Transcription
Hi everyone and welcome to the Neuro Olympics podcast, where we believe that every brain's got talent. This podcast is brought to you by Brains First, the company that helps you make better talent decisions powered by neuroscience.
I'm Lucy, I'm the host of the Neuro Olympics podcast, and in case you're tuning in for the first time and wondering what my background is, well, I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in applied neuroscience. I really love to apply these psychological and neuroscientific insights to any field, and I hope this can be super beneficial to you to grow and further excel in your personal life, your work life, in your sports career—wherever.
With our episodes, we're now running through the behavioral cycle, the six natural skills that we're measuring at Brains First with our Neuro Olympics cognitive games. The cognitive tests are developed to measure your cognitive potential and then match it to the tasks and job environments that suit your cognitive profile.
In the first two months, we addressed the topic of attention and thinking—so how you take in information and then how you process this information. Think about this information in really interesting episodes with our co-founders and our neuroscience experts, Dras and Andre Ferlay, and also on two solo episodes. So make sure to catch up if you haven't done so yet.
This month, we're addressing the topic of decision-making. We've already released an episode with Andre where we spoke about the fundamentals of decision-making, how we make decisions, how it can go wrong, especially in the workplace. We related it to HR decisions, talent decisions, talent management, study decisions, and job-related decisions. I think we touched upon some really cool points and topics, and I'm sure you're going to find a link here somewhere in the description now or in the show notes. I would love for you to tune into this episode as well if you haven't done so.
Today, I want to use the opportunity to touch upon some more decision-related topics—how we are struggling nowadays with making decisions and what can help us to boost our decision-making capabilities. Thinking is fantastic, but if you've listened to my first two solo episodes on attention and thinking, I shared how we are overloaded nowadays by information. We're just presented with too much information on a daily basis and too many choices. This leads to a cognitive drain throughout the day; our mental resources are really demanded and required too much.
You might say, um, I also touched upon how we have, I think, a distorted image of productivity and how it's also not helping that we're experiencing a societal sleep problem. So in the end of the day, we're really draining our cognitive capabilities. You might ask yourself, what happens ultimately to decision-making? Do we even have the mental space, the cognitive space, to make good and healthy decisions? This is also a question that I asked you in the last episode, so let's dive into it.
We're confronted with a billion choices nowadays, and this leaves us with an average of 35,000 decisions that we have to make on a daily basis. Well, now you might think this is a lot, but a lot of the decisions that we make happen in a System 1 kind of way—so intuitively or, let's say, subliminally. You're not really consciously aware of it or thinking about it.
But it starts with an overload. I mean, there is also a luxury problem for most of us. For study directions, you could go into universities; you could attend to. I shared last episode that we're confronted with about 200 different cereal types and 175 different salad dressings in a supermarket. And also, it doesn't help in our daily life that Netflix, for example, presents 5,000 different titles. You end up scrolling through the library, wanting to watch a movie, but after 20 minutes of watching all these trailers, you're actually tired of it. You experience decision fatigue and you really think, I might not even want to watch a movie anymore.
All these choices and all these options that we're presented with will have two negative effects on it, according to Barry Schwartz. He wrote a fantastic book and also spoke on a TED Talk episode that I really recommend you to watch. He's an American psychologist, and it's called The Paradox of Choice.
Here are the two negative effects he's talking about: paradoxically, choice overload can lead to choice paralysis rather than liberation. This is when our brains are confronted with too many options; we would rather not want to make any decision. Also, a concept that ties into this is the fear of making the wrong decision—the fear of failure. We see it especially with high-stakes decisions made in business or professional sports, where these decisions can have significant consequences.
A tip here is, if you feel like you really cannot make a decision and the decision is just too much, you can break down the decision into less intimidating and more manageable parts. In psychology, we call this chunking, and this will help you reduce the cognitive load and also make little steps towards that bigger decision. I think this decision paralysis also has the effect of postponing decisions.
I thought about it this morning that this gap year—so a lot of young people after they finish high school nowadays go on a gap year. I did the same. I think with this gap year option, we're telling ourselves, I need to find myself; I need to take some time off before the hard real life begins. But I think ultimately, we're just overwhelmed by life decisions we have to make because there are so many directions we can go into, and we're afraid to make really the wrong decision.
And this is why I think in the end, with the gap year, for example, we're trying to buy time to postpone those important life decisions we have to make, like which direction with my studies or work do I want to go into? Where do I want to live? All these questions can be really overwhelming.
And don't get me wrong—I don't have the intention to roast a study direction now; I'm just using it as an example. For example, there are study tracks like PPL—so politics, psychology, law, and economics. You can study all of these four in one bachelor's degree. I think it's quite popular because, of course, we're all interested in a lot of things, but also, it leaves the door open for later to go into any kind of direction.
How are we supposed to make a decision now about what we want to end up working in? Where do we belong? I think these study tracks, these more generic study tracks, also become more popular because ultimately we don't want to settle on really a decision of this is what I want to go for in my professional career.
And even if we overcome this decision paralysis and this postponing of decisions, I think Barry Schwartz also thinks we are still not really satisfied. So why is that? Well, you have these billion other alternatives in your mind that you juggle between. If also, with the decision that you made, you're not 100% happy or you encounter a negative consequence, you're immediately going to go back and think, shouldn't I have gone for this other decision?
While you made a decision, you are at the same time thinking about all these really attractive features of these alternatives that you could have gone for. So it's really hard for you to settle and be satisfied with the decision you made. This also leaves us with really tremendous expectations of how this decision should end up, with which consequences should come with this decision. We just build up these higher and higher expectations.
