It is March 23rd, 2020. For the past ten days, I have watched the Covid-19 virus tighten its grip on North America — and with it, I have felt an extraordinary range of emotions cycle through me in a matter of hours. If you are reading this from inside that same experience, I suspect you will recognize most of them.
Ten Days That Changed Everything
The first feeling was a kind of calm resolve. Cases had arrived in our community, and my initial posture was to stay level-headed: go with the flow, keep calm, trust the systems. That resolve lasted about 48 hours.
Then came sadness. My son told me about a close friend of his who owns a small business — a venture built from nothing, with suppliers counting on him, employees depending on their paychecks, and a wife and newborn at home with very little money in the bank. The business was not going to survive this. The sadness I felt was not abstract. It had a face and a story attached to it.
After sadness came fear. I started running scenarios in my head about my own business, about the market, about what generating revenue in these conditions even looks like. Each scenario was worse than the last. The spiral was fast and surprisingly easy to fall into.
But this morning, something shifted. I found a deep sense of peace — not because the facts changed, but because I shifted my attention toward what I actually have rather than what I might lose. That shift of attention is the whole point of this post.
Why We Feel Before We Think
I spend a significant portion of my professional life teaching the neuroscience of how the brain works when it is asked to change. Watching these emotions happen in real time — in myself, in the people around me — has been a somewhat surreal exercise. A bit like being a cardiologist who notices his own heart rate spike and has to decide whether to treat it or observe it.
Here is what we know to be true: all decisions we make are initiated and executed emotionally first. The feeling precedes the action. The meaning we assign to a situation generates an emotion, and that emotion drives behavior. Rational thought enters the process only after the emotional brain has already made its move.
In other words, how you feel about a situation will determine what you do in response to it. That is not a weakness or a flaw in human design. It is simply how the brain is wired.
The Limbic System Is Always in Charge
The limbic system — the feeling brain — is always the core decision-maker. It operates faster, runs deeper, and carries more authority than the neocortex, which most of us think of as the "rational" part of the brain. The neocortex can observe, analyze, and reflect. But it cannot override the limbic system on its own. It can only justify or second-guess what the limbic system has already set in motion.
Dr. Antonio Damasio has spent decades demonstrating that emotional processing is not optional for decision-making. It is not the thing that gets in the way of clear thinking. It is the thing that makes clear thinking possible. Strip the emotion out, and the rational brain loses its compass entirely.
This is why telling someone to "calm down and think rationally" rarely works. It asks the neocortex to do something it is not capable of doing unilaterally. The limbic system will not be ordered to stand down. It has to be given a reason to reassign the meaning it attached to the situation in the first place.
How Meaning Drives the Cycle
The meaning we assign to a situation drives the emotion. The emotion drives the behavior. That is the cycle. If you want to change the behavior, you have to go back to the beginning of the chain: you have to change the meaning.
That sounds simple. It is not easy.
During the past ten days, the meaning I assigned to the pandemic was almost entirely threat-oriented. Lost revenue. Business at risk. Supply chains disrupted. Uncertainty compounding. Each of those meanings generated a predictable emotion — fear, scarcity, dread — and those emotions produced a predictable set of behaviors: scenario planning for the worst, pulling back, protecting resources.
None of that is wrong, exactly. Some scenario planning is useful. Some protective instincts are rational. But when threat-oriented meaning is the only lens available, the brain gets trapped in a loop it cannot exit on its own. The limbic system keeps running the same threat-response program because the meaning that triggered it has not changed.
The shift this morning came when I deliberately changed the meaning. Instead of "what might I lose," I reoriented toward "what do I actually have." The facts of my situation did not change. The meaning I assigned to those facts did. And almost immediately, the emotional experience changed with it.
The Question That Changes Everything
Here is where the story of my son's friend comes back in.
After my son shared the weight of his friend's situation — the failing business, the newborn, the mounting debt, the uncertainty — my wife asked a single question: "How can you help?"
That question did everything.
It changed the meaning of the situation. My son had been sitting in sadness and anger, two emotions that produce inward, protective behavior. "How can you help?" redirected the meaning from "this is a loss I cannot prevent" to "this is a problem I can do something about." The emotional experience shifted from sadness and anger to agency and purpose. The behavior followed: he found a grocery store gift card, reached out to two friends, and convinced them to match the gift. A small act. A real one. A little hope in dark times.
The question did not change the facts. His friend still has a struggling business and a newborn and very little money. But the meaning changed. The emotion changed. The behavior changed. That is the cycle in action.
Good questions are one of the most reliable tools we have for reassigning meaning. "How can you help?" is a particularly powerful one because it moves the brain from passive observation to active contribution. It is nearly impossible to stay in a threat-response emotional state when you are genuinely focused on what you can do for someone else.
Changing the Meaning in Real Time
I want to be careful not to overstate what meaning-reassignment can do. The pandemic is real. The economic damage is real. The fear is legitimate. None of this is a mindset problem with a simple solution.
But within the real and legitimate weight of this moment, there is a genuine choice about the meaning we assign to what is happening. That choice has consequences. It will shape the emotions we carry, and those emotions will shape the behaviors we produce — in our businesses, in our families, in our communities.
The meaning of "crisis to be feared" is not untrue. But it is incomplete. The meaning of "opportunity to do well by others who are in need" is also available, and it produces a very different emotional response, which produces a very different set of behaviors.
You do not have to choose between those two meanings. Both can be true at the same time. The question is which one you are letting the limbic system run on — because whichever meaning takes up residence in that system will drive everything that follows.
This is not easy. It requires deliberate attention and consistent practice. But the neuroscience is clear: behavior follows emotion, emotion follows meaning, and meaning is something we have more control over than most of us believe.
If there is one practical take from this: try the question. For yourself, or for someone near you who is struggling right now. "How can you help?" Watch what it does to the meaning, and then watch what follows from there.
If you are working through what this kind of behavior change looks like inside your organization — how to build leaders who can hold their people through uncertainty and redirect meaning toward action — start a conversation with Braintrust. That is exactly the work we do.
