Lessons from Online Trading

One of my hobbies is trading on the stock market. I track these experiences on my NeuroTrade trading blog. Doing this is a really great way to drive out all your negative beliefs about two things: money and emotion. As you make profits, especially if they come fast and easily, you get a seratonin and dopamine rush. It can put you in a great mood for hours or days. And of course, if you spend the gains you made, tangible real world rewards in terms of material goods or experiences.

However if you lose money, or miss opportunities to make money that part of you knows you should have succeeded at, the emotions go quickly in the other direction. Cortizone levels spike, you get angry, stressed, mentally scattered, and make worse decisions, leading to further trading losses and lost opportunity.

I remember messing up yet another potential trade recently due to an inability to think clearly due to the emotions involved in trading, I got really emotional and angry with myself. I did some EFT processes to release the initial stress of the situation. In the somewhat clearer mental space that I created,  I started to wonder whether there was a link between my emotional state and my willingness to learn something from situations where my emotions were strongly activated.

So back to intense emotion and learning - not quite so clear is whether positive emotion blocks learning as well as negative emotion does. Typically, when people get excited, they become more motivated. Quantifying and encouraging motivation is a tricky task, and many factors come in play. I highly recommended reading "The neuroscience of motivation" by  Dr. Dean Mobbs and Walter McFarland in the latest NeuroLeadership journal to understand motivational factors in relationship to organizational environment.  But when excitement over ones own achievement is sustained for too long, there can be a slide into ego based thinking, which can impact ongoing learning just as much as negative emotion. You only have to look at various celebrity disasters to realize what occurs when too much achievement too quickly overwhelms someones life just as much as too little achievement can.

Whatever direction emotion takes you, the key skill that meditation adds is the ability to sort through emotion and increase your ability to self-regulate or manage emotion to the level appropriate with the size of the emotional obstacles that will come up. In fact, in every article in the current NeuroLeadership journal highlights in some way the role of emotional self-regulation. Self regulation of emotion is clearly a key skill that neuro-scientists will be explaining to us and studying in more and more detail in the years ahead. Sadly, academic journals are often long on referencing other academic studies and short on specific details on what you can do to achieve the things they are describing.