We know surprisingly little about the role of emotions in decision-making, and nearly nothing about how we can change those emotions, and thereby our choices. In a series of studies, we asked participants to make risky monetary decisions while measuring their emotional responses, and found a tight relationship between emotional and brain responses to loss aversion. Furthermore, we found that perspective-taking strategies, emphasizing “thinking like a trader”, reduced loss aversion behaviorally, emotional responses to losses, and neural correlates of loss aversion, demonstrating a selective and powerful effect of strategic thinking on the choices we make.