Emotions and Our Lives.

To what extent do emotions control our life? 

I've always wondered why I feel a certain way about certain things, why I make decisions that others normally wouldn't. I wasn't the only one feeling this way, I've seen other people make many decisions according to how they feel, according to their moods. Whether or not it's a good decision, they still make it, impulsively. I slowly started to realize that our whole life is controlled by our emotions. We tend to avoid situations and people we don't like, sometimes we dismiss logical thinking and go with our "gut feeling". We do all this because of our feelings. Everyone's probably said that they're following what their heart says a couple times at least, what does that mean? Why do people follow it? Why do we not look at the logical side of things first? 

Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior. This attentional and executive control is intimately linked to learning processes, as essentially limited attentional capacities are better focused on relevant information. It also helps retrieval of information efficiently. 

For example, let's take a cravings, there's something called as emotional eating. Emotional eating is basically when you consume large quantities of food just for "comfort", usually junk food, in response to feelings instead of hunger. It isn't necessarily harmful but it does cause weight gain. So if you want to lose weight but you're stressed and you just eat your feelings, this won't help.  The first thing people do when it comes to making a choice is assessing how they feel not what would be right. 

In conclusion, I would like to say that emotions play a major role in our lives, but we should also give logic the same importance.