Lately, in my professional writing, I've been covering how fear and anxiety poison the well for decision making. That research crept into my class the other night as I gave a common instruction:
breathe into the deepest part of your lungs, so that the decision making part of your brain kicks on. In yoga, we seek to stay in that decision-making, in evaluating information and adjusting activity. And my students looked back at me, some taking the information in, others blinking at me as though I had just spoken in Sanskrit: welcome, beautiful, and totally foreign. That made me think... a post on yoga and decision-making might be in order. And, because I write about personal finance (even though I am, admittedly, a dumpster fire of debt), here are a few thoughts on decision-making in personal finance that pretty readily can apply to decision-making in health and wellness. From a great article on Distinction Bias: In comparison mode, we end up spending too much time playing “spot the difference.” This is where we run into trouble and focus too much on inconsequential quantitative differences. To combat this, avoid comparing two options side by side. In regards to why life stress makes horrible retirement savers: When under stress, people will not trust information that could indicate a bad result in the making. And more confusingly, the stress the person is under doesn’t necessarily have to relate to the decision at hand. Anxious brains, those with chronic anxiety and high levels of cortisol have a structure different from others. In other words, it is harder to make good decisions when you have long-term anxiety. And finally, from Money Love author Meadow DeVor: If we want to have a better relationship with money, there’s only one thing we need to do to create lasting change. Change our mind. It’s not more complicated than that. We don’t have to understand investments, banking, real estate, business, dividends, stocks, ROI’s, percentages, budgets, spreadsheets, or exchange rates. We only need to understand the way our mind works. Alright, so the last quote falls into the "cheater cheater" category, because Meadow DeVor is, in addition to being a financial health expert, also the Founder of Yoga Church. But, you can see how enhancing your decision making by learning to be present, and by reducing anxiety is clearly linked to finances. And its also clearly linked to pretty much everything else. So, what do I mean when I say "the decision-making part of the brain?" I mean the parasympathetic system. In most exercise classes, the goal is to respond as quickly as possible. That's the sympathetic system or as I like to call it the "run away from the tiger" part of the brain. If you had to run away from a tiger, your system would be focused on big blunt things - where trees are, how close the tiger is, if there are allies around. In life, when you sit down to write a budget for the year or plan a holiday meal, your parasympathetic system is working (unless you have relatives that are human versions of tigers). Planning a meal involves noting small differences between options, balancing a variety of information and determining a course of action that harmonizes all of that information. It's sensitive, its comparative, and its complex. How and where we breathe affects the two systems. Breathing slower and deeper into the lungs signals to the brain that it can rest and relax. Breathing more shallowly into the top, and smaller, part of the lungs, signals the body that it needs to GO. You can make much better decisions about how you choose to experience your body, what you do with it, and what you allow yourself to put in it (and maybe even on it), if you can learn to move from the shallower breathing into the deeper breathing.
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