Germans have a brilliant word, Torschlusspanik

It means, gate-closing-panic. It’s a brilliant way of describing irrational, urgency based behaviour.

Urgency can make us do strange things, the overstimulated brain overweight’s the things put in front of it while in this state of Torschlusspanik. The fear of not having enough, the fear of missing out, leads us to behaving irrationally. This phenomenon recently led to brawls over toilet paper in supermarkets in Sydney and California, and armed robbers stole 600 rolls in Hong Kong, leaving the cash registers untouched.

Torschlusspanik overstimulates the area of the brain that balances value, it’s not a particular stretch to link this to the hole that we find ourselves in when we are chasing both ends of the rainbow at the same time, like back to back to back meetings, chasing client’s every thrown stick, sales-leads, indiscriminate attendance at away-days, conferences and award shows, (insert your own version of role-creep here), and the general malaise that could describe so many people’s over-tapped lives in organisations today.

The hit of reinforcement we get when we take some action, decide to go somewhere, agree to something, add one more thing to our plate is classic immediate gratification, it’s a hit of the good stuff. It’s what we’re searching for to alleviate the loss aversion triggered by Torschlusspanik. So what to do? Well as with everything, the first step is to admit that you’re doing it in the first place…

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