Practicing Good Decision-Making as You Age
Making good decisions actually gets better with age as you rely on mental shortcuts your brain has developed over time. Decision-making is a mental process influenced by emotions, memories, reason, and personal bias as you weigh options, benefits, and costs. We often fit into one of the four types of decision-making:
- Analytical decision-making requires logical reasoning, evidence, and data to come to a conclusion and take action.
- Behavioral decision-making considers the feelings of others to reach a team consensus.
- Conceptual decision-making involves thinking of the bigger picture and evaluating different possibilities and options.
- Directive decision-making values efficiency, speed, and action when quickly coming to your decision.
Why You Get Better at Decision-Making
There are a few reasons we seem to get wiser and better at decision-making as we age. For one thing, we learn to regulate our emotions better, which allows us to think more rationally without a heavy influence from our feelings. With that emotional maturity comes responsibility, so we also have a better sense of prioritization and know what matters. What we also gain over the years is experience, so we have those moments in our personal histories to learn and pull from when making current decisions.
How to Practice Good Decision-Making
It’s not enough to only rely on the above reasons that help us make better decisions. There are other things we can do every day to practice good decision-making:
- Staying active, eating a balanced diet, and managing stress reduces the risk of chronic illness and improves brain function and memory
- Having a regular sleep schedule ensures you’re well-rested and sharp when going about your daily activities and cognitive thinking
- Keeping your mind active by playing games, reading books, having hobbies, and learning new skills exercises your thinking skills
- Having an active social life improves overall health and cognitive ability through conversation and connection
If you want to implement a strategy to make good decisions, consider the following steps you can take:
- Identify your goal, what’s important to you, and the problem that needs to be solved.
- Gather information such as possible alternative solutions, the opinions of experts and those you trust, and other resources related to the problem.
- Consider how the consequences of your decision will impact you and others involved.
- Make your decision and put it into action, then evaluate it for future decision-making experiences.
To ensure you are most effective in making good decisions, watch out for these potentially unexpected problems that might occur:
- Misidentifying the Problem or Overestimating the Outcome: Take your time to evaluate the situation so you don’t identify the wrong issue. On that same note, you also want to take your time to evaluate the consequences.
- Having Only One or Too Many Sources: Be open to a broad choice of alternatives and information when considering your consequences so it’s not narrow-minded, but don’t overload your thoughts with too many opinions. Otherwise, you might be misguided with incorrect or emotional information.
- Timing: This can be a tricky thing. On some occasions, you need more time to think on such a tight turnaround, and on others, you can actually make a quick decision easily. Trust your gut and sit with yourself to ensure the most accurate decision for you.
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