Are Emotions Relieving Or Preventing You From Making Wise Decisions?

As you go about making life altering decisions, emotions may be influencing your choices. Have you ever made a bad choice based on strong emotions? Or, are you making decisions because you're too emotional to reason with logic?


Regardless of whether you realize it or not, emotions may be influencing your decisions. You might be influenced by strong emotions such as fear, greed, or even jealousy. Although in most cases, these emotions do not have an immediate influence on your decisions, they do have a long term effect. Over time, these emotions become woven into your subconscious thinking and can actually make you act in ways that you never thought possible. This is why it's important that you understand what these emotions are and how they can affect you.

One of the most common emotions that can easily be an influencing factor on your decisions is fear. When you fear something, your brain releases chemicals that give you a feeling of urgency, which can cause you to take action before you think you have the appropriate reaction. In most cases, this emotion leads to taking actions that are risky or self-destructive. In extreme cases, this same emotion can lead to suicide.

Greed, on the other hand, can also lead to poor decisions. This emotion may be experienced when you feel out-of-control of a situation and must find some way to make up for your loss of control. However, if you allow yourself to become overly concerned with gaining more food, you may be setting yourself up for starvation. On the other hand, if you're worrying about not having enough money to pay for your upcoming circumstances, you're setting yourself up for a disastrous depression. It's important to remember that your situation may not be as dire as you perceive it to be.

Another example of emotions that can influence your decisions is your ability to ignore, or numb, negative emotions. Negative emotions can affect you in many ways, including making you procrastinate and/or neglect your health and safety. Although you may feel that your situation is hopeless and that nothing can be done to change it, ignoring your negative emotions will only make them worse. Instead, embrace them and allow them to pass by. Remember that if you can't feel anything else other than a relief that something is going right, it's probably because you're feeling too much grief over something that doesn't really matter.

Another of the factors that may be influencing your decision-making is how strongly you react to what others say. If you're told that you're making a poor decision or that you're likely to make a poor decision, your emotions will likely be strong. However, if someone tells you that you're going to make a great decision or that you're likely to be happy with your decision, your emotions may be subdued. Regardless of whether you trust someone or not, when they say that you're making a bad decision, your emotions may prompt you to believe that you are making a bad decision. However, if you respond to the words that have been said in a supportive way, your emotions may become more calm.

Another thing that may be influencing your decisions is your own reaction to the news that a loved one has died. When you're faced with the news, your emotions may be so powerful that you focus all of your attention on the death itself rather than the impact it will have on your life and future. Even though you may have known the deceased for a long time, your reactions can become extremely strong when the news about his or her death first breaks. Don't allow the death to overwhelm you; remember that you're still important and that you're working throughout your grief period.


Emotions can be an overwhelming and overpowering force. By choosing to acknowledge these factors and to control your emotions so that they don't rule over your life, you can find greater insight into how you're making decisions and how you need to make them. Making the decision to control your emotions can mean that you can finally move forward with your life.