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It’s a wonder that good decisions are ever made by the species known as Homo Sapiens. The reality is that the cards are stacked against us whenever we are faced with choices, especially when the decisions are of consequence. Think about all of the horrendously bad decisions that have been made in recent history and how obviously bad they look in our rear-view mirrors. The Iraq war, securitizing mortgages, Congress not voting for background checks on gun purchases, another season of The Bachelor, the list goes on. And bad decisions don’t just occur at the highest levels of government or business; rather, everyday folks can make appalling decisions as well, whether getting married to that particular person (50% of marriages end in divorce), wearing those low-cut jeans, buying a Hummer, or going into debt to remodel the kitchen.

The fact is that humans are behind the eight ball from the get-go when it comes to making decisions. Children are wholly ill equipped to for decision making. They lack knowledge, experience, and perspective. Children are myopic, impulsive, and easily persuaded. It doesn’t get much better during adolescence when teenagers are driven by raging hormones, underdeveloped self-identities, and peer and cultural pressure.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle is neurological where the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with executive functioning, doesn’t fully develop until the early twenties. Executive functioning directly influence decision making because it regulates, controls, and manages our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. It influences our reactions to new, ambiguous, and difficult situations. It helps us to weigh risks and rewards and short- and long-term consequences. Executive functioning assists us in planning, organizing, and executing decisions and, importantly, it can prevent us from making rash and potentially harmful decisions.

It doesn’t get any easier as adults to make good decisions either. A wide range of research has demonstrated that we are often at the mercy of psychological, emotional, social, and situational influences when we make decisions. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, has demonstrated the powerful effect that cognitive biases have on our decision making. Cognitive biases involve the tendency to draw conclusions and make decisions based on limited information or self-interest. An extensive body of research has demonstrated that these biases can lead to irrational decisions at very level of society.

Our decision making is also influenced by our emotional states and social world in ways both overt and subtle, making us appear quite fickle in what we decide. For example, feeling stressed or rushed alters our decisions. The decisions we make are affected by our mood. We make different decisions based on whether we are feeling happy, contemplative, or disgust. As considerable research on peer pressure and groupthink has demonstrated, our decisions are also significantly influenced by social forces, whether friends and family, cultural messages, or societal norms.

Another thing I learned recently is that emotionally laden information (i.e., information that is threatening in some way) goes directly to the emotional center of the brain, including the amygdala and related structures. This connection isn’t surprising given the role that our emotions play in our survival; we need to receive and act on threatening information right away or we may die.

Unfortunately, the rapid decision-making associated with triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that served humans well during primitive times is generally ineffective at helping us make good decisions about complex issues in modern times. And emotionally relevant decisions are the ones that are usually the most important and most necessary to get right. What is even more unsettling is that there are no direct neurological pathways to the prefrontal cortex; all emotional information goes through the primitive emotional brain. So, the pre-frontal cortex is at a severe disadvantage in contributing to decision making because the information it receives is “old news,” secondhand, and tainted by emotions.

We can only conclude that we humans are behind the eight ball when it comes to making decisions and we have a long history documenting just that. Yet somehow we do find ways to make good decisions, whether buying a Prius, not investing with Lehman Brothers, or not invading Iran.

With such a strong current pulling us in the direction of bad decisions, what can we do to increase our chances of making good decisions? Here are a few strategies:

• Don’t make knee-jerk decisions: Give yourself time to reflect on your decisions before you commit to them.
• Don’t let your emotions make your decisions: The more distance you can create between your emotions and your decisions, the easier it will be for your pre-frontal cortex to “get in the game.”
• Look at your decisions from many perspectives: The more information you have, the more you will engage your pre-frontal cortex and the more reasoned your decisions will be.
• Talk to other people about your decisions: People who know you well can identify your biases, offer helpful viewpoints, and reality test your decisions.

Of course, there is no way we can completely resist all of the genetic, neurological, psychological, emotional, and social forces that impact our decision making. But these few simple steps can prevent us from making truly appalling decisions like, say, attacking North Korea or watching the latest music video from Psy.

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In a recent post, I suggested that our survival instinct, which has served us so well for so long, may now be failing us. Why? because the reactions that arise as part of the fight-or-flight response are often no longer effective in a world that is far more complex, unpredictable, and uncontrollable than that of our primitive ancestors’ from which the survival instinct arose. In this post, I want to explore further this disconnect between our survival instinct and what kind of new survival instinct might work better today.

