Health Decisions Archives - Decision Coaching – Ursina Teuscher, PhD

Blog Archives

Temporal Construal Levels: Seeing the Big Picture in Daily Choices

An interesting but not widely known framework for dealing with self-control and daily decisions is the theory of temporal construal levels.

How does knowing about temporal construal levels help us make better choices?

The theory and many subsequent research studies (here’s just one example by Fujita, Trope, Liberman, and Levin-Sagi) suggest that we think quite differently about events depending on how far in the future they are. When we think about a distant event, we represent it in a more abstract and coherent way, and we connect those future events with our goals. This would be a high-level construal. As the event gets closer, we become more concerned about the concrete and incidental details of the events and about the experience itself.

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Multitasking: How Bad is it Really?

You’ve probably already been warned to stay away from multitasking. In recent years, there have been many articles, blog posts etc. dissuading us from it. Why?

Multitasking doesn’t exist. Instead, when we do try to pay attention to two tasks at once, what we end up doing is switching our focus rapidly between different tasks.
This kind of switching makes us less productive than if we focused on one task only, and then moved on to the other task later.
People who are most likely to attempt multitasking – and who think they are good at it – have the lowest actual multi-tasking abilities.

This is all relatively uncontroversial and based on many experiments measuring task effectiveness and brain activity, and I believe it is important knowledge.

However,

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Effects of sleep deprivation on decision making

How does a lack of sleep affect our judgment? Does it really lead to poorer choices?

"Drowsy drivers use next exit": warning sign on Interstate 15 in Utah Unfortunately, the answer is many times yes. In my research into the topic, I’ve found at least eight ways how a lack of sleep affects different aspects of our judgment and decision making.

Sleep deprivation affects us both physically and mentally, and decision-making is a complex process that requires the orchestration of multiple neural systems, such as emotion, memory, and logical reasoning. It is therefore not too surprising that sleep deprivation would take a toll on many fronts.

Here are eight effects of sleep deprivation on decision making:

1) What’s perhaps best known is that it impairs attention and working memory, leading to slower reaction times, reduced vigilance, and more mistakes.

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Does Positive Thinking Help You Reach Your Goals?

Can positive thinking help you reach your goals? Picture from: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/539763 (Attribution not required)

Can “positive thinking” really help you change your life for the better and reach your goals? Many motivational speakers and writers seem to believe so, but empirical studies reveal a more complicated picture.

If you want to reach your goals, positive thinking seems to come with some pitfalls.

In particular, in her research spanning decades, Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have discovered a powerful link between positive thinking and poor performance [e.g., 1 – 5]. Oettingen’s book “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” [6], and her website detail many of these findings. For example, in one study [2] they asked college students who had a crush on someone to engage in future fantasies about them and a person of their romantic interest.

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Improving your Habits with Choice Architecture

Choice Architecture Coaching to Improve Habits Picture credit: Ben Deavin

What is choice architecture, and how can we use it to improve our own decisions?

Choice architecture is the art and science of how to present choices to decision makers. The way a choice is presented to us has a much bigger influence on our behavior than we may realize. For example, children eat more fruit when fruit is placed in more prominent positions in a school cafeteria. Or, people are more likely to enroll in retirement savings plans if the employer makes that plan the default option – which is the option that happens when you do nothing. Similarly, people eat less when the default serving size is smaller.

Two recent books shine a light on choice architecture, and on how it affects our decisions:

Eric Johnson’s The Elements of Choice (2021) offers a guide to creating effective choice architectures.

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How to Deal with Regret

Do you have deep regrets about some of your past decisions?

A solid “No!” to this question should be much more concerning than a “Yes”. Regrets make us human, as Daniel Pink argues in his new book The Power of Regret. What’s more, regrets can help us become better humans, if we learn something from them along the way.

Drawing from his own research as well as previous studies, Pink claims that people feel regret quite often. He identifies four core categories of regret:

1. Foundation regrets
“If only I’d done the work.”
These are regrets where we opt for short-term gains over long-term payoffs, like not studying hard enough in school or not saving enough money.

2. Boldness regrets
“If only I’d taken that risk.”
These are regrets of inaction,

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Heuristics and Biases in Early Responses to Pandemic Uncertainties

Decisions under uncertainties are driven to a large extent by heuristics and biases. How can policymakers take advantage of this knowledge in order to communicate more effectively?

