To Make Better Decisions, Check Your Mood and Your Physical State
Think about the last time someone at work offered feedback on your mood. Did you make adjustments, moving toward a middle ground?
Emotional awareness functions as a mood-management system, granting full access to logic and feelings. Just as your home thermostat keeps temperatures within sensible limits, turning on your emotional thermostat allows you to monitor your internal climate.
Become more emotionally fluent by actively soliciting feedback. Ask yourself how you feel, and become mindful of your moods.
Mindful Meditation
Buddhist monks practice “mindfulness,” continuously noting—but not judging—their emotions. Studies show they have highly developed emotional thermostats. When confronted with negative emotions, they immediately note them and recalibrate their responses. They effectively balance their emotions when making decisions.
A 2011 Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging study revealed that even novice meditators enjoy an increase in the brain’s grey matter, which regulates emotions.
Learn to spot, label and understand your emotions by becoming more mindful (with or without meditation). Practice detaching from your feelings and observing them without judgment. You’ll eventually learn to separate biases and distortions from the decision-making process.
Check Your Physical State
After checking your emotions, the second element that influences your decisions is your physical state. Your physical state and awareness of your body has a profound impact on decision-making.
“In a recent study of parole decisions in Israel, the key factor that determined whether or not a judge granted parole was not the gender of the prisoner, their ethnicity, or even the severity of their crime, but whether or not the judge had eaten recently. If a prisoner came before a judge whose blood sugar was low in advance of his ten o’clock mid-morning snack of a sandwich or a piece of fruit, it was terrible timing. At such times, the accused had hardly any chance of getting parole—pretty much 0 percent.”
– Noreena Hertz, Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World (HarperBusiness, 2013)
A compromised state can drive you to be impulsive and impatient. Before making any decisions, take a physical inventory. Are you:
- Functioning on adequate sleep?
- Hungry or thirsty?
- Stressed?
- Experiencing fear?
- Physically fatigued?
This is a frequent point of conversation with my clients. How tired or stressed they are can drastically affect their choices. Conduct regular self-audits. Note how you feel before making a decision.
In my next post, I write about how we are influences by social systems and group dynamics when making decisions.
In the meantime, what decisions have your made while stressed, hungry, angry, or tired that you wish you hadn’t? I’d love to hear from you.