At the heart of the fight-or-flight response are what I call the “Big Three” reactions to threats to our survival: fear, gloom, and panic. First, the emotional reaction of fear is instantaneous and intense, ensuring that we recognize and respond to the perceived threat. In other words, fear causes us to just act fast! Fear paralyzes our ability to think clearly, identify problems, and make deliberate decisions because thinking takes time and there just wasn’t enough time back in the cavepeople days for us; the only viable options were to fight or flee.

Many of today’s threats can’t be fought because there is no readily confrontable enemy. And they can’t be run away from because many are diffuse rather than localized; you can run, but you can’t hide. And burying your head in the sand may work for ostriches, but for humans, it leaves a very important part of the body exposed!

Second, gloom can work if the threat is clear and present. Focusing on the negative dimensions of the threat, namely, what can go wrong in the near term, ensured that we stayed vigilant to the most relevant dangers, allowing us to respond most quickly. By focusing on the negative aspects of the threat during primitive times, our ancestors had the simple choice of fighting or fleeing. These primitive threats were also usually short lived, for example, an attacking animal or rival tribe, so gloom had no long-term implications.

But today’s threats are often amorphous, distant, and long lasting. So the initial gloom, which had short-term survival benefits, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that worsens the threat. We saw this play out with the ongoing financial crisis. Many people distrusted the stock market. Many businesses had little confidence in their own survival. And governments lost faith in their ability to overcome the crisis. In all these cases, an attitude of gloom led to behavior that may have worsened the financial crisis.

Third, panic causes knee-jerk reactions that produce immediate and frenzied behavior. Panic was quite functional back in prehistoric days because it triggered in our ancestors either a furious attack or a frantic retreat from the threat. Panic in response to many of today’s crises, however, produces actions that are more ill-advised and destructive than helpful. Where there should be patience, there was haste. Where there should have been reasoned deliberation, there was irrationality. Where there should have been calm, there was, well, panic.

In the panic after the fall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers and the stock market crash that followed, many people fled the financial markets, many businesses drastically cut costs by letting go of employees, and governments went into austerity mode at the worst possible time. All of these efforts were intended to ensure everyone’s respective survival, but such panicked behavior was short-sighted and had the exact opposite effect in the long run.

If this survival instinct that is so deeply woven into our DNA no longer fulfills our most basic needs to survive, what new form of survival instinct do we need to evolve to help us to survive in the concrete, metal, and hard-wired world in which we now live? As with earlier stages of evolution, we need to adapt to our surroundings and produce a shift that will be more effective than the fight-or-flight response that served us so well for these hundreds of thousands of years. Admittedly though, we will want to leave a bit of the old-school survival instinct and its accompanying fear, gloom, and panic in our genes for when an immediate threat arises.

This new survival instinct would be the antithesis of the fight-or-flight reaction. Instead of overwhelming and uncontrollable fear, a threat would trigger courage, which isn’t the absence of fear—it’s impossible to not to experience fear in the face of a threat—but rather the ability to confront the fear and act proactively and deliberately despite it. It involves being able to manage negative emotions, such as fear, anger, frustration, and despair, and to generate helpful emotions, including hope, inspiration, excitement, and pride.

Instead of gloom, we would engage in rational thinking that includes calculated risk-reward analysis, in-depth problem solving, and effective decision making. It means being cognizant of the threat, but focusing more on finding solutions. This reasoned thinking would require that people set aside differences, establish priorities, and work together—because that is the rational thing to do in the face of significant societal threats—to produce answers to the pressing dangers that today’s threats present to us.

Finally, instead of panic, we would take calm and measured action that is directed and purposeful.  This new survival instinct would act as the foundation for creating change that can actually increase our chances of surviving and thriving during periods of threat. What results is a psychology that is diametrically opposed to and entirely more effective than the survival instinct that now dominated our lives.

We don’t need to wait for evolution to adapt our survival instinct to today’s challenges. Rather, we already have the capacity to override our primitive survival instinct.  We are already capable of experiencing courage, thinking rationally, and acting deliberately. In fact, we see this reaction quite a bit these days, though obviously not enough to avert disaster in many cases. That is the gift that evolution has also given us; it’s called the cerebral cortex. I guess we just need to exercise that “muscle” more so that when faced with a real 21^st-century threat, we use it rather than falling back on our primitive flight-or-flight reaction which doesn’t do us much good any longer.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about what I thought was the worst possible emotion. There are certainly enough worthy aspirants including hate, anger, and sadness. But I felt regret was the winner (or should I say loser) because its causes can’t be undone, it slowly eats away at your soul, and it can last a lifetime.

