Permission to Feel: The Power of Emotional Intelligence to Achieve Well-Being and Success

by Marc Brackett

We make decisions continually, all day long, and most of them are small. We can’t deliberate over each one, so we rely on our brains to make snap judgments. These issues come up all the time in contemporary research into how our brains operate. There’s the “thinking fast and thinking slow” concept, where our brains are believed to work on two separate but overlapping tracks, one that immediately responds without any or much deliberation and the other that takes its time and weighs the information first. When we use our brains for familiar or relatively simple functions, we come to quick responses, while novel situations or complex problems cause us to cogitate. These quick decisions are particularly susceptible to our moods and unconscious biases, especially when additional information is unavailable. We decide often with minimal conscious thinking.