Many of us have heard of Ted Talks and even if they are not something incorporated into your daily or weekly life, it’s still something bound to have crossed your path in some way or another. I used to watch Ted Talks weekly without fail until well, now. Alas, my attention span has become so shortened that I would watch a ten minute video of an engaging topic over two or three days. #sigh

Enter Ted-Ed. My new favourite go-to for knowledge and news. I still want knowledge and information…only I want it in a form that isn’t necessarily going to add to my anxiety or depress me…especially in current times. They are literally bite sizes of informative topics with cartoon like videos to match (you know, for the child in all of us).

My choice this week was a video on “The psychology behind irrational decisions” by Sara Garofalo…(https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-psychology-behind-irrational-decisions-sara-garofalo). Why? Because it ties in with my recent thoughts shared on self sabotage and procrastination. What’s behind irrational decision making? Loss aversion. Yep, we make irrational decisions because we’re afraid of loss however the irrational decision we make most likely leads to the loss which then only emphasises how irrational it is, unless of course we want to lose something, which isn’t really rational, now is it?
The idea that the negative psychological impact we feel from losing something is almost twice as strong as the psychological impact of winning something is a little cray cray to me but we are humans soooo…I’m learning to expect nothing less.

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And while we at it, beware of the anchoring effect…it’s for those of us who are terrible at negotiating and just get sucked into a situation we could have avoided if it wasn’t for this irrational decision making thing we do.

Okay, so besides learning all the above, why was this 5 minute talk really interesting? Because it challenges this notion of encouraging humans to always follow our intuition. In specific situations. Yet I’m one who’s all about following our intuition and gut and knowing what we know without knowing how we know it. Hmmm…maybe though, could it be…that our intuition hasn’t evolved as quickly as the rate of the information we now need to analyse daily to make certain decisions in a short space of time? This question can be compared to an era when all we had to rely on to survive were our instincts, we now have too much information that requires a rate of absorption our intuition cannot keep up with.

I’d like to say nah, that’s not possible. Our intuition is King…or Queen…of our decision making abilities…but then again, I’m not forced to make a decision here, now am I?