How Your Emotions Influence Your Decisions

Being aware of the constant dance between emotions and feelings could improve your decision-making ability.

1. Every feeling begins with a stimulus.
2. The stimulus leads to an unfelt emotion in the brain.
3. Unfelt emotions cause the body to generate responsive hormones.
4. The hormones enter the bloodstream and bring about positive or negative feelings. 

For example, when we feel threatened (stimuli), the initial label is fear (emotion) and happens unconsciously. Fear results in the production of fight-or-flight feelings (hormones), which helps our bodies to react (feelings).

We need to understand how any particular emotion (root cause) will translate into a feeling (symptom).

The six emotions are broad categories, while the feelings are specific to describe what is going on in our bodies. For instance, disgust (emotion) may result in 'loathing' or 'detestable' feelings.

When you have to make a decision, always track your feeling to the resulting emotion to find the root cause.