Saturday 15 August 2015

What do you do when your Emotions & Logic battle each other

Emotions flow effortlessly towards what we value. Emotions are strong and subtle signals that spring forth from an inner mechanism that we as human beings have within ourselves. This mechanism allows us to sense how we "feel" about something. Logic is when we use the information and data that we have gathered in our life so far and translate that knowledge into a set of principles to judge and decide what is right and what is not. For example, feeling sad while witnessing the plight of hard working labourers in a steel factory or loving that girl/guy with all your heart and soul despite of the fact she/he is not at all interested in you. These are examples of your behavioural responses being guided solely by emotions.
However, to understand logic let us consider this example, let's say a mediocre salaried salesperson gets a job opportunity from a company based in abroad with a far better salary and higher position, but the challenge is that he will have to migrate alone to that place and there will be no leaves for the first two years of employment, this would mean that he cannot come down to meet his old parents or his wife and children for a span of two years. Bang on starts a fight between emotions (that advocate staying near his family with the same job but with peace of mind of being with the family) and logic (that advocates taking that opportunity and working hard for a few years to improve his own career and raise the family's standard of living).
In conclusion, I have personally observed that emotions dominate over logic. But the only exception is when values come into picture. If career development is my priority and if I am emotionally strong enough to stay away from my family for 2 years, then I would definitely grab that opportunity without wasting any time.
My experiences have always been of emotions getting a strong dominion over logic. But in those scenarios where logic was more in alignment to my values I chose to scrap my emotions away. To quickly share my experience in this regard is when I was getting attached romantically with a woman who had different priorities. Later after looking at her from a non-emotional point of view I realized that I was traveling on the road towards a destination that wasn't meant for me. I then chose to free myself from those emotions.
So the one line answer is - Emotions rule logic. With exceptions being those situations where your emotions conflict with your values.

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