Amount of Sugar in Your Blood Impacts Decision-Making Big Time!

You get a lot of advice on how to make better decisions – sleep on it, shop around, go with your gut and so on.  Although a lot of this type of advice sounds like common sense it can be loaded with cognitive biases and decision traps.

Learning to make better decisions is a big part of what YourNextBrain! (improving your mind and brain) is about so it will be a frequent topic on this blog.  We will look at two aspects:

1. Uncovering the biases and traps in everyday decision-making and talking about how to manage them.
2. Discussing what decision-making advice holds up under scientific study and how to put it to use.

For example, a recent study reported on the Physorg blog, Got a Decision to Make? Get Some Sugar in Your System, found that our ability to delay gratification is improved if we have sugared up.  More specifically, they found that taking a sugary drink actually improves our ability to focus on a larger future payoff versus a smaller but more immediate payoff.  This is key for making many types of decision especially about managing money and health. It also supports the common sense advice of never go food shopping hungry.

Higher blood sugar levels means you are less likely to decide impulsively.

The study also found:

“Not only did having a higher blood sugar level make study participants less likely to act impulsively, but taking a diet drink made people more likely to act on impulse and take the immediate, smaller reward, Wang said.

“Giving someone a diet drink tells the body that there’s an ‘energy crisis’ because you’re giving it something that tastes good but it has no calories.”

So you really need to increase your blood sugar level not just “eat something” before you decide.

____________________________________________________________

Source for Right Way and Wrong Way image can be found here.