Our apologies Celine Dion, but we don’t second your lyrical poetry in ‘let your heart decide’ because doing things based on emotions rather than logic rarely ever turns out to be great. And of course, because the brain is the most complex organ in the human body, it only makes it right to not allow your heart to rule your head. But life’s not perfect, so no matter how hard you try, some parts of your emotions will always influence your decision-making capabilities. In fact, emotions play a critical role in the mechanism of reasoning.
How Emotions Come Around to Influencing Your Decisions
Emotional influence can determine the outcome for an extensive range of decisions, altering decision-making skills. In the case of a physical event, the feeling first emerges with an external stimulus responsible for generating an unfelt, unprocessed emotion within the human brain. However, the body reacts instantly to produce responsive hormones that enter the bloodstream to generate either positive or negative feelings. This is the lifecycle of an emotion that impacts your decision-making power by introducing certain feelings in the system.
How the Brain Processes Emotions
The brain updates the information within the body constantly to regulate the innumerable processes it’s meant to keep alive — for this reason, it automatically translates emotions into actionable feelings. For example, the emotion felt during an argument is ‘fear’, resulting in a fight or flight response to allow self-preservation. All of this happens unconsciously until the responsive hormones enter the bloodstream to convey a message of feeling inferior or frightened.
Emotions Help Make Decisions
According to a study, people with brain damage whose ability to experience emotions may have been compromised also have reduced chances of making good decisions. Emotions can be thought of as appraisals for situations that motivate survival and wellbeing — think of a message that doesn’t make you feel anything; how likely are you to act as it says?
There’s no ideal situation where your decisions are driven solely by logic and rationality — emotions always play a key role. For example, feeling disgusted increases the likelihood of discarding a belonging, fear may increase levels of risk, and feeling joy may instantly make you want to leap into action. This is referred to as emotional intelligence that better comprehends and manages emotions to play a vital role in decision making.
Hang on to a Driving Force
There are two fundamental driving forces in life: survival (running away from fear) or purpose (running towards fear).
Running away from an event is a survival tactic that has a strong instinct — for example, deciding to run away from a stalker, a bear spotted farther away in the woods or a mudslide. But survival gets boring because of its negative nature — if you don’t like the job, quit and start over again. It isn’t sustainable because the thing you fear at this moment will slow your journey and wear you out faster.
There’s also the neutral force, but that doesn’t drive you anywhere at all, which is why it’s referred to as the paralyzing middle. When life stays predictable, you stay comfortable and reasonably safe — but you’re hardly ever achieving something that could make you happy.
The alternative to survival is a purpose, i.e., discovering the big why. As you move towards something, you’re very likely to counter it with your sustainable motivation. This is one driving force that pulls you in front and compels you to keep moving in that direction. Anything that sounds so positive is unlikely to slow you down, wear you out, or make you want to give up.
Take Charge of Your Emotions through Self-Empowerment
Author Ann Zachariah is a renowned poetry writer who has written poems for spiritual soul healing. Her latest release, Wild Child of the Monsoons, is an emotional lyrical poetry collection that discusses the myriad of emotions life has gifted humanity.
The beautiful poetry on self-love and healing by Ann Zachariah M.D. takes you on a journey of self-discovery to reestablish your belief through empowerment and self-confidence. Buy the Wild Child of the Monsoons on Amazon to enlighten your reading corner with poems of grief and gratitude, love and pain, as well as inspiration and spiritual healing.
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