Is It Rational to Be Irrational or Irrational to be Rational?

Why is it that we can completely understand something rationally, yet at times still react irrationally?

I’m sure many of you have experienced something like this when confronted with a fear or phobia. For example, I am deathly afraid of doctors, needles, and blood. Rationally I know that the needle isn’t going to hurt that bad, but I still freak out, start crying, and so forth.

Fears are the most obvious example, but it happens plenty of other times in life too. I’m sure you can think of a time or two when you wished you hadn’t overreacted.

However, at other times our emotions are completely controllable. For example, over the holidays, I started to get really annoyed with certain family members because they are ALWAYS late and on top of that they don’t even call. Those of us on time have to wait, while starving, for everyone else to finally show up. Well, I was working myself up to a fever pitch about the whole thing when all of a sudden it hit me that these were people I cared about and it wasn’t really worth getting mad over. The bad habit would probably never change so why should I create animosity between us? After I thought that, I totally calmed downed and everything is cool again.

So why, I ask you are we able to act rationally some times but not others?