It occurred to me that, as long as I’m thinking about emotions, I would also nominate what I believe to be the best possible emotion. As with bad emotions, there are plenty of candidates: love, happiness, joy, excitement, and inspiration. But I thought, “What positive emotion underlies and allows us to experience all of those other wonderful emotions? What emotion, in its absence, prevents us from feeling good?”

And the winner of the Best Possible Emotion award goes to…Hope. Why hope?, you ask. Because I believe that it is the wellspring from which all other good emotions emerge. What is hope? It is the basic belief that good things will happen. Hope creates possibilities. Hope instills in us a sense of expectation and anticipation that what we want can come true.

Hope is the antithesis of regret in several ways. Where regret causes us to dwell on the past, hope directs our gaze to the future. Regret is about lost opportunity, while hope is about opportunity to be gained. We feel regret for our inaction, for what we didn’t do. We feel hope for our action, for what we can do.

To see the power of hope, close your eyes and imagine the feeling of having no hope. What are the dominant emotions that are present? Fear, frustration, sadness, despair. A dark cloud hovers over you. Can you feel any positive emotions in the absence of hope? I don’t think so. Hope, in fact, is the only way to get rid of those decidedly unpleasant emotions.

Now, fill yourself with hope and tell me what other emotions come to the fore? Well, just about all the great emotions that are out there. You feel energetic, happy, and that dark cloud lifts and the sun shines in your soul.

Hope isn’t just a pleasant feeling. Rather, it is empowering. It gives us confidence that if we try, we can succeed. Hope gives us the motivation to pursue possibilities and opportunities. Hope drives us to work hard and persist even in the face of obstacles, setbacks, and failure. Why? Because even during the darkest times, there is hope, but only if we feel it.

Is there anything more American than hope? I say no. Hope is woven into the very fabric of the American narrative. Hope is what propelled the pilgrims to seek religious freedom in the New World. It was imbued in the thinking of the Founding Fathers that resulted in the Constitution. Hope lay at the heart of every movement that has shaped our history, from abolitionism, to Manifest Destiny, to the Suffragists, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to the present.

Hope lies at the core of the American Dream. Hope is what brought people from all over the world to the U.S. looking for a better life. It’s what drove immigrant parents to work long hours at tedious jobs to give their children the chance to go to college and realize the American Dream. Hope is what created the middle class. It’s also what has driven America to become the richest country in the world, a leader in innovation, and a beacon of light for peoples and countries with little reason for hope.

Yet, as I write this post, hope seems to be in ever-decreasing supply in America these days. There is a palatable sense of hope lost running through our country today. As the haves have more and the have-notes have fewer opportunities to have more, the sense of hope that made America such a vital and inspiring country seems to be fading. The American Dream seems more like a dream than a possibility now.

I can see hopelessness in so many of our institutions. It is no more apparent than in our toxic political system where those who purportedly represent us are more concerned with their own interests than forging alliances that will actually give us hope. And those with extreme ideologies are more interested in demonization and conquest than civility, compromise, and solutions.

Our public education system seems irreparably broken for those poor and minority children who were once the hopeful recipients of the American Dream and an essential source of our human capital. Our economic engine that once propelled the vehicles that people drove with hope is now so corrupted or flawed that there is little reason for many Americans to get in the metaphorical driver’s seat.

Could the epidemic of obesity, fiscal irresponsibility, and absorption in the fantasy world of our media-fueled culture that has gripped America be a reflection of the nihilism—the antithesis of hope—that many in our country feel? “We have no chance, so we might as well bury our heads in the sand and enjoy ourselves.” Could the rise in narcissism and the decline in empathy among our youth suggest a “circling of the wagons” on the self to ensure our individual survival during a time when hope for survival, at least of the economic variety, seems to be at a low point?

I think back wistfully to 2008 and then-candidate Obama’s mantra of hope as exemplified by the iconic multicolored poster. Were we so naïve to think there was hope? I hope not. And will the formerly indomitable spirit of hope that has taken America this far reemerge like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I hope so.

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The human instinct to survive is our most powerful drive. Since animals climbed out of the primordial muck and as our early ancestors rose from all fours to walk upright, evolution has been guided by its ability to help us survive and reproduce. Just about everything that humans have become serves that essential purpose, in how we think, what emotions we experience, and the ways we behave and interact with others.

Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, has demonstrated that how we think has clear evolutionary value. The way we process and remember information, problem solve, and make decisions, what he calls “cognitive biases,” don’t always result in the most accurate or best outcomes, but they are most efficient in terms of time and energy expenditure and “good enough” for our survival.

