How To Improve Your Decision-Making Capacity

Your decision-making ability is the only defense you have against the onslaught of the data in our current environment. The noise around is increasing and your connection to your intuition is depended on how well your nervous system is regulated.
The more stress and fear you feel, the less capacity for deductive reasoning and clear think you will have.
In this video I share with you a very easy and basic approach to regulating yourself to preserve your rational thinking capacity.

Transcript

Hi and welcome to Autotelic Drive. My name is Pauline Dugult and I am an embodiment coach and I work at the intersection of peak performance, Strength training and mindset. And in this video I want to approach a subject about how fear makes you dumb. Let's just put it very simply. When you are in fear, When you are in fight or flight response, You become stupid. And there is a biological reason for that. When you are in fight or flight, All your energy and all your cognitive capacity goes to the portion of the brain that is responsible for survival. It is requirement for survival of the biological organism. That is how our hardware works. What happens when we are faced with stressful situations constantly and without relief? There's constant stress that is present in your body and it causes constant degradation of your decision-making ability. So, What are you supposed to do about that? Well, First of all, You would want to be aware of your state of being and your stress and you have to stop normalizing it. Oftentimes, We live with stress for so long that it becomes a second nature. It becomes something that we just deal with, But the cost of that is your degradation of your intellectual capacity. You may be the smartest person in the room, But when you are scared and stressed, You are reduced to the fraction of who you are and what you're capable of. So, You owe it to yourself to deal respond better to the circumstances by regulating yourself, Regulating your nervous system. I always speak about this concept of embodiment and regulating nervous system through strength training. I'm a certified personal trainer, So I work in that realm because this is what I am passionate about. But there is a key aspect to that. When you train your body physically, You prepare for the circumstances, You become more resilient, Your body knows how to deal with stress much better. Not only that, But there is also a component that enhances your breath work. Breath work in itself is a very good way of dealing with stress. Navy SEALs have a specific methodology for dealing with very challenging and stressful situations by using specific breath techniques. And those techniques are simple. They are not rocket science. You take a short inhale and you and you exhale for much, Much longer. Pretty simple. There's also a box breathing, There's a circle breathing, But those are deviations and variations of the same idea. Short inhale, Long exhale. That is the basis. So you can go to that too. But what happens is that situation passes, You relax and you forget about it. But next time this can repeat itself. And we've all been in situations where we have made bad decisions because we were stressed and didn't realize that. Only looking back can you really see that the reason you made a bad decision is because you were not yourself. And that happens due to sleep deprivation, It happens due to just overall worriness, And women worry a lot more according to research, According to the feedback that I've heard about. So, This all comes together, And if you look at your environment, You will notice a lot of Aspects that are almost designed to make you constantly be in stress because when people are in stress They're thinking less clearly and they're more easy to control So you owe it to yourself and to your closed ones closed loved ones to be thinking more clearly make better decisions and be connected with who you are an Embodiment allows you to connect to your deeper core self in order to stabilize yourself in order to deal with challenging situations and in order to see through the fog of confusion that is so present in our world right now. If you look at everything that is happening, The exponential data increase, The conflicts, The noise, It is a lot to process and it causes a lot of confusion. So the only way you can counteract that is by training yourself, Training your body physically, So I always state that strength training is essential. Because it builds your muscles, It builds your capacity and it reflects on your nervous system. When you train with heavy weights at the gym, Your nervous system gets stronger and as a result your decision-making capacity gets stronger. If you find yourself constantly, Chronically stressed, Look at the components of your environment. First of all, The basis, The sleep, Nutrition, Hydration, Time in nature, Connection with people that you care about. Those are the absolute basics that nobody can live without. But on top of that, What is your breath like? What is your training practice like? What is your ability to stay resilient and recover? And so recovery practice is any activity that allows you to move your body, Just allows you to shift things around, Change your state, Change your perception, And allows the bodily fluids to circulate more freely. Because when you're sitting in one spot, Your blood is not moving as well, Your lymph is not moving as well. You want to be moving around, But not to extreme extent. You don't need to take it to the high level three cardiovascular exercise just walk in the nature or hot therapy cold therapy something like that that gets your blood moving is helpful in that regard. So those are the components that will help you deal with environmental stressors much better. Basics like sleep, Nutrition, Hydration, Connection, Time in nature, Recovery practice, Breath work, And then training your physical body. So this is it for today. Trust this was helpful. Come back again here for more tips and ideas on how to be more yourself, How to find that inner motivation for accomplishing all the goals that you're trying to accomplish. And if you have questions, Let me know and connect with me if you want to hear something about the specific subject that I haven't covered yet. Until next time, And I wish you all the best.