Your Emotions Hate You

It's something not very often talked about and applies to all areas of everyone's lives, from the moment you set foot in a store, to dating the cute stranger you met last weekend. Backwards rationalization to put it simply is whereupon you come to a logical conclusion in your brain based on your emotional state, essentially rationalizing emotional choices with logical reasoning.

If you've ever been in sales you've probably heard of backwards rationalization before, its an often used sales tactic to get a customer emotionally committed to buying an item even if logically they do not need it. This way when someone emotionally wants something you'll often see them rationalizing with them self, thinking up reasons why they do need the item, and ignoring the reasons they don't. On the other hand, if someone doesn't emotionally like something even if they really need it they'll often talk themselves out of buying it. Which is precisely why sales people exist in the world, not to help people make rational choices (as they can do that on their own by simply browsing) but to emotionally sway them so they logically convince themselves they need something.

This habit of backwards rationalization is also in full force in relationships. It's been seen and evidenced hundreds of times that the reason why one person likes or stays with another has little to nothing to do with logic, even though it often appears as though it is. Its funny experiment that you take a girl and get her to date 2 different guys. One guy is naturally good with women and the other guy is a bit of a creep. Now they go into a restaurant to get something to eat and 2 key events occur, the guys both open the door for the girl and pull her chair out for her to be able to sit down, and they both tease and make jokes of the girl at the dinner table. Now what's amazing is often after this date the girl will feel more attracted to the natural guy and repelled by the creepy weird guy. As such the girl backwards rationalizes this with logic, with the guy she's attracted too she thinks of how sweet he is opening the door and pulling out her chair for her and completely ignores the teasing at the dinner table, however with the creepy guy she does the complete opposite, ignoring the door opening and remembering the teasing, claiming that is the reason why she dislikes this guy.

Of course this also applies to guys, and its a really peculiar facet of human intelligence. It is also the key to understanding relationships, and that what you logically do in a relationship has little to no bearing on the outcome, for if the other person emotionally adores you they are only going to think of the good and forget the bad, and vice versa.

So how does this help you out in life? We'll once you become consciously aware of why you are doing certain things you can begin to resist people trying to emotionally manipulate you and realize that many decisions you are making are actually due to your emotional state rather than logic. In the short term most people generally do things based on their current emotional state and although this brings short term pleasure it can and will often harm you in the long run.

This isn't to say don't trust your emotions however, there are many times where you may chose to go with your intuition, say you get a bad feeling about someone, they rub you the wrong way or just feel like they are hiding something. Often this is your subconcious's way of telling you it picks up on something they are hiding and feeding it back to you through your emotions and it should be duly noted. This is of prime importance in the business world where it has been witnessed many times of sneaky business men attempting to lure someone into a contract or spending money raising a business based around flawed business models (such as pyramid schemes) by giving them plenty of emotional pleasure with vivid images of huge mansions, luxury yachts and trips around the world, then letting the target know how terrible and painful it would be to work their current job instead of jumping aboard this new bandwagon, often times confusing the target and getting them to sign up to deals based on their emotional state rather than logical decision making.

Don't go away feeling increased pressure to suppress your emotions today, for they will help you out many times in your life in certain situations. The key is to not simply run on emotions and realize that it's best to think about a problem logically, then use your emotions (how do you feel about it) and make a decision based on both ways of thinking, which will (provided your not using a balanced amount of emotional and logical thinking) provide you with the correct answer at least 95% of the time.