How We Make Decisions is a Key to Self-Mastery

The following is an excerpt from my new book, The Journey to Self-Mastery: Unlocking the Secrets to Personal Transformation.

This section deals with the importance of good decision-making.

Decision-Making

Some online sources say adults make over 35,000 conscious decisions daily. Cornell University researchers discovered that we make about 200 daily decisions solely about our diet.

As a result, decision-making has been researched in several academic disciplines, including math, sociology, psychology, economics, and political science.

People typically highlight qualities like honesty, friendliness, humor, courage, or other virtues when asked to list their greatest assets. Surprisingly, of the virtues that a study with over 1 million individuals looked at, self-control or willpower came in dead last. According to Florida State University social scientist Roy F. Baumeister, willpower influences all our decisions.

According to Baumeister, the most successful people don’t have particularly strong willpower while making decisions; instead, they conserve their willpower by establishing routines and habits, reducing their stress. According to a suggestion made in an article by Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, these people utilize their self-control or willpower to avoid crises rather than to get through them.

Effective, conscious decision-making requires cognitive resources, and because increasingly complex decisions put a strain on these resources, the quality of our decisions declines as decision complexity increases, according to research by Ap Kigksterhuis, Maarten Bos, Loran Nordgen, and Rick van Baaren, published in the esteemed journal Science.

According to Prince Ghuman and Matt Johnson in their book Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains, “When it comes to making decisions, our brain functions in two modes. One mode is largely automatic, it makes reactive decisions based on intuition. The second mode is deliberate, it makes rational, analytical decisions. However, the second mode is finite, meaning “we can only make so many logical decisions,” they write.

To discover what happens when people’s decision-making abilities are overworked, Angelika Dimoka, Director of The Centre for Neural Decision-Making at Temple University, conducted studies published in Neuroimage. She discovered that logical and rational prefrontal cortex functioning declines when the cortex becomes overloaded with information. As a result, subjects in her experiments started to make stupid mistakes and bad decisions.

So much for the idea of making well-informed decisions; Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and author of The Art of Choosing studied the effects of more information for people making investment decisions and concluded that too many choices or too much information did not make for better decisions.

She continues, “Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints. It’s not a marker of liberation but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. We all have physical, mental, and emotional limitations that make it impossible to process every piece of information.”

The Role of Emotions in Decision-Making

Neuroscientists Daeyeol Lee of Yale University, Daniel Salzman of Columbia University, and Xiao-Jing Wang of Yale University have discovered the following conclusions concerning decision-making:

• Our emotions influence all our decisions.
• We consider incentives or rewards in most of our decisions.
• Improper brain function and negative emotional states, such as severe anxiety, negatively influence decision-making.

Anil Seth’s book, 30-Second Brain, describes how Antonio Damasio’s patient, “Elliott,” a once-successful businessman, underwent neurosurgery for a tumor and lost a part of his brain — the orbitofrontal cortex — that connects the frontal lobes with the emotions. He could no longer make decisions — even the simplest ones.

Damasio later developed the somatic marker hypothesis to explain how visceral emotion affects human behavior. For instance, in a card game, he showed that people’s fingers begin to perspire before picking up from a losing pile, even before they are aware of their poor judgment.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that the emotional impact of losses is twice as powerful as the emotional impact of wins, which impacts our decision-making in predictable ways. For instance, it explains our stubborn inability to write off bad investments.

Can You Make Decisions Based on Gut Feelings?

The question of whether our leaders — or any of us, for that matter — trust our brains and rational thinking when making important decisions or whether we make better decisions based on our gut instincts and emotions has been raised by recent research on the process of decision-making, which has revealed surprising results that defy conventional wisdom.

When asked, “When should you trust your gut?” psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in economics Daniel Kahneman and senior scientist at MacroCognition Gary Klein conducted a study on using intuition to support decision-making under duress. “Never,” Klein retorted, adding that executives should actively and purposefully assess their gut instincts.

According to a study by Joseph Mikels, Sam Maglio, Andrew Reed, and Lee Kaplowitz that appeared in the journal Emotion, gut instincts are effective at making quick decisions. The researchers gave respondents a series of complex decisions of various types and asked them to trust their gut instinct or reason it out with knowledge. Overall, they found that using your gut led to considerably superior results than trying to sort out the nuances.

Decision-Making with Mindfulness

The findings of the Wharton School of Business study were released in the 2013 issue of Psychological Science and demonstrated how 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation might improve decision-making.

Researchers discovered that a brief mindfulness practice helped people make more logical decisions by considering the information at hand in the present, which resulted in more positive results in the future. The study’s principal investigator, Andrew Hafenbrack, found that mindfulness can improve decision-making by thwarting ingrained inclinations.

Making mindful decisions can stop compulsive or addictive behavior patterns and lead you along a route that benefits your long-term health, happiness, and general well-being.

Brain-Gut Connection

Recent research published by academics and neuroscientists shows a clear connection between the gut and the brain.

Dr. Linda Rinaman of Florida State University describes how the brain and gut constantly communicate via the vagus nerve, which runs from the gut to the brain. Rinaman claims that gut-to-brain signals have a “powerful influence on emotions, mood, and decisions and are often a response to worrisome or threatening stimuli and events.”

