Experiments With Hope - Episode 28: Beating Bad Decisions

NOTE: This episode was recorded on January 7th, 2019 and moved from YouTube on January 21rst, 2021.

How to overcome anxiety and bad decision making....it's a fascinating topic. I used to tell coaching clients that some states of mind are so negative, or anxious, you should ignore even your own advice, your own reasoning and your own interpretations of circumstances while in such states. Too many times, we get anxious, or angry or depressed, and our brain looks for reasons to justify this state. Many times, these reasons are completely unrelated to our state and should be ignored until our state is normal again. It's also important to dedramatize these such states by being an observer of these states, instead of a participant. 

In my earlier podcast (called "The Science of Self Sabotage") I talk about how your left brain (what we sometimes call the conscious mind, the thinking mind, or the ego) is not in charge of your decisions. Rather, it's the narrator of your decisions and of your states of mind. In today's podcast, I explain how scientific split-brain experiments have proven that our left brain (which we ironically call our "rational" brain) is more likely to lie to use than our right brain (which we call our experiential brain). Yet, because we put so much emphasis on logic, labeling, and "reason," that we're predisposed to believe what our left brain tells us.

True, sometimes our left brain can help us to remain objective in the midst of deception or in spite of our states. But I've found it much more common for people to be fooled by the stories told by their left brain. That's why, in this podcast, I talk about why it's important to reassess your reasoning about things while you're in different states of mind. If your reasoning isn't sound and consistent across multiple states (positive and negative), it's probably not worth taking seriously. The same with your decisions and with the stories you tell yourself about your life, other people, and the world. 

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