- 03Emotions are transient and usually fade within minutes.
- 04The action you'd take while emotional almost always looks foolish once you're calm.
- 05You are most likely to act precisely when your judgment can least be trusted.
How to run it
- 1
Detect the emotional state
Catch the moment you feel angry, spiteful, anxious, or over-excited. Naming the feeling is what breaks its automatic control.
Pro tip The urge to 'be nasty back' online is the clearest tripwire; treat it as a signal, not a mandate.
- 2
Disown the impulse
Recognise that the self demanding action right now is your most primitive self, not the person you'd endorse when calm.
Watch out Do not rationalise the emotion as 'just being honest' — that is how regretful actions get justified.
- 3
Refuse to act while hot
Do not send the reply, the email, or make the decision. Hold the position without committing to any output.
Pro tip Draft it if you must, but never hit send while the feeling is live.
- 4
Wait for the emotion to pass
Most emotions weaken and fade within a few minutes. Give it that time deliberately rather than staying engaged with the trigger.
- 5
Compare hot versus calm
Once balanced, contrast the action you were about to take with what you'd now choose. The size of the gap teaches you to distrust emotional decisions.
Pro tip You can still reply — even be snarky — but do it in a way you'll endorse tomorrow.
In the wild
Gurwinder describes his younger self getting angry when someone said something nasty to him online. He'd fire back something spiteful, then read it later and think 'what an idiot I was', realising he'd become just as bad as the person who provoked him. He concluded that the self that wrote those things was not really him, because his calm self consistently regretted it. Now he still feels the urge but always waits for the emotion to pass before responding.
→ By waiting, he almost always finds the hot response would have been 'idiotic', and avoids the regret entirely.
Gurwinder generalises the rule to work communication: if you send an email in the spur of the moment while emotional, more often than not you later think 'I could have worded that a lot better.' The same balanced-state check applied to messages prevents damage to professional relationships.
→ Emails written from a calm state are clearer and cause fewer regrets than reactive ones.
Common mistakes
Trusting your gut as if it were wisdom
People remember when their gut was right and forget when it was wrong (confirmation bias), overrating emotional intuition. Raw emotion favours short-term impulses over long-term interests.
Confusing suppression with the razor
The goal is not to become a robot who feels nothing; it is to still feel the emotion but delay the action until judgment returns.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who fires off replies, emails, or big decisions in the heat of the moment and later regrets them.
Not ideal for
Genuine emergencies where an immediate instinctive response is required for safety.
From the transcript
“when you act when you're emotional you are an ambassador for your most primitive self”
“if you're going to make an important decision just wait for the emotion to pass it will pass”
“everybody is not a single person but is a collection of selves”
From the episode
17 Shocking Lessons About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal - #742
Gurwinder Bhogal