Our emotions have also evolved to our greatest survival benefit. So-called “hot” emotions, such as surprise and disgust, are experienced instantaneously and powerfully. These emotions signal an imminent threat to our survival which then initiates urgent action in response to its cause (e.g., an attacker or rotten food, respectively) that increases our chances of survival (more on that shortly). In contrast, “cool” emotions, such as joy and love, typically take longer to be felt and are usually less intense initially because there isn’t a pressing need to experience them strongly or right away.

The way we think and the emotions we feel that have survival value then produce behaviors that increase our chances of survival. Our “fight or flight” reaction may be our best-known expression of our survival instinct. This response set is triggered when we (and all animals) perceive a situation as a threat to our existence; our sympathetic nervous system activates rapid emotional, psychological, and physical changes. Emotionally, we feel either fear or anger intensely. Psychologically, our senses are heightened and we’re able to make faster decisions. Physically, we get a shot of adrenaline, our heart rate increases, blood flow is diverted to essential parts of the body, and we experience increased strength and stamina. Without these essential changes, our primitive forbearers would have died, their genes wouldn’t have been passed on, and we wouldn’t be living large in 2012 America.

Now, we get to the question that I pose in the title of this post: Is our survival instinct failing us? Our fight-or-flight reaction worked well for many millennia. The most common threats to humans remained fairly simple and obvious, for example, the threat from a wild animal or a rival tribesman. Vanquishing the threat through fighting or distancing it through fleeing, our survival was ensured.

Unfortunately, what worked as cave people doesn’t necessarily work in the 21^st century. You may ask: Why would a reaction that has served us so well, first, as animals that walked the earth some 300 million years ago and, later, as homo sapiens for the past 200,000 years, not work now? The answer lies in the increased complexity of life that has evolved as humankind has become more civilized and as technological advancements have changed our individual, social, and work lives.

The notion of survival and how best to ensure it has changed dramatically since the earliest days of humankind. It’s no longer about staying alive by fighting or fleeing in the face of an immediate threat. Survival isn’t even about putting a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food on the table. These essentials haven’t changed much since we lived in caves (though our “caves” have gotten larger, our clothes fancier, and our food better tasting).

The fight-or-flight reaction to threats is far too simplistic to effectively overcome many of those we are confronted with today. Unlike threats of the past, today’s are often neither immediate, foreseeable, or understandable, much less controllable. In fact, not only is this hard-wired response often not effective, but it can be counterproductive to our survival.

Let’s consider several examples. The Great Recession presented an existential threat to our survival. When the fight-or-flight reaction of people kicked in after seeing the world’s stock markets crash and their retirement funds decimated, what did many do? They attempted to flee the situation by liquidating their investment portfolios which, from what I understand from my friends in the financial world, was the worst thing to do for most people.

Also, you learn that you didn’t get the promotion you had expected. You feel threatened because it jeopardizes your financial future and your career aspirations.  Your fight-or-flight reaction kicks in and you either: a) storm into your boss’s office in a rage and threaten her life, or b) leave the office in tears and never return. Clearly, neither are responses that will help your long-term survival, yet they have been wired into us for eons.

This analysis demonstrates that the survival instinct as it has existed for so many thousands of years may have outlived its usefulness. In an ideal world, the fight-or-flight reaction would go the way of the dinosaurs and the appendix, extinct or having no impact on us, respectively (except for the occasional appendicitis).

Okay, maybe it shouldn’t go away completely. Realistically, there are some people in modern society who still need it to function old-style, for example, soldiers on the battlefield, 20-somethings walking down the mean streets of SoHo at 2 am, and Tiger Moms who learn their second grader got a B+ in spelling. I’m obviously being facetious about the latter two, but perhaps fight or flight doesn’t even work that well in modern-day warfare either.

Yet, this ancient reaction is not going away any time soon; evolution is a very slow process. This programmed response to threats, which is coded into our very genes, cannot be readily excised from our psyches. Yes, over the next few hundred thousand years, our fight-or-flight reaction will likely evolve to better meet the threats we now face (though, of course, by then, the threats will likely have changed too).

But that very evolution can begin right now. Relying on the “survival of the fittest” maxim, those who respond with “old school” fight or flight today will not likely survive and pass on their outmoded genes. By contrast, those who learn to control and direct those primitive instinctive reactions will survive and their genes will begin the inevitable march toward a new and more adaptive response to today’s threats.