After-hours and intraday, it's like you've become a different person.

During offline planning, your mind is crystal clear. There's no position pressure, and your emotions are stable. Your decisions at that moment are purely probabilistic thinking—"must cut losses at 5% drawdown," flawless in logic. But the moment real money hits the account, especially watching those account numbers drop, you instantly transform from analyst to warrior.

The physiological changes are direct: the amygdala in your brain responsible for fear and stress responses gets activated, while the prefrontal cortex that helps you make rational decisions gets suppressed. At this moment, survival instinct crushes logical thinking. Whatever trading discipline seemed crystal clear before now appears utterly fragile against the violent storm of physical and emotional reactions.

The cruelest part is, your brain will even weave excuses for this avoidance.

Behavioral finance proved a brutal fact long ago: the pain of losses is approximately 2.5 times greater than the pleasure of equivalent gains. So watching your stop loss get triggered, watching a chunk of your account get cut away with certainty—that psychological torment is no less than a minor trauma. To escape this pain, many people unconsciously reinterpret "executing a stop loss" as "admitting I was wrong."

Then what? Your brain starts telling stories. "Just wait a bit more, maybe it's just a pullback," "could be institutional washout," "news should come out soon." You've definitely heard these self-hypnosis lines—and definitely said them too.

When rationality completely exits, "hope" becomes your master. You stop reading price signals and start praying the market reverses. You replace hard data with illusory expectations. The result? That critical 5% often becomes 15%, or worse.