Decision Making And The Emotional Brain

• The emotional brain has a major influence on your behaviour.
• Emotions can cause you to do things you later regret.
• Never make an important decision under the influence of emotions!

The Importance Of Your Emotional Brain

The emotional brain evolved to serve the needs of the reptilian brain, by ensuring you are driven towards pleasure, and away from pain.

In this way the emotional brain allows you to learn from past experiences, by associating emotions to a particular memory. Thereby helping to counterbalance the repetitive ritualistic nature of the reptilian brain.

The emotional brain therefore plays a major role in influencing your everyday thoughts and behaviour.

This is an important point to understand, as most people like to think that the actions they take are as a result of their thoughts, when in reality, the large majority of their actions come as a result of their emotions.

Controlled By Emotions

The influence of the emotional brain is most apparent when we do things we know we shouldn’t do, and then later regret.

For example, many dieters struggle to stick to their diet because they give into “temptation” and eat something they said they would no longer eat.

This occurs primarily for 2 reasons. The first is the natural pre-programmed response to food from the reptilian brain, which readies the body to receive food.

The second, and perhaps the most powerful, is the emotional association (memory) that has been linked to that food by the emotional brain.

If the food is perceived as being particularly tasty, and therefore pleasurable, the emotional brain strengthens the desire for food by activating memories associated with pleasure for that food.

Although your conscious thinking brain may be telling you not to eat it because it will make you fat (logical response), somehow you suddenly seem to change your mind, and eating the food doesn’t “feel” like such a bad idea anymore.

After all, it won’t hurt if you have just a little bit, right? (irrational response)

Before you know it, you have eaten the food you were trying to avoid, and later when the food is gone (the trigger) your conscious thinking brain (which is now no longer overpowered by the emotional brain) logically analyses your action, leading to feelings of regret and guilt because you did something you didn’t want to do.

In essence what has happened here, is that the needs and desires of your unconscious reptilian and emotional brains overpowered your conscious thinking brain, leaving you as nothing more than a helpless observer.

Even though it “felt” like a good idea at the time, later on you knew what you did was wrong and wonder why on earth you did it.

This really does beg the question of how much of our life do we actually control?

If an external trigger such as food can cause the reptilian and emotional brains to overpower our conscious brain, and irrationally change the way we think about something, how can we live a rational conscious life doing what we want to do, rather than acting in a pre-programmed unconscious manner? (I shall expand on this point in the last article in this series)

Do Emotions Make You Blind?

Another example of the overpowering affects the emotional brain can have on the thinking brain, is love. Ever hear the expression “madly in love” or “love is blind”? Well, there is some truth behind these sayings.

Love, lust, a crush or even just physical attractiveness, can stimulate reptilian sexual and mating responses. Some of which include the desire to have sex/seek a mate, the desire to own or possess (obsessiveness) and the desire to dominate.

Because sex is so important in keeping our genes “alive” in future generations, the drive for sex is incredibly powerful. This especially true when these desires are amplified by the emotional brain, which links feelings of pleasure and well being to it.

By doing so, the emotional brain increases your desire to seek out that experience, pursue it and repeat it as many times as possible.

Madly In Love

When two people fall “madly in love”, their irrational unconscious brains dominate their conscious logical brain.

This has a strong influence on how they view each other, often causing them to overlook flaws the logical thinking brain would have noticed, and instead seeing their partner as perfect. Love truly is blind when you think about it emotionally.

I hope now you are beginning to understand the importance of your emotional brain, and why acting whilst under the influence of an emotion (thereby bypassing the logical mind) can lead to poor decision making, and actions you may later regret.

This applies to all emotions, so never make an important decision when you are very happy, or very angry. Otherwise you might regret it!

Are We All Doomed To Be Pre-Programmed Slaves?

If this article has left you feeling a little bit helpless, then don’t worry! The good news is that we have a thinking brain for a reason, which means you don’t have to be a helpless slave all your life.

Although the thinking brain is strongly influenced by the older brains (especially the emotional brain), it can be trained to enable you to live a more conscious life.

Strengthening your conscious brain will allow you to do the things you know you should do, and also to make the right decisions that will positively impact your life (and that you won’t regret!).

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