RetroAdventurer

If you say that you don’t allow emotions to influence your thinking, you’re actually saying that you have absolutely no awareness of all the ways your emotions influence your thinking

Emotions are the result of thoughts, not the other way around. You literally cannot experience an emotion about something unless you first have a thought about it.

This is completely untrue. Emotions determine what we pay attention to, by sorting out what's scary, important, interesting, sad, socially significant, etc. We think about things that are brought to the forefront of our mind by our feelings.

This is only partially true. Emotions are faster and we can rationalise our decision-making afterwards. But we can also deliberately or subconsciously think in a certain direction to conjure up emotions.

What provides the initial motivation to do that, though? Without emotions we have pure apathy.

You can’t be happy or unhappy about losing your job until you actually know that you lost your job and then form a thought about it. You might tell yourself: “What a relief!” or “I’ll starve!” and then you’ll experience the emotion that results from that thought.

You don't even think about losing your job though, unless your brain tells you this is important to you. Your job has feelings associated with it that cause you to care about whether you have one or not.