Researchers Rinaman and James Maniscalco from the University of Illinois at Chicago claim that vagal feedback signals are highly protective and promote cautious. “Vagal feedback signals can serve as a warning signal to assist us in stopping ourselves from making risky or unwise decisions.”

According to Rinaman, a high-fat diet can produce an inflammatory reaction in the GI tract, transmitting signals via the vagus nerve and resulting in sensations of anxiety and sadness. She also claims that our eating habits might occasionally cause changes in behavior or mental state and greatly impact how well our stomach communicates with our brain.

Considering how much data is coming at us at any given minute — over 200 billion emails will be written and received daily this year alone — there may be some justification for controlling the fire hose of information that threatens to overwhelm our brains with useless information.

Joel Pearson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, found evidence that people can use their intuition or gut feelings to make decisions that are better, faster, more accurate, and more confident in a study that was published in the journal Psychological Science.

What Characterizes a Good Decision?

Consensus-seeking should never be your objective, but this does not grant you the right to take unilateral action. Great decisions are shaped by considering a wide range of perspectives. Please just consult with those who can make a substantial contribution if you want to make an informed choice. This does not imply that you should investigate every viewpoint. The appropriate individuals must clearly express their viewpoints and possess the necessary competence to assist the responsible decision-maker.

A scourge that afflicts people’s decision-making frameworks is short-termism. Focusing just on immediate results can be tempting, especially if your performance is only evaluated on how well you do your annual task. Great choices strike a balance between immediate and long-term benefits. Consider the short-term vs. long-term expenses and advantages as you weigh risk vs. effect.

Habits to Help You Make Better Decisions

• Watch out for overconfidence, as it can swiftly result in bad decision-making. Studies consistently demonstrate that people tend to exaggerate both their performance and the accuracy of their knowledge. Comfort comes from familiarity and overconfidence, and there’s a good chance you’ll make some poor decisions since you’ve grown accustomed to your routines and need to be aware of the risk or damage you’re causing.
• Evaluate the risks associated with every action. The facts are the same in both cases, but research shows that people who hear “10% of people die” perceive their risk of failure to be higher. For example, take two surgeons who tell their patients, “Ninety percent of people who undergo this procedure live,” and the other surgeon who says, “Ten percent of people who undergo this procedure die.”
• Put the problem to rest. You could take a lot of time analyzing the benefits, drawbacks, and possible risks and rewards when faced with a challenging decision, such as whether to relocate to a new place or change occupations. Additionally, data demonstrates that considering all your options has many benefits, but doing so excessively might be harmful.
• Make it a daily ritual to reflect on your choices for the day. When one of your decisions doesn’t turn out nicely, consider what went wrong. Consider the lessons you can learn from every error you make. Set aside time to reflect on your errors, whether you forgot your umbrella at home and got soaked on the way to work or broke your budget because you couldn’t resist an impulsive buy.
• Identify your shortcuts. You’re biased in some respects, though admitting it can be awkward. It’s hard to be entirely unbiased. In truth, your brain has developed heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to help you make judgments more quickly. These mental shortcuts might lead you astray even though they spare you from spending hours agonizing over every decision you make. Consider the mental shortcuts that result in poor decisions regularly. You can become more objective if you admit your false assumptions about people or circumstances.
• Take the opposing view. You’re likely to hold onto a belief after you’ve decided it is true. It relates to the psychological concept of belief perseverance. There’s a strong probability that you’ve formed some views that don’t work for you, and it takes more convincing evidence to change a belief than it did to form it. For instance, you might shy away from speaking up in meetings because you think you’re a poor public speaker. Or perhaps you quit dating because you think you are lousy at relationships. Additionally, you’ve formed opinions regarding specific racial or ethnic groupings. These ideas that you assume are always true or 100% correct might lead you wrong, such as “People who work out a lot are narcissists” or “Rich people are evil.” I think it’s the best way to counter your views. Discuss all the benefits of speaking up in a meeting if you need to be sure you should. Or, if you think that the wealthy are terrible, give examples of how wealthy individuals may be helpful or nice.
• Speak to yourself like you would a reliable friend. You’ll probably find the solution more readily when you visualize yourself offering advice to someone else when you ask yourself, “What would I say to a friend who had this problem?”
• Establish a due date for yourself. Setting a deadline, according to Levy, “allows us to advance rather than remain immobilized in the worry of making the “wrong” choice.” The best method to give yourself a deadline is to establish a date for your final decision so you have time to consider the benefits and cons and sit with your feelings. It can be a good way to avoid decision paralysis.
• Be mindful of your three brains. We all have three, not just you. The best brain for reasoning, rational decision-making, creativity, and empathy is your cephalic (head) brain. You can find passion, compassion, and values in your cardiac (heart) brain. Courage, self-defence, and authentic self are in your enteric (gut) brain. All three heads should be heard. Which one should be the deciding factor here?
• Apply the rule of ten. Before making a choice, consider where you’ll be in 10 days, ten weeks, ten months, and ten years from now. Then, consider how you will feel after making this choice.
• Consider your biases. While leaders must use their instincts, they must also critically examine themselves and understand that “acting on your gut” sometimes means being influenced by your own biases.
• When making decisions, use your values as a compass and a filter. When presented with a difficult decision, ask yourself, “Is my decision consistent with my values? My ethical and moral beliefs?” and “How will this enhance my life?”