Making Decisions Shouldn't be this Hard - The Lunch Decision

Gut Almighty

Intuition really does come from the gut. It's also a kind of matching game based on experience. There are times when trusting your gut is the smartest move—and times you'd better think twice.

By Carlin Flora, published on May 1, 2007 - last reviewed on February 10, 2017

You "know" things. You don't even know how you know them. Yet you have a sense of certainty when driving down a strange street that you really must make a left turn. Or comfort a co-worker who insists she's fine. Or quit your job and move to Paris.

Intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can't immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you're not even aware you noticed.

Think of them as rapid cognition or condensed reasoning that takes advantage of the brain's built-in shortcuts. Or think of intuition as an unconscious associative process. Long dismissed as magical or beneath the dignity of science, intuition turns out to muster some fancy and fast mental operations. The best explanation psychologists now offer is that intuition is a mental matching game. The brain takes in a situation, does a very quick search of its files, and then finds its best analogue among the stored sprawl of memoriesand knowledge. Based on that analogy, you ascribe meaning to the situation in front of you. A doctor might simply glance at a pallid young woman complaining of fatigue and shortness of breath and immediately intuit she suffers from anemia.

The gut itself literally feeds gut feelings; think of butterflies in the stomach when a decision is pending. The gut has millions of nerve cells and, through them, a "mind of its own," says Michael Gershon, author of The Second Brain and a professor at Columbia University. Still, gut feelings do not originate there, but in signals from the brain.

That visceral punch in the paunch is testament that emotions are an intrinsic part of all gut feelings. "I don't think that emotion and intuition can be separated," says cognitive scientist Alexandre Linhares at the Brazilian School of Business and Public Administration. Emotion guides how we learn from experience; if you witness something while your adrenaline is pumping, for instance, it will be remembered very vividly.

Experience is encoded in our brains as a web of fact and feeling. When a new experience calls up a similar pattern, it doesn't unleash just stored knowledge but also an emotional state of mind and a predisposition to respond in a certain way. Imagine meeting a date who reminds you of loved ones and also of the emotions you've felt toward those people. Suddenly you begin to fall for him or her. "Intuition," says Linhares, "can be described as 'almost immediate situation understanding' as opposed to 'immediate knowledge.' Understanding is filled with emotion. We don't obtain knowledge of love, danger, or joy; we feel them in a meaningful way."

Encased in certainty, intuitions compel us to act in specific ways, and those who lack intuition are essentially cognitively paralyzed. Psychologist Antoine Bechara at the University of Southern California studied brain-damaged patients who could not form emotional intuitions when making a decision. They were left to decide purely via deliberate reasoning. "They ended up doing such a complicated analysis, factoring everything in, that it could take them hours to decide between two kinds of cereal," he says.

While endless reasoning in the absence of guiding intuitions is unproductive, some people, including President Bush, champion the other extreme—"going with the gut" at all times. Intuition, however, is best used as the first step in solving a problem or deciding what to do. The more experience you have in a particular domain, the more reliable your intuitions, because they arise out of the richest array of collected patterns of experience. But even in your area of expertise, it's wisest to test out your hunches—you could easily have latched on to the wrong detail and pulled up the wrong web of associations in your brain.

When researcher Douglas Hofstadter is starting a knotty math problem, for instance, he begins with a hunch. Then he hunkers down and calculates. After two weeks, perhaps he'll see a roadblock and give up. Another hunch pushes him to a new tack, and perhaps it is the right one.

It's time to declare an end to the battle between gut and mind—and to the belief that intuitions are parapsychological fluff. Better to explore how the internalized experiences from which gut feelings arise best interact with the deliberate calculations of the conscious mind.

Going with your Gut can be a Winning Strategy for Trivia Games and Tests

You've memorized the almanac and you're ready to take down your Trivial Pursuit opponents. Well, don't get too cocky—sometimes knowing less about a question helps you pick the correct answer. Intuition does the guesswork. Case in point: A kid is asked whether Spain or Portugal has a bigger population. He guesses Spain, simply because he's never even heard of Portugal. And he is right; there is a reason he isn't yet aware of Spain's less powerful and less populous neighbor. There is wisdom in his lack of knowledge, says Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and author of Gut Feelings.

