Staring at the roof

Feeling confident right after something good happened to you and feeling low after a bad incident is not very uncommon, I suppose.

Let’s think about it.

Feeling confident, effectively, is a situation wherein your brain imagines situations of positive/desired outcomes of your actions. Why does it happen so strongly after a victory?

One way I think about it is:
Our brain tries to predict the outcome of our actions. There has to be a basis for the prediction. Else, all the possible outcomes would be equally likely. So it uses our past experiences and observations. The past experiences are stored in our memory. The more recent an incident, the higher is its weightage in the prediction. Right after an incident of undesired outcome, the most recent incident ‘biases’ the prediction towards highly undesirable outputs and thus the ‘low’ feeling.
Thinking about a situation where one ‘succeeded’ brings a sense of confidence and thus ‘positive thoughts’ give us strength.

If we think about it, the universe hasn’t changed the way it functions because of one desirable/undesirable incident that happened to a person. So feeling low is just an outcome of relying on a faulty predictive mechanism and can thus be revoked by changing the input.

Apple falling on the ground? Gravity.
Levitating/floating apple? MAGIC!!??

The brain has always seen the objects being ‘pulled’ by the Earth. If the science behind it can be manipulated in a way to force the object to move in the opposite direction, the brain sees something that contradicts its past observations.

BAM…!!!! You have just been tricked.