As an AD/HD coach, lots of my clients have trouble making decisions. So finding ways to make it easier has become pretty fascinating to me. I came across this article in News@Nature about a recent study done at the University of Amsterdam on people shopping for bigger ticket items.

Published online February 16, 2006, author Helen Pearson reports “ Studies say you should list the pros and cons, then sleep on it. … The best way to make a tough decision is to put your feet up and think about something else.”

The article goes on:

For the simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for the more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science1.

My teachers have been telling me since grade school days that I don’t use enough of my brain. It seems like a brain can only hold so much information on its front page, so to speak. So it’s comforting for me to know that the parts of my brain I’m not using right now are off doing something that I’ll be able to use later.

If you’d like to know more about what I know about making decisions, you can buy a recording of a teleclass I gave called Decision Making: Can’t You Just Make Up Your Mind? It’s part of a series of audio classes in the library at www.addclasses.com

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Thanks.