In a culture defined at the same time by extreme levels of stress and a surfeit of choice, it stands to reason that we might want to know something about how we make decisions under pressure.
Overwhelmed
This is exactly what researchers at the University of Southern California set out to investigate in a recent study published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Their results are a little counterintuitive.
High Stress, Half Full
Since we tend to associate anxiety with negative emotional states, we might expect stress to make us generally pessimistic about our options when the pressure‘s on. But this is not what the study found. In fact, it turns out that stress has quite the opposite effect on our decision-making.
When we‘re nervous about giving a speech, or worried about which college to attend, we actually focus more on how things can go right at the expense of how things can go wrong.
The folk advice of "sleeping on it," then, might be a perfect strategy for counteracting this potentially-regretful optimism. Or, if you haven't got the time, at least take a few deep breaths and mellow out for a couple minutes.