A University of London team found that people who went with their initial response on a test of visual perception (questions included picking out an anomaly in a pattern of symbols) did better than those who were given more time to ponder. Whereas the subconscious brain recognized a rotated version of the same symbol as different, the conscious brain reasoned that "an apple is still an apple whether rotated or not," the researchers concluded. When the subjects had time to engage their higher-level functions instead of relying on their intuitive responses, they were more likely to be wrong.

Jody Steinglass, founder of Empire Education, a private New York City-based tutoring company, says that the trick to preparing for standardized tests such as the SAT is to hone intuition by identifying cues—say, certain words—that let you know which category a question belongs to (quadratic equation), which in turn tells you how to solve it. "Right before test time, we go through drills where I will give students a list of questions. I don't have them actually solve them but just quickly tell me how they would solve each one. This way they are trained to make good snap judgments and then to confidently trust those judgments."

Great Liar-detectors Build on a Big Rolodex

Many of us are sure we could never be deceived, and yet our gut instincts about people's veracity are usually off. "We don't pay enough attention to all the channels of communication, and we believe what we want to believe," says Maureen O'Sullivan, professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco. There are no set rules to follow in order to improve your fib-spotting—liars do not necessarily avoid eye contact, for example. But you can ask yourself questions, such as whether the person you are sizing up is deviating from his or her typical repertoire of behaviors. If your daughter is using strange gestures and an odd tone of voice, she may indeed be hiding something.

There is, however, a tiny elite whose deception detection could be considered intuitive. O'Sullivan has spent years identifying and studying "truth wizards," people with a way-above-average ability to detect lies. Interestingly, they have various modes of arriving at their spot-on intuitions. Some are very empathetic and sort of morph into the person they are judging. "As they assume the subtle postures and expressions of the other person, they seem to be putting themselves into their skin, or into their emotional reality," she says. Others coolly notice subtle nonverbal cues and voice tones and put all of those together in a meaningful way. And until directly questioned, most are unaware of what they are doing.

O'Sullivan compares the truth wizards to Agatha Christie's fictional Miss Marple, who accurately judges people by matching them against a Rolodex of personality types in her head. Unsurprisingly, astute judges of character are people who have an intense interest in people and a broad range of experience under their belts. "They may be a corporate lawyer who also worked in a coal mine at one point," she says.

Though you may not reach wizard status, anyone can improve general interpersonal intuition. Simply put, if you are highly motivated to understand people, your intuitions about them will be better. Take Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University, who has spent his life trying, he says. After all, he creates models of the human mind. "I'm deeply curious about what makes people do certain things. I am somebody who spends a great deal of time trying to understand what the real reasons for their behavior are."

Even so, Hofstadter emphasizes the importance of not prematurely closing your mind when it comes to intuitions about people and their motivations. "You have to test these cautiously. When you have confirmation—then you can make the daring leap," he says, whether it's telling your friend that you suspect she's getting divorced for the wrong reason or confronting your boyfriend about what you think are fabrications.

Because you know him so well, your intuitions about what your spouse is thinking and feeling are fairly correct. But that doesn't mean you should always act on them. Let's say your husband is flipping through a catalog and you can sense that he's thinking about how much he'd like to be with one of the lingerie models.

Research on "mind reading" tells us that in such situations, where "relationship-threatening" thoughts are intuited, happier couples keep their hunches to themselves. They don't bother to test them out; they understand that such thoughts are temporary and not serious.

Anxious people need to apply the most caution. They are particularly accurate at divining any negative feelings and thoughts their spouse might be having. But the catch is, they are probably missing the positive things their partner is also thinking about them. Singling out critical feelings only winds up sabotaging the relationship.

Jeff Simpson, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, who has led this line of research, puts it this way: "Anxious women are accurate at the wrong times." Alas, your intuition may have led you down the aisle in the first place, but that doesn't mean it won't turn around and trip you up.

