Use your heart to make up your mind

I keep thinking about what I read about emotions and decision making in The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.  In essence, he cites research that emotion is almost always involved in our decisions.  No matter how analytical we are when weighing our options, we need to emotion to stop analyzing and make a choice.  We often talk about feeling good about a choice we made, as if we made it first, and then we felt good about it.  It's really the other way around.  We consider our options.  One of them makes a lot of sense to us.  We can see that the benefits that this choice will give us.  We feel good about this option and, only then, only because we feel good about it, we make the choice.

As described in the "Social Animal", people with brain damage that dulls their emotions can analyze options like the rest of us, but they can't generate enough feeling about any option to stop analyzing and make the choice.  We need to use our hearts to make up our minds.