14 DAY TRIAL // Simple focused-breathing meditation exercises can help improve your decision-making skills, researchers at The Wharton School and INSEAD discovered in a new study. They say that a single, 15-minute session of mindfulness meditation daily is sufficient to produce this positive effect.
What this investigation suggests is that it may take too long for the human brain to learn how to make good decisions. With short periods of practice, it is very likely that individuals who want to improve the way in which they make decisions, or the speed at which they do this, can achieve their goals.
“Most people have trouble admitting they were wrong when their initial decisions lead to undesirable outcomes. They don’t want to feel wasteful or that their initial investment was a loss. Ironically, this kind of thinking often causes people to waste or lose more resources in an attempt to regain their initial investment or try to ‘break even’,” says INSEAR PhD candidate and study author, Andrew Hafenbrack.
Mindfulness meditation was found to allow test subjects more time to think about their decisions rationally, thus increasing they odds of them reconsidering their initial positions after new evidence pops up.
“Our findings hold great promise for research on how mindfulness can influence emotions and behavior, and how employees can use it to feel and perform better,” adds researcher Sigal Barsade, PhD, a coauthor of the study, quoted by PsychCentral.