Improvisation Takes Instant Feedback—and Years of Practice

The spontaneous voyage that creative improvisers take their audiences on exemplifies a paradox of intuition: The more a jazz musician has deliberately prepared throughout his musical career, the better he is at instantly responding to the cues around him when deciding what to invent in the moment onstage.

"Virtually all serious students of jazz copy solos from their favorite musicians' records," says guitarist Randy Napoleon. "All our preparation in music is designed to make our instincts more reliable, our execution more free. Gut-level playing is mastery born from a lifetime of discipline and thought. The more you think, analyze, study, practice, the stronger you internalize the natural flow of music. You are free to think less when on the bandstand and trust your feelings more."

Dan Goldstein, assistant professor of marketing at London Business School, is a decision researcher who moonlights as a comic. "It's not that improvisers are intuitively funny—no matter who they are," he says. "It's this thing of doing drill after drill, and after you've mastered those drills, you've internalized them. You can apply them quickly, and with a cool head."

Morality Comes from the Gut; Ex(planations) Post Facto

We think of moral decisions as the raw material of great drama—as warring internal desires or puzzles to solve via logical arguments. But most people actually determine whether an action is right or wrong automatically, finds Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of The HappinessHypothesis. Haidt likens moral intuitions to aesthetic judgments: We instantly know whether we think something is beautiful, but we don't necessarily know why. "The rational mind is like a press secretary that spins reasons for our intuitive moral decisions," he says.

The "press secretary" is all about advancing our own interests, prosecuting those we don't like and defending ourselves. Haidt theorizes that we have evolved this way because of the competitive advantage attached to being able to navigate society's dense web of gossip. Because what people think you do is just as important as what you do, it pays to be able to explain your behaviors in a rosy light. That makes the internal machinery inherently self-deceiving. You may have no qualms about cheating on your taxes, but you'll probably think twice after speaking with friends about it (if you dare even bring it up).

That's why Haidt does not advocate going with your gut when contemplating a moral decision. "The general advice I would give is to check with others to see what they think." We can see the splinter in our neighbor's eye, after all, but not the plank in our own.

A Strong Hunch can be the Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship

We've all heard stories of couples who "just knew" the moment they met that something serious was going to develop between them. (David Myers, professor of psychology at Hope College and the author of Intuition, had that feeling about a young woman as a teenager; they've been married for more than 40 years now.) The heart has reasons which reason does not know, said the philosopher Blaise Pascal. But maybe the "heart" is governed by the unconscious emotional pattern matching that produces intuitions.

Bechara describes the phenomenon as an overall feeling that someone would be "good for you," perhaps even irrespective of passion. "It's tapping into your unconscious and triggering prior emotional experiences. We need to trust that this is a survival system that has evolved to our benefit," he says.

As choosing a mate is rife with unknowns, it's not best arrived at by number crunching. Gigerenzer tells the story of how Ben Franklin advised his nephew, torn between two sweethearts, to list each woman's qualities, place a numeric value on the importance of those qualities, and total each column. But when a friend of Gigerenzer did just that and calculated the winner, his heart sank. That's how the friend knew he really wanted the other woman.

Big Purchases Benefit from Intuition, but not Stock Picks

Our brains have a number of innate capacities, but they grow out of ancestral, not modern, problems, says Terry Burnham, author of Mean Markets and Lizard Brains. The types of dilemmas we are good at solving intuitively are ones in which the old machinery lines up well to produce positive contemporary outcomes. Investing is not among these.

Any gut feeling you may have about where to put your money is probably very similar to many others' gut feelings (say, going with a stock that has been on the upswing for a while). It's simply not investment-savvy to pick the same stocks as everyone else—you will not stand to gain.

Burnham advises that you set up a system to ensure that your prefrontal cortex, and not your gut, is firmly in charge of financial decisions. You need to analyze investment strategies and information about different companies. Just as Burnham refuses to get the key to the mini bar in hotel rooms lest he give in to a late-night junk-food craving, he "locks in" his money by making sure he can't change his allocations without an adviser's authorization. That way, he won't move his money around on a whim.

