Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath and Stressful Situations

It has happened to almost everyone: you’re in a stressful situation and end up making a bad decision. You can’t change it now, but what you can do is understand why you made that decision. This will allow you to evaluate your decision making next time you find yourself in a tense spot and need to make a choice. A study produced at the University of Southern California explains why we make these decisions in stressful situations, and how we can possibly avoid them.

Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanth: Stress in Decision Making

Counterintuitively, stress in decision-making tends to lead people to focus on the way a decision could go right. This seems to be the opposite of what many people would think, seeing as stress is a negative emotion to begin with. However in stressful situations people tend to learn from positive feedback and information versus negative information.

For the example, one study induced stress onto people by submerging subject’s hands in ice water, or asking them to give a speech. The subjects would almost always tend to focus on the positive information and discount negative information.

Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath: How Stress Can Effect Decisions in Our Lives

This study opens up many doors into deciphering why and how we as humans make certain decisions when stress is a factor in our lives, which it almost always is in modern times.

• Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath reminds students that stress may affect someone’s decision making about taking a new job. If the job offer pays more than your old job, and you have financial problems, stress may cause you to weigh a salary increase as more important than a two-hour commute and a longer workday.

• Stress also effects decision making in men and women differently. When men are approached with decisions in stressful times they are more likely to take a risk. Conversely, women are more likely to become conservative about risk in stressful situations. Men are also prone to “fight or flight” decisions, versus women who strive to create bonds.

Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath: Alleviate Stress From Your Life

Stress is never a positive emotion in life, even if it does sometimes make people focus on the positive. It causes the inability to properly evaluate a situation and make a rational and informed decision. However, as Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath tells his students, the more we know about how stress plays into our decision making the more we can direct how much we let it control those decisions.