I’m happy to share the publication of a new commentary article by Raffaella Misuraca’s team that addressed this question in depth. It’s been a pleasure to be included in this collaboration:

Can We Do Better Next Time? Italians’ Response to the COVID-19 Emergency through a Heuristics and Biases Lens
by Raffaella Misuraca *, Ursina Teuscher, Costanza Scaffidi Abbate, Francesco Ceresia, Michele Roccella, Lucia Parisi, Luigi Vetri, and Silvana Miceli
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

ABSTRACT:
During the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy, people often failed to adopt behaviors that could have stopped, or at least slowed down,

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Summer Reading List 2018

New Summer Readings: Books on Decision Making and Goal Achievement Another hopefully long and beautiful summer is coming up, and my intention is to spend a lot of it productively: reading. Preferably in a hammock. If you feel the same, here comes my new list of book recommendations about decision-making and goal achievement.

Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler (2017). Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. I’ve always enjoyed Dan Ariely’s self-deprecating sense of humor, and in this collaboration he found a great match in Jeff Kreisler. Even though I was familiar with most of the concepts they discuss, this book not only kept me entertained, but also highlighted very clearly (and sometimes painfully) the irrationalities around money that I still allow into my life. Read a sample here.

Chris Guillebeau (2017). Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days.

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How to Nurture Your Brain

I’m happy to announce the publication of a literature review from a collaboration with my colleagues Raffaella Misuraca and Silvana Miceli from the Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy:

Misuraca, R., Miceli, S., & Teuscher, U. (2017). Three effective ways to nurture our brain: physical activity, healthy nutrition, and music. A review. European Psychologist, 22 (2), 101–120.

[Full text available from ResearchGate]

How to Nurture Your Brain

ABSTRACT: A growing body of research suggests that physical activity, healthy eating, and music can, either directly or indirectly, have positive effects on our brain and cognition. More specifically, exercising and eating seem to enhance cognitive abilities, such as memory, creativity, and perception. They also improve academic performance and play a protective role from many degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. Concerning music, research has shown that there exists a general positive relation between music aptitude and cognitive functioning.

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Valentine’s Special: Chocolate and Coaching

I’m offering a new coaching package for couples. Could you use some help improving your shared time management, figuring out priorities, getting better organized together? If you sign up for your first exploratory Strategy Session before Valentine’s Day, you’ll receive a box of the world-famous Teuscher Champagne Truffles at our first meeting.

Read more about the couples coaching program and schedule a first session here.

Couples Coaching Valentine Special
And no, you’re not the only one wondering: people keep asking me whether I’m related to the “Chocolate Teuschers”. Sadly, not that I know of. But that won’t stop me from loving them, and from using their most delicious treats to get us all started on a sweet note.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Binge Working and Procrastination: Your Experience

Last-minute stress and binge working will improve your future procrastination as much as a hangover will improve your drinking habits.

At least that’s my hypotheses.

Guilt, Binge Working and Procrastination

Or what do you think? I’d love to hear about your experience. Do you sometimes work in somewhat excessive “binges”, for example through the night or throughout a weekend? If so, is this productive for you in the long run, or does it lead to the vicious circle in the image?

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Decision Skills Matter

To what extent do decision skills matter in real live? Do these skills actually lead to better decision outcomes and fewer unpleasant life events?

Or, more specifically: do people who perform better on hypothetical decision tasks also make better real-world decisions, to the extent that they experience better outcomes over the course of their lives?

Let’s take a step back. Based on all the different theories of what counts as a “rational” choice, we know that some people perform better in the kinds of choices that are typically presented in research studies. There are people, for example, who are less affected than others by the way information is presented to them (in other words, they are better able to resist framing effects). Or, while most people are overconfident most of the time, some people actually have a pretty accurate level of confidence into their own judgments.

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New Productivity Coaching Group

Time is our most precious resource – are you getting the most out of yours? Or are you ready for a change?

My next productivity coaching group will come in a new format, starting with one-on-one sessions and an in-depth assessment before the group meetings.

