Stress Is Ruining Your Ability to Make Good Business Decisions (and What to Do About It)

“Chronic stress may support a shift to habitual responding while promoting an insensitivity to novel goal-directed contingencies” (Porcelli and Delgado, 2017)

At times, stress can be motivating. It encourages you to meet deadlines, work hard at the gym or break your creative boundaries. Low-level stress has also been shown to increase brainpower, and give your immune system a boost.

On the other hand, too much stress can have terrible consequences for your physical, psychological and emotional health. Symptoms include:

• Feeling overwhelmed
• Irritability
• Tiredness or difficulty sleeping
• Racing thoughts
• An abnormal lack of confidence
• Reduced creativity
• Difficulty concentrating
• Headaches and stomachaches

While these symptoms are easy to recognise, the knock-on effects of chronic stress are much harder to see. According to Yu (2016): “When stressed, individuals tend to make more habitual responses than goal-oriented choices, be less likely to adjust their initial judgement, and rely more on gut feelings.” This means that, rather than using objective information to make well-reasoned decisions, a stressed individual is much more likely to misunderstand, misinterpret or misuse data. Similarly, the tendency towards habitual responding and unwillingness to change one’s initial judgement mean that your analysts might repeat the same mistakes with every performance report. Over time, this can have devastating effects on business growth.

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