When I’m in a decision-making process and wondering what to do, I’ve tried making lists of pros and cons. I’ve tried to analyze the situation. Then sooner or later, I make a decision.
But I started to wonder, at what moment do I actually decide? Do any of those pro and con lists make a difference?
John Gottman is a couple’s therapist with a “love lab” in Seattle where he’s been filming couples in therapy for 4 decades.
He hooks them up to biofeedback sensors and captures their biomarkers like heart rate variability and galvanic skin response during therapy.
What he’s discovered is that the body has decided it will have a fight seconds before the person is aware of it. The body is already gearing up for the conflict before consciousness is aware that he or she is going down that path.
Recently, I read some related research about how our brains make decisions before we’re consciously aware that we’re making a decision.
For example, before you avoid your old college roommate on the sidewalk or reach for a drink, your brain has already decided what it will do.
As I mulled this over, it made me wonder, if this is the case, how do I make a new decision or change a habit if I’ve made the decision before I’m even aware that I am making it?
Drumroll, please… Cognitive Behavioral Modification (CBM).
According to CBM, the key is to design your life toward the decisions you want to make.
Instead of pro and con lists, the question becomes how can I bias my life to nudge me toward making good decisions unconsciously?
There’s lots of research about how to do this, like having your gym bag by your front door, which will increase the likelihood that you’ll actually make it to the gym.
In addition to these behavioral hacks, it’s also important to nudge your brain into a positive state so it can — you can — see a wider range of opportunities and potential outcomes.
In the book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, pioneering neuroscientist Elaine Fox explores many ideas to overcome pessimism and achieve a more positive outlook.
Although outlook may seem miles away from decision-making, it’s actually intimately connected. Whether your brain is happy or sad greatly impacts the choices you feel are available to you and how you act on those choices.
Nudging Your Brain Towards Happiness
We’re filled with biases like confirmation bias, which directs what we notice and points us toward conclusions that confirm our beliefs. If, for example, you believe that people are untrustworthy, your system will focus on examples of untrustworthiness around you.
So you need to change your biases in order to “bias the way your future self responds.” Scientists at McGill developed a fascinating experiment for people with social anxiety, which is often related to having a bias toward unhappy faces.
If you have social anxiety, you have already decided pre-consciously that someone is upset with you or dangerous.
In order to teach the brain to stop jumping to that conclusion and look for the positive, the researchers created grids of growling, angry faces with one smiling face in the mix.
The experiment asked people to search for the happy face and click on it, and then they would get another grid of angry faces and again have to find the happy face.
What they found was interesting. Searching for the happy face in a line-up of unhappy faces became a skill in the brain. The subjects with social anxiety became less anxious. And what is even more interesting, this skill of looking for the good in a sea of bad broadened and generalized. The people became more positive generally. I had to try it!
I decided to commit to playing the game every day for 10 days and noticed a purely self-reported sense of resiliency when it came to how I handled the moods of my children and boyfriend.
I didn’t get as stuck on the negativity as I had in the past. I’m not sure if an actual change had occurred in my brain or if just doing the game puts the idea of focusing on the positive at the forefront of my mind, but regardless, it made me more positive and resilient in my reactions to the people around me.
If I were to do this again, or if you are thinking about doing this, I would recommend this — Once per day, if you are in a crowd, look for a happy face. You don’t need to know the person. Do this at the grocery store, on the subway, when driving, every day for 10 days to start.
Then, document your mood daily, especially when you have big highs and lows. What happened right beforehand? Who did you interact with right before the change in mood?
I use the Notes app on my iPhone to document this. There’s something about writing it down that strengthens the groove in your brain.
I know this sounds time-consuming, and it is, but I think it will be worthwhile. Even if the game doesn’t make a difference, you will learn a lot about the forces in your life and what and who can shift your mood.
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This post was previously published on Curious.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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