Emotions skew the lenses we see the world and make our decisions through.
Emotions are something we all have and experience, thoughts happen and create emotions;
Most of us have heard the word "Nervous System" so much we've learned to take it for granted.
However, without the Endocrine System the nervous system would be essentially useless.
The brain, is the control center at the top of the nervous system. To me it resembles a jelly fish, with tenticles draped throughout the body. The (electrically charged) jellyfish swims through a sea of emotions, produced by the endocrine system for the jellyfish to swim in and interact with.
There are certain currents the jellyfish detects and swims away from, and others it detetcs and swims toward. There are certain currents that provoke movement and other currents that provoke stillness.
Because the jellyfish is electrically charged it detects the slightest changes in water variation. and swims away from danger and toward food without thinking as It just keeps jellyfishing along throughout the endocrine sea.
This is emotion's imporance in our survival operation, however as a society many of us (especially males) were taught to reject the notion that we are experiencing any emotions at all. Other than anger, some occasional happiness, sadness, and love at times, emotions have remained an ignorantly forbidden topic for countless generations until now.
The reality is, our survival system runs on emotions. The endocrine produces them constantly to interact with our electrically charged nervous system. Without one there is not the other. Society's challenge in now doing the highly uncomfortable and empowering work of sitting through the biological lifespan of them, observing what they are, how they feel, and that they are not us.
Observing that emotions are temporary and powerful things, and they are by default only one component of a survival system we experience operating in our everyday lives.
When the emotions are too intense our perceptive awareness dissociates and there is also our currently developed threshold to hold the mind awake through the emotional intensity of them, into clarity of and in presence from the other side of them.
Our ancestors did their best passing on the best information they knew for us to work with, and this could have very easily been, quit crying, toughen up, walk it off, rub some dirt on it. There's nothing personal happening here either, because it was most likely exactly what they themselves learned about dealing with and understanding emotions.
The survival brain is part of the nervous system and it defaults to survival based sortcuts in thinking called heuristics, an example of a heuristic is if I touch a hot stove, my survival brain notes stoves can be hot. If I developed a cognitive bias from that, my survival brain would note all stoves are hot.
*Tip* (I am not particularly good at identifying specific emotions as they're happening, so I have learned to categorize them by their polarity, either negative, neutral, or positive).