After-hours and intraday, you feel like a different person.

During offline planning, your mind is very clear. Without position pressure, emotions are also stable. At that time, decisions are entirely based on probabilistic thinking—"Stop loss if it drops 5%," logically airtight. But once real money is投入, especially watching the account numbers go down, you instantly transform from an analyst into a warrior.

Physiological changes are very direct: the amygdala, responsible for fear and stress responses in the brain, is ignited, while the prefrontal cortex that helps you make rational decisions is suppressed. At this moment, survival instincts override logical thinking. Even the clearest trading discipline before becomes pale and powerless in the face of intense physiological emotional storms.

The cruelest part is that your brain will also weave reasons to justify this avoidance.

Behavioral finance has long confirmed a harsh fact: the pain of loss is about 2.5 times the pleasure of equivalent gains. So, watching the stop loss trigger and a chunk of your account being definitively cut away is psychologically torturous, comparable to a minor trauma. To escape this pain, many subconsciously interpret "executing a stop loss" as "admitting I was wrong."

And then? The brain starts to spin stories. "Wait a bit longer, maybe it's just a pullback," "Perhaps it's the market maker's shakeout," "News should be coming." You've definitely heard these self-hypnotic lines—and you've probably said them too.

When rationality completely leaves, "hope" becomes your ruler. You no longer look at price signals but start praying for the market to turn around. Replacing hard data with a幻想 of expectation. The result? That critical 5% often turns into 15%, or even worse.