Emotions

October 2026

I recently had a conversation with a friend about whether thinking emotionally was valuable. My knee-jerk reaction was 'no, you should always think rationally'. When I considered this argument a few days later, as one tends to do, I started to wonder why emotions were even useful at all.

First of all, what even is an emotion?

The technical definition is "An emotion is a complex, short-lived psychological and physical state that arises in response to an internal or external stimulus, typically involving a mix of subjective feelings, physiological changes, and behavioral responses".

Or easier - "an emotion is an internal phenomenon that, when triggered, changes your brain and body state."

Here's how it works.

When someone insults you, their sound waves hit your ear, which then sends electrical impulses through your brain's nervous system.
You then start to go through loops of neuron firing (lets call it the thinking loop).
The thinking loop just means that as you process & react, you will go through multiple iterations. And even after you respond, the thinking loop is not over. The thinking loop only truly gets over when your attention gets diverted.
As your neurons fire, cognition happens - your neural patterns make sense of what those electrical impulses are, which gets translated into your reality.
During this loop, you will feel emotion.

There are eight emotions according to Robert Plutchik's wheel.

joy & sadness
anger & fear
trust & disgust
surprise & anticipation

You don't just feel the emotion, there are five steps that come with it - Scherer's Component Process Model.

appraisal (making sense of the emotion)
physiology (heart rate pounding etc.)
action tendency (instant urge)
expression (face contortions, etc.)
subjective feeling

You can choose to give in to your emotion, but you don't have to. You can feel your emotion, then react however you want.

Being in tune with your emotions basically means that when emotions arise through your thinking loop, you can recognize, accept, and ideally control them.

A good way to test this is if you're hungry and get cranky, you're much more likely to get mad at stupid stuff. Before that happens, can you recognize that you are hungry and cranky?

So, now the question is - are emotions good for decision making? Is emotion the enemy of rationality?

I think, in terms of assessing a situation, you should operate on evidence and facts. How you feel about a cliff won't change what happens if you jump off it. Reality does not care about how you feel, it just is. Someone can hurt your feelings and be right, but they cannot be rationally wrong and right.

I believe emotions serve a different purpose - they are a reward mechanism for living life. They give us meaning and motivation. I tend to reject abstract statements like the previous one - as an engineer I prefer to think of things more discretely, but bear with me.

A thought experiment - a life without emotions, one where everyone would be rational thinkers. Without emotions like happiness, trust, affection, where the dopamine rushes through you as you make life better for the people around you, what even is the point of living? We would be robots incapable of love, just focused on the next strategic move. Passion, desire, it would all go away.

I believe emotions are what make life worth it. Its what makes us human, it gives us a reason to do things. Everyone wants to be happy - and the great part about it is you get to find out what makes you happy then do that. You should think about it rationally, but the reward is an emotional one.

In summary - emotions are great. You should be cognizant of how others feel, and you should feel your emotions too. Its a great gift of life, to be able to feel emotions. But you also should think rationally. I think both of those statements can be true.

Kush Bhuwalka

Supporting material
Interactive map of emotions