Intuition, however, is a reliable source of purchasing decisions, at least for big-ticket items. The only goal of investing money is to make a profit; cold calculations count. Material possessions, on the other hand, have a subjective value—you want products to bring some ease, comfort, or happiness.

When it comes to complex acquisitions such as homes and cars, consumer satisfaction is greater among buyers who decide with their gut. The experience of living in a house is ultimately an emotional and unpredictable one; so throw away your spreadsheet and rely on your "old brain" to assess whether or not you'll get more pleasure than pain out of the purchase. Resume rational deliberation for the little stuff; research shows it is superior to intuition for picking items such as oven mitts and shampoo.

It's comforting to know you can lean on your unconscious when facing big life questions. And, even better, you've got a mind that can both listen to the gut and keep it in line.

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TONY ROBBINS: How to Find Yourself When You're Feeling Lost (PERSONAL DE...

Have you ever felt lost? I know I have, and I have spent much time and money finding out who I was and the way forward. Tony Robbins is most definitely an inspirational man and worth a listen

Understanding Sleep Problems -- The Basics

During normal sleep, you cycle through REM and four stages of non-REM (NREM) sleep numerous times a night. Stage 1 of NREM sleep is the lightest, while stage 4 is the deepest. 

When you're repeatedly interrupted and can't cycle normally through these types and stages of sleep, you may feel tired, fatigued, and have trouble concentrating and paying attention while you're awake. Sleepiness puts you at greater risk for car wrecks and other accidents.

What Are Sleep Disorders?

Circadian Rhythm Disorders

Typically, people sleep at night -- thanks not only to the conventions of the 9-to-5 workday, but also to the close interaction between our natural sleep and alertness rhythms, which are driven by an internal "clock."

This clock is a small part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus. It sits just above the nerves leaving the back of our eyes. Light and exercise "reset" the clock and can move it forward or backward. Abnormalities related to this clock are called circadian rhythm disorders ("circa" means "about," and "dies" means "day").

Circadian rhythm disorders include jet lag, adjustments to shift work, delayed sleep phase syndrome (you fall asleep and wake up too late), and advanced sleep phase syndrome (you fall asleep and wake up too early).

Insomnia

People who have insomnia don't feel as if they get enough sleep at night. They may have trouble falling asleep or may wake up frequently during the night or early in the morning. Insomnia is a problem if it affects your daytime activities. Insomnia has many possible causes, including stress, anxiety, depression, poor sleep habits, circadian rhythm disorders (such as jet lag), and taking certain medications.

Snoring

Many adults snore. The noise is produced when the air you inhale rattles over the relaxed tissues of the throat. Snoring can be a problem simply because of the noise it causes. It may also be a marker of a more serious sleep problem called sleep apnea.

Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea occurs when the upper airway becomes completely or partially blocked, interrupting regular breathing for short periods of time -- which then wakes you up. It can cause severe daytime sleepiness. If left untreated, severe sleep apnea may be associated with high blood pressure and the risk of stroke and heart attack.

Pregnancy and Sleep

Women often experience sleepless nights and daytime fatigue in the first and third trimesters of their pregnancy. During the first trimester, frequent trips to the bathroom and morning sickness may disrupt sleep. Later in pregnancy, vivid dreams and physical discomfort may prevent deep sleep. After delivery, the new baby's care or the mother's postpartum depression may interrupt sleep.

Narcolepsy

Narcolepsy is a brain disorder that causes excessive daytime sleepiness. There is sometimes a genetic component, but most patients have no family history of the problem. Though dramatic and uncontrolled "sleep attacks" have been the best-known feature of narcolepsy, in reality many patients do not have sleep attacks. Instead, they experience constant sleepiness during the day.

Restless Legs Syndrome

In people who have restless legs syndrome, discomfort in the legs and feet peaks during the evening and night. They feel an urge to move their legs and feet to get temporary relief, often with excessive, rhythmic, or cyclic leg movements during sleep. This can delay sleep onset and cause brief awakening during sleep. Restless legs syndrome is a common problem among middle-aged and older adults.

