Why is it important to listen to your inner voice and follow your emotions

In all business books they write, at every large meeting in a corporation they say: any decision must be clearly calculated, rationalized, weighed, judiciously accepted, and emotions must be turned off. In my opinion, this is one of the main misconceptions of today. To understand why, let’s look at decision making from a neuroscience perspective.

One day, a very interesting patient came to an appointment with the famous neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. His name was Elliot and he had surgery to remove a small tumor near his frontal lobe. The operation went well, Elliot retained his IQ level, but something was wrong. He completely lost the ability to make decisions.

“Elliot thought endlessly about minor details, such as whether to write with a blue or black pen, what radio station to listen to, and where to park the car,” the doctor wrote. – When choosing where to dine, he carefully studied the menu of each restaurant, the arrangement of tables, the lighting scheme, then went around the restaurants to see the workload. But it was all for nothing: he still couldn’t decide where to eat. The inability to make decisions was pathological.”

A nuance that is important to mention: during the operation, Elliot suffered damage to the orbitofrontal cortex.

Damasio became interested in Elliot’s case and began to study other patients with similar injuries. They showed a similar syndrome: while maintaining their sanity and high IQ, they were completely unable to make even minor decisions: what to eat for breakfast, what day to meet the doctor, what suit to wear.

The fact is that the orbitofrontal cortex is responsible, among other things, for embedding emotions in the decision-making process. It connects the subconscious (limbic system) to the conscious (neocortex). When the orbitofrontal cortex is damaged, emotions cannot influence decision-making by consciousness.

What does this mean in practice? When a decision doesn’t involve emotions, we have nothing to cling to. We can logically argue why we should choose option A, and immediately explain why we should choose option B. If we do not have an emotional attachment to any of the options, we will never be able to make a choice.

Try to logically justify why you eat what you eat for breakfast. Because it’s helpful? Why are you so sure of this? Why do you eat exactly this useful, and not something else? Five minutes of thought experiment is enough, and you will feel that it is impossible to make a decision without emotions.

Damasio went further and conducted an experiment with his colleague Antoine Becara. They gave the subjects four decks of cards (two red, two black) and $2000 to play. Each card in the decks showed whether the subject lost or won. The goal was to earn enough money by the end of the game. The researchers cheated and made two decks of cards “balanced” in terms of winning and losing cards and two decks – high-risk.

What happens when we make a decision with an incomprehensible result? We include what the noted behavioral economist Richard Thaler calls naive diversification. When we have four decks and do not know where the winning or losing cards are, we try to take cards from each deck in turn – just as if we were choosing exotic fruit jams for the first time. We would try the whole spectrum to choose what we like and what we don’t.

What happened next in the study was unexpected. On average, it was only after the fiftieth card that players began to guess which decks were the most winning and the least dangerous. After the eightieth card, they could justify why they preferred one deck and ignored the other. The key to the experiment was connecting the subjects to a computer that measured the electrical conductivity of the skin. Generally, higher conduction levels indicate nervousness and anxiety.

And here’s what’s interesting: the computer showed excitement after the tenth card, when the subject’s hand reached for the wrong deck. The data said that the hand at that moment showed a lot of “nervousness”.

So, on the tenth map, our emotions, body and “inner voice” already know where it is dangerous and where it is not worth going, but only on the fiftieth map does consciousness finally guess the right strategy, and only on the eightieth map can we explain to ourselves what happened 30 cards back.

These studies clearly show how important it is to address your emotions and listen to what is called instinct and inner voice. Emotions are one of the three essential components in decision making. Without them, there can be no solutions.

And if your option A is carefully calculated and verified, and emotions ring the alarm and do not want to accept it, you should listen to them: they may be aware of details that consciousness does not yet know about. Emotions can read those signals that are not achievable for the rational mind.

And, of course, you should train to understand your internal signals, learn to distinguish their meaning.

For example, do I really not own the data that my body and emotions have? Or have I had a negative emotional experience in the past, and it is automatically transferred to the current situation? And if so, how adequate is such an experience?

Do not try to get rid of emotions when making decisions. Emotions can, much earlier than the rational brain, inform us about what is right, correct and effective for us. Understanding and realizing emotions, trusting them, we are able to make the most correct decisions.