Your first reaction is outdated

When considering an answer to a question, it’s OK to answer slowly and ignore the initial automatic response that comes to mind, because that initial response is either cultural conditioning or your best thinking from the past. It is not your most authentic and current thinking, and that’s what both you and the person who asked the question deserve.

“Fast thinking” is often just shallow thinking. So, don’t feel the need to respond immediately, the social pressure to respond will produce an immediate answer, but if you’re mindful a better answer will come.

From a Derek Sivers blog post in 2016: Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.

Seneca For this is what makes us wicked: that no one of us looks back over his own life. Our thoughts are devoted only to what we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future always depend on the past.