Emotional Influences on Lifestyle Decisions

You have decided how to conduct your lifestyle and your health will be affected accordingly.  "Wait a minute," you say, “I have made no such decision.” 

But, of course, you have.

There are at least three ways to decide on a healthful or non-healthful lifestyle.  You can make a deliberate, conscious decision about what you should do.  You can fail to make a deliberate, conscious decision, and unconsciously enact health-inducing or health-impairing behavior.  Or you can make a conscious or unconscious default decision by merely behaving in health-relevant ways that are most convenient at any given point in time.

The choice of deliberate, enacted, or default decisions often is determined by your emotions.   The more you understand the connections between decision making and emotions, the better.  So, let’s review what Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim Kassam (2015) have to teach us about the issue.

The group points out the well-accepted notion that emotions usually predispose us to a particular action.  For instance, fear often causes us to flee from the source of our fear, and anger often incites us to strike out against its source.  Lerner et al. add that emotions also bias us to view the environment in ways consistent with the emotion.  If we are fearful, we perceive the environment as threatening, and if we are angry we regard the environment as frustrating.  Emotions then encourage us both to perceive the environment and to act within it in a manner than is emotion-consistent.

Several other important researched-based features of decision making and emotion are emphasized that are germane to our discussion.  First, emotions influence decisions in predictable ways.  Second, some of the influences are integral to the emotions and some are incidental.  Third, features specific to a given emotion exerts particular influences.  Fourth, emotions can affect the depth of thought, the content of thought, and/or the content of a given goal. Fifth, it is the interaction among the intellectual and motivational features of a given emotion that determines the extent and nature of that emotion’s influence on decision making.  Sixth, when emotions unconsciously prompt us, if we are aware of that prompt we frequently can use our conscious rationality to modify the emotional affect.

The seventh research-based feature of decision making and emotion warrants separate discussion because it directs us toward helpful strategies.  Number seven suggests that unwanted emotional influences can be combated in several ways.  One way is for us to learn how to reduce emotional intensity.  Another is to ensure that the emotion that does occur provides as little influence as possible.  Finally, we can cultivate a proclivity toward emotions opposite to the problematic ones.  Applying the Learner et al. advice, when you must make a stressful decision and you feel yourself becoming angry, you might take a walk before finalizing that decision (reducing intensity).  You also could accept your anger, realize that the anger will only interfere with your decision, and make a dispassionate list of the pros and cons involved in the decision (anger provides as little influence as possible).  Or, knowing that you are prone to anger, you can learn to see the source of your anger as weak, irrelevant, and not worth getting yourself upset (cultivating feelings opposed to anger).

The bottom line is this: decisions are either deliberate, enacted, or default.  And all three possibilities can be powerfully determined by your emotions.  Be aware of the way you make health-relevant decisions.  Be proactive and conscious with them.  And know that your emotions will be central in how you intentionally or inadvertently structure your lifestyle.

Reference

Lerner, L., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K.  (2015).  Emotion and Decision Making.  Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 799-823.