Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach Hello, I'm Henry Emmons, and welcome to Joy Lab.
I'm Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today we are opening a virtual letter from our community mailbox and this one is from Rachel. They ask about decision making. Specifically, how do we make decisions that are in our best interest? I love this. Practical. a great Yeah. Yes. So there are no shortage of five or seven step decision making processes that gurus have proposed. And I think those systems can help.
Actually, I rebel against them. I hate them. Um, uh, they can help some folks. But I think it can first be helpful to call out some common obstacles that depression and anxiety can have on decision making. I think I, that's why I don't like those rigid five step plans for decision making because sometimes it ignores these big behemoths like depression and anxiety. How can those show up and influence our decision making? So let's talk about anxiety first.
We have explored this a lot on the pod about how anxiety can shrink our world in a very literal sense. We've talked about our visual field narrowing, auditory and sensory blocking amidst anxiety and stress, are survival mechanisms in many ways, but that can last a little longer than they need to be or show up when it's unnecessary. But you can imagine how this shrinking of our world can make decision making difficult. We are simply pulling from a narrower field of options.
There is a growing amount of research here as well on day to day decision making. So, coming out of the field of behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, the new tool or domain of computational psychiatry. It's just something we should maybe talk about in a later episode. Kind of interesting. But when it comes to anxiety and decision making, the research is then pretty clear, as we've said, that anxiety can make us also more risk averse and more negative.
I'll read directly from an article from researchers Hartley and Phelps. Their article titled, "Anxiety and Decision Making." Here's what they said. "Anxiety increases the attention to negative choice options. The likelihood that ambiguous options will be interpreted negatively and the tendency to avoid potential negative outcomes, even at the cost of missing potential gains."
So, if you're struggling with anxiety and decision making, yeah, that's very normal and as this article notes, as the research in general has found, we really have to work with our anxiety and it's work, but that work will benefit our decision making. So that order of operations, address the anxiety first, I think can be really efficient, actually, when we're thinking about decision making. Henry, do you want to say more here about anxiety and decision making?
Well, I like the way that you described it, Aimee, that anxiety narrows the field of vision. Yeah. But how we respond to that can really be different from person to person. So anxiety, you know, it's not just one thing, even though we tend to lump everything together. So, for example, when some folks are stressed, they might make decisions really quickly.
You know, there are some people you might, you might know someone in your life like this who might not be the best at making their big life decisions, but in a crisis, they're just really good. They're decisive, they're quick they might make good emergency room docs or CEOs or something because when they're stressed, they just go into fight mode and they are ready to take action. Others of us, might go more into the flight mode, fight or flight. So, instead of wanting to take action.
They want to run away. And they may even make pretty impulsive decisions in order to do that. Like, for example, eating too much, drinking too much, avoiding social contact. things that they know, even in that moment, are not good for them. But still, unconsciously, they think that it will help them to avoid the stress. And then, it's fight, flight, or freeze. And so there are others who, when they're really stressed, they simply freeze. And they can't make any decisions, really, large or small.
They can't act. And it is not that they are weak or ineffective. It's just how they're wired to respond to really high stress. So this fight, flight, or freeze is wired into each of us, but to different degrees, I think. And I think it's just helpful to remind ourselves that how we're wired is not the final answer. It does not have to have the last word. So most of the time, we are, most of us really, are reacting at a pretty primitive, knee jerk level when something is really stressful.
Even though it is probably 99. 9 percent of the time not really as threatening to us as our body and this reaction thinks that it is. Yeah, I think that is a good reminder. And also, we have tendencies, like you said, but we're not locked into them. So let's talk about depression and decision making. Similar to anxiety, there's more research coming out here. There's a, 2020 study from Kurji and colleagues I want to highlight.
So in this study, they sent participants through a battery of decision tasks. And they had some interesting outcomes, but that were consistent with past research. The main takeaway was that folks diagnosed with major depressive disorders, so MDD, had a significant difference on all four decision making measures that I think are really helpful to call out. So let me outline those four. The first was that participants with MDD made fewer choices that were associated with an advantage.
