The world famous neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, was the first scientist to state that without emotions there is no good decision making. Damasio came to this conclusion after a thorough study of his patient, Elliot. Elliot is one of the most well-known cases of Damasio and he was profiled by him in his book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, first published in 1994. Elliot was a successful businessman, in the 97th percentile for IQ, a caring and lovely father and husband that suffered from a brain tumor, located in the frontal lobe. Elliot was submitted to a brain surgery to remove the tumor. After the surgery Elliot's life started to fall apart--his marriage and new business collapsed. He lacked any motivation, frustration, impatience, or sadness. He was like an uninvolved spectator of his own life. It was clear to Damasio that as a result of his surgery, Elliot was incapable of making decisions. Elliott was still a man with a normal intellect but was unable to make proper decision about personal or social matters. Elliot's lack of emotions paralyzed his decision-making process to the point that even to choose the color of a pen to fill out a form was fraught with endless deliberation.

Although neuroscience has built a strong body of evidence over the past 25 years to show the link between reason, emotion and decision-making, most mainstream cultures still warn that emotions have no place in decision-making. Many businesses still follow the old saying: Emotions have no business in the office--despite that neuroscience has already thoroughly proved that emotions assist in the reasoning process. We are brainwashed to regard emotions as irrational impulses which need to be overcontrolled and put aside. The mainstream thinking about reason over emotions is based on three assumptions:

• We can choose whether to feel or not
• Emotional suppression works in the long-term
• Thought-stopping works as a regulation strategy

The flaw of these three assumptions is that when you consciously stop trying to distract yourself, the unconscious mind carries on looking out for the thing you are trying to suppress. If you consciously don't change your emotional triggers, your thought pattern will never change, therefore, what you are desperately trying to forget will come to torture you. No, you are not mentally disturbed--this is only the brain doing its work at pattern detection, firing and rewiring neurons in the process.

Over thinking a problem or a decision is the root cause of overwhelming the rational prefrontal cortex. Short-term memory capacity varies from being able to hold between 4 and 9 bits of information at one time. When faced with too many variables, the brain simply makes the wrong decision because its resources are overburdened, adding to our body's allostatic load and resulting in a chronic response to stress. The prudent use of our thinking process to measure or understand any problem is essential to prevent overloading the system, especially, in an era when external distractions are permanently challenging the brain's energy reservoir to stay alert and focused amidst a constant flow of information. Though, we can learn how to approach the decision-making process in a more balanced way. Like in everything you want to be brilliant at, you need to practice everyday and as the Portuguese saying goes, about the things we don't know First we strange it. Then, it becomes part of us. Just practicing for five minutes before an important and challenging decision that needs to be made is not going to work--it is only going to overload your pre-frontal cortex. To achieve the balance between "what we think " and "how we feel and act" you need to practice the four following steps:

1. Observe the patterns of your thinking process by bringing conscious awareness to your thought process. How? By noticing the content of your thoughts. The language you use to talk to yourself--is it kind or harsh? Does that vary? If so, when? What's your decision-making style? Do you tend to overanalyze, generalize or cut, perhaps prematurely to the chase of a problem? Understanding what you think and how you think under different circumstances is critical to this process.
2. Identify the beliefs you hold--as they influence our decision-making process. One of the main reason we resist making decisions is because, often, to decide implies going against our beliefs. And that is putting ourselves outside of our comfort zone and our comfort zone is the realm of our feelings. The first step in uncovering beliefs that may limit your decisiveness is to understand what you believe about rationality versus emotionality.
3. Increase your emotional self-awareness--if you don't want to be ruled by feeling, you must allow your emotions to experience the light of day and give them some breathing room. According to the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, no single center of the brain dominates decision-making--"the lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions. In turn, these lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually every bodily organ thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning and decision-making". In other words, if you are rationalizing what is a bodily experience, (not a mental one) by ignoring, devaluing, or burying emotions, you are just draining your cortical batteries, steeping up your stress levels and on the right path to "burn-out".

4. Limit the amount of information you need to make a decision--a great quantity of research already showed that too much information hinders decision-making. Long before your reasoning mind kicks in, your emotional brain senses the way to go, thus make sure the information you consider takes into account your intuitive sense of the right direction to take. Your feeling brain is listening through your body, so the information that you receive is sometimes subtle and somatically based.

To optimize your decision-making process, you have to build capacity and resilience in the rational and emotional brains as they are interwoven to maximize the understanding of your inner and outer worlds.