The Best Decision-Making Is Emotional

In my work as an executive coach, it’s common to hear founders share something along the lines of, “My emotions get in the way of my ability to make good decisions.” There’s a pervasive myth—particularly in the tech industry—that listening to our rational, logic-oriented left brain is superior to acting in response to fluctuating emotions. 

Life might be simpler if this were the case. Emotions are messy, and in some circumstances they cloud our judgment. Even the neuroscientists studying them have struggled to understand how they work. 

But it turns out that without our “irrational” emotions, we would be unable to make even basic day-to-day choices. Research in recent decades has shown that emotions are a crucial component of our decision-making process. And running a startup requires making constant choices.

In this article, I unpack the recent neuroscience on the topic and share an emotion processing tool I use with clients. 

We can’t make decisions without emotions 

The caricature of a stoic Spock-like creature making perfectly rational decisions is—as we now know from the science—absurd. Famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was one of the first to figure this out in the late twentieth century. He studied a patient with a tumor that compressed the frontal lobe tissue in his brain and had to be removed.

In the months following, the patient, Elliot—who previously had a good corporate job—saw his life fall apart. Even though his IQ was high and his language and mathematical abilities seemed intact, his emotional capacity had been severely limited to the extent that he was unable to make basic decisions, like prioritization of tasks and scheduling. 

This and other similar cases became the foundation for Damasio’s so-called “somatic marker” hypothesis. It posits that emotion registers in the body through phenomena like a racing heart, frowning forehead, butterflies in the stomach, etc. These sensations help us consciously and subconsciously filter data sets of information. 

We then make choices based on what we think will allow us to feel good in the future. Without these “somatic markers,” even the most basic decisions are overwhelming. (This theory gives a whole new meaning to common aphorisms like “trust your gut” or “follow your heart.”)

Emotion = sensation + context

The simplest questions can be the most vexing. Even to this day, there is no scientific consensus on the precise definition of an emotion, which speaks to how little we know in this emerging field of neuroscience.

The French essayist Marcel Proust once described the emotion of love as producing “geological upheavals of thought.” While this is an evocative metaphor, recent neuroscience suggests a different picture, exploring the idea that emotions are a fundamentally biological phenomena and emotional experiences are co-created by our minds.

As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett told The Cut, “Emotions are not your reactions to your world. They are how you make sense of what’s going on inside your body in relation to the world.” First, stimuli trigger pleasant or unpleasant physical sensations. Then the insula (a part of the brain’s cerebral cortex) checks the sensation against the perceived situation and makes sense of it. 

In other words, the experience you label as an emotion comprises sensation plus context. If your heart is racing when you pitch your business to a big investor, you might experience that as fear. But in a different context—like launching a new product to the public—you interpret the same bodily signals as excitement. 

Barrett believes that our brains follow the scientific method, perpetually constructing hypotheses through prediction and then testing them against the data of sensory input. For example, maybe you’re excited to give your first conference talk, and then you fumble your speech. In prepping for the next public speaking engagement, you may feel fear instead of excitement. 

Where do emotions arise in the body?