One-minute idea - How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll Be Stressed

High-stress events cloud your ability to make critical choices. Under pressure, your
brain releases cortisol, which inhibits rational thinking. Why? When stress causes the
brain to release cortisol, it turns off many bodily functions. Humans evolved this way
in order to respond to danger. If a lion attacks you, you don’t want your digestive
system to slow you down. Alas, cortisol also inhibits rational thinking processes.
Practicing prospective hindsight by preparing for worst-case scenarios helps you
reduce the damage of failure to make the right choice under stress.

To avoid making poor decisions under pressure, engage in preemptive damage control
using “prospective hindsight,” or “pre-mortem” planning.

Prospective hindsight is the process of anticipating problems and planning for high-
stress situations by putting systems in place when you’re feeling calm and rational.

You can apply such techniques to any stressful medical, financial or social situation to
help you make rational decisions when the time comes.

Daniel Kahneman, who suggested “prospective hindsight,” or what psychologist Gary

Klein termed “pre-mortem” planning, whereby you hypothesize what might go wrong
in the future so you can prepare for it when you are feeling level-headed.

Examples include designating a spot in your home for items you often lose, such as
keys and spectacles, or emailing yourself pictures of your credit cards and passports so
you can replace them easily if they get lost or stolen.

“You all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there’s a disaster, a team of experts
come in and they try to figure out what went wrong. In the pre-mortem,…you look
ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and…what you can
do to prevent those things from happening.”