Second, and so this is compared to folks who were not diagnosed with MDD, so the second was that they also made more choices associated with a punishment. This is based on measures known as the punishment and reward reversal learning, kind of a wild measure, but a good indicator to say that folks were, again, making fewer choices associated with an advantage and more choices associated with a punishment. So, with that, I think it's interesting to think about this, in two ways.
Maybe it's a comprehension issue, right? Which is possible considering that depression can be joined by symptoms like brain fog, fatigue. So maybe they just, weren't as quick on the response and maybe didn't understand the questions. Or they were actually, and I think this is where it is, making a choice, either unconsciously or consciously, to choose something more negative. The third difference was that participants with depression had a lower expectation of winning money in one of the tasks.
So this demonstrates a more negative skew on something called future expectations. They expected the future to be worse. They wouldn't, win the money. Fourth, folks with depression were also less willing to wait for a reward. This was measured with something called the high persistence condition of the willingness to wait task. So, there is a real difference in our decision making abilities and the choices we make when depression has taken hold.
And I think it matters because the point is that we can create change. Just the awareness of these tendencies can be very helpful if you're dealing with depression. And then, with that awareness, we can practice new skills, we can create new patterns. It is not easy, but we can do it, and we can create some healing that can also benefit our decision making. Do you want to add anything here, Henry, about depression, decision making?
Well, I think that's a really interesting study, actually, and those outcomes are sort of what I would expect, based on what I know about depression. And I think there's at least two things going on with depression that might explain that. One is the negativity bias that we have talked about before. And briefly, that's the tendency that seems to just be wired into the human brain to see what's wrong more easily than to see what's right.
And this is a lot of what we try to undo or to provide an antidote for in Joy Lab, frankly. We believe that this happens as a sort of a survival mechanism, that we might be more likely to survive if we notice that something is off, then maybe, possibly it's something that might threaten our safety.
The problem though is that when one is depressed, this negativity bias is just on steroids, it just gets magnified and our thinking changes so that we expect worse outcomes, we see ourselves as flawed or unworthy, we think that it's always going to stay this way. Things are bad and they're always going to be bad. Now those thoughts are distortions. Let's be clear about that. They are not real. But when caught in the throes of depression, it's super easy to convince ourselves that they are true.
I think there's another issue, though, that when one is depressed, the brain is just not working very well. Thinking is slowed down, just kind of generally, it becomes inefficient. Memory is not as good, it's harder to do mental tasks that are challenging, and it's difficult to make nuanced decisions. Everything is just harder in the state of depression. And I just have to add here, again, that sleep is a big factor here as well.
And when one is depressed, sleep is most likely going to be poor as well. You can improve either sleep or mood and it can go a long way toward getting your brain back online. Yeah. Sleep sneaks into so many of our discussions. It's the linchpin of good mental health. That is on point messaging from Dr. Henry Emmons. So true. Frustratingly true. As somebody who does not like to sleep, cause I feel we've talked about this, I feel like I'm missing out on something.
Bye. Nothing good, as my grandma would say, happens after dark. So, but still, and I wouldn't even want to go to a party. Anyway, I will pop in some helpful resources for us all in the show notes on sleep too, I'll put in some more there. But as we, close up here, we'll save more of like the decision making strategies for a later episode. Henry and I will work on cooking up a five step process for efficient decision making that doesn't make you want to vomit. Oh, Aimee, I was thinking one step.
Oh, yes. I've got a good one step process. Okay! Hahaha. Should we save it for later? We'll save We'll save it. Okay. Get excited, everybody. Look for an episode on the one step strategy for efficient decision making. But I think, hopefully the message that's coming through here is that so often the problem with decision making may not be that we need an outside formula, even though that one, this one step formula might be perfect that we'll present later.
It's not an outside formula, it's an inner formula. even better. Okay, well then, right on. So, but then the message here is that sometimes the best way for us to make wise decisions is to shine a light on what might be holding us back unconsciously. I think that can be so helpful, like these factors that we noted today. And when we can take those blinders off, I think we can naturally engage in more healthy decision making. So I will close with some simple wisdom from Nelson Mandela.
Here's what he said. "May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears." Thank you for listening to the Joy Lab podcast. If you enjoy today's show, visit JoyLab.coach to learn more about the full Joy Lab program. Be sure to rate and review us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Please remember that this content is for informational and educational purposes only.
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