Anxiety and decision making

This Harvard Business Review blog post summarizes a recent academic study about the effects of anxiety on decision-making, which found that anxiety lowers self-confidence and makes the anxious more like to seek and follow advice -- and that the anxious are less likely to discriminate between good and bad advice, or to discount the role of conflicts of interest in advice givers. From the post:

Consulting experts and trusted friends may seem like a wise choice, but it comes with unexpected costs. Recently, my colleagues and I undertook research to understand how anxiety impacts people’s willingness to accept advice from others and their likelihood of following poor guidance. The upshot? Our natural instincts can get us into a lot of trouble... 

Eliminating the emotional turmoil of high-stakes decisions may not be always possible, but there are ways to minimize your likelihood of falling prey to bad advice. 

1. Refrain from making major decisions until you are in a relaxed state and can clearly reflect on the matter at hand. 

2. Avoid making a quick decision or obsessing over details. Using a metaphor from golfing, rather than focusing on the endless details of the perfect shot — such as the correct club, proper grip, turning your shoulders just so, and so on — it may be more helpful to focus on the more important outcome: where you want the shot to land.

The study focuses on "state" anxiety ("a transient emotion that anyone can experience") as opposed to "trait" anxiety ("a personality characteristic similar to neuroticism that reflects an individual's susceptibility to anxious feelings") and those with anxiety disorders, but the findings and advice for making better decisions in the face of anxiety seem pretty spot-on to me regardless of where you might fall on the anxiety spectrum.