How Emotions Influence Our Mind

How Emotions Influence Our Mind

As early as the moment when you start taking information in and when your thought process begins, emotions already take effect on your mind. Especially information that we interpret as having a relevant emotional content, reaches the mind quickly. Particularly content of negative character, such as an unpleasant message, reaches our minds quickly and influences our though process instantly. This happens at the very beginning of our thoughts and is therefore not something that we consciously notice. Only after some time we realize that a negative emotion has altered the way we have thought about a situation.

Before any thought concerning something particular happens, our mind is required to direct its attention to a certain object, person or source of information. Our mind works like a flash light, zoning in on something particular and then soaking up all the information that our senses take in. Everything else that surrounds the attention spot, remains mostly dark and is therefore not transferred to our conscious mind. Our emotions influence the strength and colour of that light. Negatively tainted information is tagged with a more intense flash light and therefore it gets drawn into our thought quickly. Less important things with less emotional charge receive more dull colours of light and are therefore pushed aside to allow for the more pressing information to enter our mind.

This is done, because our mind is limited in its capabilities and it therefore needs to select what is important enough to become part of our consciousness. You have only one street and only a certain amount of cars may drive those streets, so that no traffic jam is created. The cars are only filled with the most important messengers. Negative messages get a front seat, for protective and survival purposes. Since there are only a limited amount of seats available, information is filtered and information perceived as irrelevant is not given a seat towards your consciousness.

Your mind also acts according to the way you feel. If you are currently feeling sad, sad information is given most of the car seats towards your mind. If you are feeling happy, more happy information is loaded into those cars. How you feel is therefore vitally important, determines the information your mind receives and therefore influences your acting and learning capabilities.

You also judge others and your surroundings according to how you feel. If you feel miserable, your judgement and thought of other people and situations is tainted. You judge them more negatively than you usually would.

Your emotional state also influences recall from your memory. When you feel sad, you are more keen on recalling information from your mind, that is tagged with sadness as the baseline emotion. When you feel happy, you are more likely to recall other happy memories and things you learned. If you are in a situation where you have to recall certain things you learned, such as during an exam or a presentation, the way you feel matters.

It is vitally important to keep the way you feel in balance. Not only do charged emotions influence your attention, but also your memory, learning, judgement, decisions and problem solving capabilities.

You will find yourself not being able to decide or solve your issues, unless you treat your emotions like the well of life. If you drain the well, you dry out. If you keep refilling it, you will survive. If you take extra care of your emotions, a beautiful well-nourished garden, i.e. a strong and lively personality, will grow around your well.

Posted in: Psychology