This is affecting us in daily life; you might not notice. But I have an example: I go to the gym and I listen to music with my AirPods, and then I receive these notifications from friends like, "Hey, do you want to meet up? Do you want to go for dinner? Do you want to have a call?" I love long calls with friends—these deep dives into really deep topics. Then you also get a notification of an email; it reminds you, oh, I forgot I should have done this and I still need to do this.
Then it leaves you, or it leaves me, for seconds or minutes thinking about is it okay that I'm in the gym now, which is ridiculous, of course. But yeah, I'm thinking about all these alternatives of what I could do while I'm doing—while I decided to do this, namely going to the gym at the moment.
Barry Schwartz, interestingly, he's a psychology professor, says that he's nowadays assigning 20% less work to his students—not because he thinks they're not smart enough to manage this high workload, but because he knows our mental resources are really occupied by all these other life decisions we have to make besides studying and besides diving into the study topics. Our brains are just occupied by a lot of other things and a lot of other decisions we have to make at the same time.
Well, this is a problem because this points towards that we do need cognitive resources because making decisions is cognitively demanding. So if we want to make a decision, these cognitive resources we should really dedicate towards this decision are competing with all these other factors that are calling for our attention and calling for our thinking. Ultimately, do we have space to make these decisions?
Here's an example of how you can free up your mental space, and it's the Steve Jobs black turtleneck example. Steve Jobs famously wore a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers almost every single day. Why? He said if I keep wearing the same outfit, I don't have to decide in the morning what I need to wear, and so I have more mental capacity for all these other important decisions that I have to make later.
This is a really simple life hack, I think, but very efficient. How you can boost your smarter thinking and make some room for better decision-making and better problem-solving on a daily basis, if you automate these—you might say trivial tasks of what to eat or what to wear in the morning, this can really help.
Besides what Steve Jobs did, you can try the 10-10-1 rule. This is coming from emotion regulation and long-term thinking. It basically tells you to consider your long-term effects and consequences on a certain decision. It asks you to think about if I make a certain decision, how will I feel about it in 10 minutes from now, in 10 months, and in 10 years? This is really not about the trivial decisions you have to make but more about these really important life decisions.
I think it can really help to apply the second-order consequence thinking—not only the immediate effects that might also lead you to impulsive decision-making based on your emotions, but really consider the long-term effects of a certain decision.
The second tip is to use a premortem, and this is coming from risk analysis. So before making a decision, you can think about if this decision would fail or would go wrong. You think about the potential risk factors and consequences of your decision—what could be the potential causes of why it went wrong? What this does is it tries to counteract the overconfidence we sometimes have with decision-making, like, yeah, this decision is definitely the best decision.
This really forces you to think about these consequences, what could go wrong, and these risk factors. Ultimately, you can apply strategies before making the decision to already mitigate these risk factors.
Then the third tip is really sleep on these big decisions. Because when you have a good night’s sleep, a good night’s rest, you are restoring your mental capabilities. Your brain is doing some memory consolidation, some learning, and you might wake up with a really—you hopefully wake up with a really fresh mind to make a really important decision rather than at the end of the day.
I also recommend you, by the way, to make really important decisions before lunchtime because throughout the day, your mental resources will deplete more and more. You will be cognitively drained throughout the day, the more you do. Also, napping can help. A NASA study on pilots found that taking a nap during the day can really boost your cognitive performance by 34% and your cognitive alertness by 100%.
Lastly, you can apply the 70% rule; act on enough information rather than perfectionism. This is really for all the perfectionists out there, me included. It might be useful for you to settle on a decision that is good enough rather than to try to get all the necessary information, writing this never-ending story before you arrive at a solution.
Sometimes, you want to put progress over perfection. This is what I had to do with my master’s thesis, for example. I really could not stop with my literature analysis in the first place, and my professor—my supervisor—really had to tell me, Lucy, this is good enough; just go with what you have right now.
This really applies to the thorough thinkers among us that just cannot settle on a decision. Also, don't be afraid to make the wrong decision because ultimately, for your brain, it's not as harmful in the moment. Of course, your brain might be like, this didn't feel very pleasant, and your brain will also—this is a really fantastic feature—attach this emotional marker to what you experience as a wrong decision. So, in a case you experience a similar scenario again, you'll feel this negative emotion, and it will tell you, don't go for that decision.
Ultimately, your brain is a prediction machine, and what you do with wrong decisions—well, your brain just keeps updating its prediction. It becomes better at predicting, and so wrong decisions, in a way, are not really harmful for your brain. Maybe a question to you: do you think there are even right or wrong decisions, or do you think there's more like bad and good decisions?
Lastly, I want to advise you to not fall into the status quo bias—the tendency to stick with the more familiar because you're afraid of leaving the comfort zone. You're trying to avoid the discomfort that comes with change, but I want to remind you: inaction—so not acting on something, deciding to stick with the familiar and not making any other decision—is also a decision.
So I'll leave you with this last thought. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I hope you could gain some valuable insights that help you to improve your decision-making and free up some cognitive capacity that you can really dedicate towards making good and healthy decisions.
I would love to see some comments, actually some engagement with you, so please leave any questions, any insights, in the comment section. I would love to hear from you! We would also love to see you more frequently under Neuro Olympics podcast, so please make sure to subscribe to all of our platforms or any of the platforms we are out there on—Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, of course. You can find all these platforms if you go to our website, www.ra.com/podcast.
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And yeah, everyone, stay tuned for the next episodes to come! I'm excited to see you next time on the Neuro Olympics podcast. Stay healthy, stay happy, everyone! See you next time. Chia Chow!