Phobia

A few days ago, I went to the doctor’s office for what would have been a fairly normal checkup. It was simply a continuation on a preliminary test that had yielded some ambiguous results. But during this trip, I’d more closely experienced one of my worst fears, getting blood drawn. The whole premise of a tiny metal needle penetrating skin to extract the most important fluid in your body has always been very frightening to me. I viewed it with significantly more dread than any other checkup routine. However, I still went through with the test, as I knew that in the long term, it would be beneficial to find any diseases early. This led me to question, “If the pain of the blood drawing was significantly larger, how would my decision have been affected?” On a larger scale, many factors, like emotions, values and spiritual beliefs have a distinctive influence on the slow deliberative nature of a rational decision making process.

On the face, emotions and logic conflict when making decisions. Emotion involves personal introspection whereas logic involves outside analysis. Despite this, both can coexist in daily life. When I got the blood drawn, all I was thinking about was how the procedure could result in some serious injury. A more logical approach to this would have been to conclude that there was a miniscule probability of malpractice because of the long existence of the medical procedure. In this case, my reason helped me to go ahead with the procedure, but my emotions kept me pessimistic during it.

Other factors like religious beliefs and morality tend to have an even larger effect when it comes to decision making. A clear example of this would be any form of humanitarian work. Although one could argue service provides a sense of worldly purpose, this claim is subjective. A purely objective analysis of charitable work suggests that there are no immediate or measurable advantages. It simply appears to be a tedious chunk of time spent acting as a slave of man. However, those involved in community service know that this is a naïve conclusion, as they have a purpose for their work, whether it is something as grand as genuine compassion or something as workaday as community service hours. They have a sense of direction, derived from personal introspection rather than outside observations.

This leads to a critical assessment of the value of emotion and values systems. Media often contrasts a peppy energetic blonde with a reserved white-collar worker, suggesting a direct correlation between intelligence and “connection” with emotion. It gives impulsive behavior a negative connotation, while glorifying more analytical behavior. This is a distortion. Because daily decisions are and have always been influenced by both logic and emotion, it is shortsighted to declare one as more socially expedient than the other. It is up to the individual to decide which one has the more priority in a decision making process.