It is a 3-month package that includes:

Two individual coaching sessions of 50 min each and an initial in-depth assessment of your goals, your individual style, your situation, and your personality along the Five Factor Model (FFM). A part of the assessment will happen during our sessions together, and a part of it will be homework for you in between our meetings.
A copy of the workbook: “Increasing Personal Productivity in Healthy and Sustainable Ways” by Ursina Teuscher.

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Numerical Skills for Financial Decisions

Relatively few people own private long-term care insurance, even though long-term care is one of the largest financial risks currently facing older people. A new study suggests that poor numerical skills may explain a part of that phenomenon: people with better numerical skills (even after controlling for education and cognitive function) are more likely to hold long-term care insurance.

Given the complexity of this particular financial decision, it is not surprising that a lack of numerical skills would create barriers. Assessing the value of a private long-term care insurance policy involves a variety of calculations, such as determining the probability of needing care, evaluating the likely lifetime expense of premiums against the payments one could expect to receive, and comparing the costs and beneﬁts of insurance against other strategies to manage the same risks. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by all this. A lack of skills to deal with all those numbers would certainly prevent people from making the best decisions for themselves.

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Instead of a Book Recommendation

This month I’m recommending an article instead of a book, by Gigerenzer and his colleagues, who have been pioneers in advocating for statistical literacy:
Gigerenzer, G., Gaissmaier, W., Kurz-Milcke, E., Schwartz, L. M., & Woloshin, S. (2007). Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 8(2), 53–96.

The article shows impressively how not only patients, but also journalists and physicians lack a basic understanding of health statistics, which can have serious consequences for healthcare and medical decision making.
The authors make a very strong case that this confusion is not necessary: it is created by nontransparent presentation of information (intentional or not), and the skill of thinking about these statistics and probabilities could relatively easily be taught – but isn’t.

Please let me know if you are interested in reading the article but don’t have access to the full text here.

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Medical Decision: What Would You Do?

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Medical Decisions: How to Judge Risks

Thanks for submitting your answer to the poll!

The question was: Would you get a cancer screening done if it reduced your chance of dying from this type of cancer by one third?

If you were undecided, you may have wanted more information about the type of cancer. But there is a more important reason why you should not have decided based on the information you got in this scenario: the number (risk reduction by “one third”) is not meaningful at all, because it only gave you information about relative risk reduction, rather than absolute risk reduction. If you get this kind of information from your health care provider, you should ask: “Ok, and what are my chances of dying from this type of cancer without the treatment?” Or more generally,

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Book Recommendation: The Upside of Irrationality

Dan Ariely (2011). The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic.

Dan Ariely is a great thinker, scientist and story-teller. In this book, he weaves personal anecdotes and research findings together to help us gain insight into our own irrational minds.

Recognizing our own behaviors and thinking patterns is a great stepping stone towards improvement. But rather than assume we could do better and be more rational (which I do believe is important and possible too, at least sometimes…), Dan Ariely suggests we should find ways to make our own irrationalities work in our favor. I find this mindset very useful in practice. In particular, he suggests many methods of how the “right” choice can become the “easy” choice for us. Those are great strategies to set us up for success.

In general,

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Cravings? How To Stay in Charge

The most frequent New Year’s resolution is to lose weight. However, one thing that gets in the way of the best goals and intentions are cravings. Cravings tell us in a very clear voice what we should do, and they have tremendous motivational force. They often seem to trigger a string of actions as if we were on autopilot – we do whatever they tell us, disregarding our own previous plans.

To help with these moments, I’ve created a visual guideline (you can download it in full size as a pdf, if you click on it):

At first my idea was only to create a reminder for myself, but then I realized it might be helpful for others too, so I turned it into a more self-explanatory and shareable design. It is meant as a quick guide to help you reclaim control over your own decisions – in the heat of those craving moments.

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Book Recommendation: Willpower

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney (2012). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This book is a collaboration of the psychologist and researcher Roy Baumeister with New York Times science writer John Tierney. Together, they created the kind of book I really love. It offers very practical advice, based on a lot of research. It provides very helpful insight into how we can increase our self-control, focus our strength, and better resist temptation. It is easy to read, but not dumbed down, nor diluted with unnecessary stories.

For those who are in money-saving mode after the holidays, you’ll most likely find this one in your local library. Ours (Multnomah County) even has the e-book for mobile devices, so you can borrow it from wherever you are. What I love most about those library e-books is that they return themselves –

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