How to Make Better Decisions

Plan your day so that you can make big decisions in the morning; your willpower and focus are often depleted by the end of the work day. In this video, Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Baba Shiv demystifies the brain chemistry that controls our decision making, and explains how you can regulate it to make better decisions. Read more: http://stanford.io/1m44nZ0

Key takeaways:

• 90-95% of our decisions are made instinctually vs rationally.

• We're most effective at decision-making in the morning, but a high protein breakfast can make us as effective mid-day.

• In the afternoons we tend to be more risk averse and gravitate toward the status quo, which manifests in indecision.

• If you don’t get good-quality deep sleep, you’ll wake up with less serotonin and make more decisions out of fear