You’re sitting there, minding your business, when suddenly someone you had an argument with earlier hits you with the kind of remark that makes your soul leave your body for a brief vacation. Your mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Your brain, the traitorous organ it is, offers only radio silence. You manage a weak chuckle, an awkward mumble and maybe a strained face, but before you know it, the moment passes.
Then, as you’re lying in bed that night, it hits you like the Orient Express railway train, carrying nothing but pure wit: Oh my god, I should’ve said THAT!
Welcome to l’esprit de l’escalier, the fancy French term for that special feeling of regret you experience when your genius comebacks arrive approximately three business days too late.
The 18th century philosopher ‘Denis Diderot’ came up with this phenomenon which can only mean he probably spent a lot of time fuming in bathrooms after parties.
The topic of the brain seems to be a common theme in my articles as so many of my questions are linked to it. As we know, it is a very complex organ that can solve intricate problems as one of the many talents it beholds. But the second someone throws a shady comment your way? It leaves the country quicker than Taylor Swift on her private jet.
Luckily, there is a neurological reason for all of this. The brain consists of three parts: the lizard brain, the emotional mammalian brain, and the executive functioning cortical brain. Guess which one evolved first and which last? The lizard brain was first of course, and it is responsible for monitoring and regulating our everyday body needs and for responding to threat by mostly freezing.
The mammalian brain is where our amygdala resides, and this little number is the smoke detector. It is responsible – among other things – for mobilizing our bodies at the times of threat.
The high functioning brain has only evolved recently, and in evolutionary terms it is quite new to the scene, but despite its tender age it is complex, and it is responsible for things like logic and language, telling time and social engagement.
So, we’ve all heard of the fight and flight response, this mechanism is activated by the older parts of our brain. When a threat is perceived, the smoke detector – amygdala – freaks out and sends the signals to the body to fight or run. The way our system works is that if the brain directs the body to respond to threat, then all rather unnecessary features shut down to some degree. Those useful features include language, time, social engagement, digestion, and critical thinking, among others. This is why we can be “stunned to silence” and we tend to remember only parts of what happened during a traumatic event.
So, stressful situations take us out of our high functioning brain. The trouble is that it is exactly there that the assessment of variables happens which in turn allows us to think of something awfully smart.
Therefore, it is not us being too slow to think of a response, it is our high functioning brain deactivating at the time when it needs to be fully activated. So instead of sulking in your chair thinking ‘Great, so I can’t even control if I can do a good comeback or not’. I have some potential solutions.
First, remember ‘less is more’. The best comebacks are not the most elaborate – sometimes a simple ‘wow, that was rude’ or even just ‘excuse me?’ does the trick. It is direct, it calls out the bad behaviour and doesn’t require you to summon Shakespearean levels of wit.
Secondly, reuse and borrow from the best. Keep a mental or actual list of go-to responses for common situations. Michelle Obama certainly did not come up with ‘when they go low, we go high’ on the spot – she polished the line over lots of time.
And lastly, just play dumb. One of the most effective ways to disarm a snarky comment is to respond with ‘what do you mean by that?’ This forces the other person to either backtrack or reiterate making them look like a fool. Either way, you win.
To finish, I hope you learnt the science behind our silence and ways to move around it and shock that person with a crucifying comeback that makes them stay up at night, regretting they ever bothered you in the first place (I’m joking but you know what I mean). See you next week for the next article of my series ‘Questions that need answers’.
