Without emotions and feelings life would be pretty bland.
Yet there are times when emotions can overwhelm your ability to think straight.
If you are well rested and have plenty of mental bandwidth available, you can access higher brain functions to plan, problem solve, and think creatively—an ability known as executive function.
If you can’t access executive functions, it’s hard to process life’s events in a rational way. Consequently, your memories as well as your future responses can be connected to more primitive emotions like fear or anger.
For example, if you were scared by a snake as a child, that memory and emotion will be recalled with the same intensity as an adult.
Of course, your ability to remember isn’t perfect. While your thinking brain works hard to put memory and emotion into context, it’s your context.
We all tell stories to ourselves. And our own interpretation of events may or may not be reality.
