Emotions

Emotions serve a purpose, informing you, the operator of your body, what to do.


You do not have time to process all information in a reflective fashion but your brain processes it passively and unconsciously. Emotions serve as a cueing system--an attention directing system associated with physiological changes that can prepare you to take action. But it is also not a very smart system because it has many false alarms. There are emotional misfires. Thus you need to evaluate your response to see if it is appropriate.


Your emotional system can give you an advantage in decision making if you make proper use of it. Many people think of their emotions as something they have to manage or control rather than something upon which they could capitalize. Evolution has given you a particular information system that you can use--a summary of information about the environment and an aggregate of a huge amount of data about a situation. Emotions can tell you something about the world that you may not have accurately perceived in another way.