Nightmares

Nightmares are frightening dreams that arise during REM sleep. They can be caused by stress, anxiety, and some drugs. Often, there is no clear cause.

Night Terrors and Sleepwalking

Both night terrors and sleepwalking arise during NREM sleep and occur most often in children between the ages of 3 and 5 years old. A night terror can be dramatic: Your child may wake up screaming, but unable to explain the fear. Sometimes children who have night terrors remember a frightening image, but often they remember nothing. Night terrors are often more frightening for parents than for their child. Sleepwalkers can perform a range of activities -- some potentially dangerous, like leaving the house -- while they continue to sleep.

What Causes Sleep Disorders?

Insomnia

Insomnia may be temporary and stem from a simple cause, such as jet lag. Short-term insomnia may also be caused by an illness, a stressful event, or drinking too much coffee, for example. Many medications have insomnia as a side effect.

Long-term insomnia may be caused by stress, depression, or anxiety. People can also become conditioned to insomnia: They associate bedtime with difficulty, expect to have trouble sleeping (and thus do), and become irritable (which can cause more insomnia). This cycle can be maintained for several years.

Circadian rhythm disorders are an important but less common cause of insomnia. People who abuse alcohol or drugs often suffer from insomnia.

Snoring and Sleep Apnea

When you fall asleep, many muscles in your body relax. If muscles in the throat relax too much, your breathing may be blocked and you may snore. Sometimes, snoring is caused by allergies, asthma, or nasal deformities that make breathing difficult.

Apnea means "no airflow." Obstructive sleep apnea was thought to be a disorder primarily of overweight, older men. But abnormal breathing during sleep can affect people of any age, any weight, and either sex. Researchers now know that in many cases of sleep apnea, the obstruction in the airways is only partial. Most people with sleep apnea have a smaller-than-normal inner throat and other subtle bone and soft-tissue differences.

Drops in blood oxygen during sleep -- once thought to be the cause of waking up due to obstructive sleep apnea -- may or may not be present. Most likely, awakening occurs with the body's increased effort required to overcome the obstruction of the airway.

Drinking alcohol can make obstructive sleep apnea worse because it relaxes muscles that maintain an open airway.

A rare form of sleep apnea called central sleep apnea occurs when signals from the brain to your muscles decrease or stop for a short time. You may not snore if you have central sleep apnea.

Pregnancy and Sleep

Fatigue during the first trimester of pregnancy is likely caused by changing levels of hormones, such as progesterone. Toward the end of pregnancy, some women find it difficult to sleep because of the uncomfortable size of their abdomen. Some women are too excited, anxious, or worried about becoming mothers to sleep well. Other women who are pregnant complain that vivid dreams prevent them from getting restful sleep. Sleep apnea, especially if it's severe and causes your blood oxygen level to drop during sleep, is a risk to the fetus.

The cause of narcolepsy is not clear. Genetic and environmental factors likely play a role, although the data on genetic factors is still speculative and not well studied. There are some rare nerve disorders that may be linked to narcolepsy.

Restless Legs Syndrome

There are many possible causes of restless legs syndrome, including kidneyfailure, nerve disorders, vitamin and iron deficiencies, pregnancy, and some medications (such as antidepressants). Recent studies have shown a strong genetic link and researchers have been able to isolate a gene that may be responsible for at least 40% of all cases of the disorder.

Nightmares and Night Terrors

Nightmares can be triggered by a frightening or stressful event, a fever or illness, or use of some medications or alcohol. Night terrors are most common in pre-school children, but they also can affect adults who are experiencing emotional or psychological problems.

Other Things that Impact Sleep

Young age. Infants may sleep up to 16 hours a day. But most won't sleep through the night without a feeding until 4 months of age. School-aged children may sleep 10 hours a day. Their sleep may be disturbed by an illness or fever. Call your doctor if your child has a fever and is sluggish when waking up.

Old age. People over age 60 may not sleep as deeply as younger people. Sleep apnea is also more common among older people.

Lifestyle. People who drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, or drink alcohol are more likely to have sleep problems than people who do not.

