No matter how rational or objective we might think we’re being, we’re always under the influence of how happy, or sad, or anxious, or even hungry we are.

The fact that each emotion is distinct from other emotions is also wrong. Emotions overlap. They don’t have sharp lines between them. It’s more like a spectrum, like the colors of the rainbow.

The feelings of the emotions might be universal, but the classifications or the categories, and the way we express or make faces, seems to vary from culture to culture. Some cultures don’t have a word for sadness, and there’s a culture that has a word for the exhilaration you feel when you’re going head-hunting against another tribe.

Emotion is a functional state of the mind. It’s a state of processing that you’re in.

It affects your rational processing. It’s a mistake to say that the rational mind and the emotional mind are separate—much less to say emotions are counterproductive. You can’t even say emotions are separable from logical thinking. It all happens together.

Emotions are used in determining our actions.

The emotions are a framework for your logical processing. It affects how you evaluate data, how skeptical you are of certain ideas versus how accepting you are of those same ideas.

Your unconscious mind does a lot of mental calculations that are more complex than your conscious mind is able to do. It can handle more information. That’s what comes back to your brain in gut feelings, hunches and intuitions.

That your hunger can make you hungry for things that aren’t sustenance?

Right. And disgust is the same.

You don’t have to sit down and go through a tedious analysis of what your state is before you accept your decision. Just be more conscious of your bodily state, your core affect, your emotional state.

people who are more mindful are happier and live longer. So why not do that? I came across studies of life expectancies showing that people with better emotional regulation, for example, have 60% fewer heart attacks.

meditation increases "executive control" in your brain. That helps you with emotion regulation.