Medication. Many drugs can cause sleeplessness. Others can cause daytime fatigue.

Depression and anxiety. Insomnia is a common symptom of depressionand anxiety.

Heart failure and lung problems. Some people find it difficult to sleep at night because they become breathless when they lie down. This can be a symptom of heart failure or a problem with the lungs.

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How to Change Your Voice to Sound More Confident

By Staff on 04 Sep 2017 at 10:00AM

We all know that being seen as confident, but not cocky, at work can have a positive effect on our careers. From one-on-one meeting with your boss to giving a presentation to the whole team, your voice is one of the most important parts of project confidence. Here’s how to adjust your voice so that how you say something has as much impact as what you say:

Evaluate Areas to Work On

You may not need to work on all of the following issues, but thinking about each area and how you measure up gives you concrete things to work on. If you have trouble evaluating your own voice or way of speaking, ask a friend or trusted colleague to help, or record yourself speaking to get a more objective sense of your own habits.

• Tone: The way you say something often has an impact on what people actually hear. Two of the most common examples are vocal fry (here’s a video example from the BBC) and up-speak, or using a higher pitch at the end of sentences similar to the tone used when asking a question. (Not coincidentally, both of these traits that are thought to undermine credibility are commonly associated with female voices.)
• Speaking Cadence: If you speak very quickly or without many pauses, it can come across as nervousness. Try these exercises to help you have more deliberate articulation.
• Volume: Speaking too softly or too loudly does not project confidence. You want to aim for a volume slightly above your normal speaking level so that you’re clearly heard without coming off as abrasive.
• Filler words: “Um”, “ah”, and “like” are all common filler words that keep what you’re saying from flowing smoothly. Try these exercises from a professional public speaking coach to cut down on your own filler words.
• Vocal tics: The area you may need the most help from a friend in analysing is common phrases or vocal tics you have. Maybe you use the same phrase when you’re buying time to think, like, “That’s a great question...” Or you could be undermining yourself with phrases like, “Sorry to interrupt...” or “I’m not sure if this matters, but...”

Toastmasters has a great PDF guide and Six Minutes lays out breathing and vocal exercises you can do to generally improve your vocal presence. For example, to work on your resonance:

Raise your volume a bit and say “Mmmmmmmmy name is…” Repeat this ten times up and down your vocal range.

Once you know where you need to improve, get to work building new habits by practicing as much as possible.

Practice New Habits

Changing the way you speak is difficult, but the more you practice, the easier it will be for you to build new habits. After a while, projecting confidence should become second nature. Since you might not have presentations or other opportunities to practice often, here are some other situations where you can test out your new techniques:

• Chatting with colleagues: While you don’t necessarily need to project a lot of confidence around the water cooler, small talk with coworkers gives you a low stakes situation in which to practice.
• Sharing your ideas during meetings: Having your ideas heard and respected can be influenced by how confident you sound while laying them out. Next time you share an idea, focus on at least one of the areas you want to improve.
• Giving feedback: When giving feedback about someone else’s work or skills, make a conscious effort to practice for at least one of the areas you want to improve on. Eventually, you want to get to the point where your confident tone positively impacts how seriously your feedback is taken.
• Asking questions: Whether at a meeting, during a training, or at a networking event, this is a very quick way to practice your vocal confidence.

Consider Other Confidence Boosters

Beyond your voice, you can work on other things to present yourself as confident and come across better at work.

• Take up space: Stand with your feet hip or shoulder width apart, keep your spine straight (but not frozen, you’re not a robot), and try to use arm and hand gestures as you naturally would when talking.
• Improve eye contact: When speaking to a group, make eye contact with different people in the audience for about 3-5 seconds each. In a one-on-one situation, it’s okay to glance away and then make eye contact again if you feel things getting awkward.
• Use open body language: Don’t cross your arms, stuff your hands into your pockets, or cross your legs. Keeping your body relaxed and open makes you look at ease and confident.

It’s not easy to change your behaviour, including the way you speak, so be patient with yourself and try to put into practice your new habits as frequently as you can.

Image: NBC / SNL

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