Stress!

October 23rd, 2021| Topic: RaMbLeS | 2

We knew this already: People are quicker to jump to the worst conclusions when they are stressed.

Yup, stress makes you a pessimist. Nothing new here, but now it’s proven. By a group of researchers from the Max Planck University College London Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. In “Under Threat, Weaker Evidence Is Required to Reach Undesirable Conclusions,” published in The Journal of Neuroscience the other day.

I.e., when under stress people reach undesirable conclusions based on weaker evidence than when they are relaxed. Stress makes one believe that the worst-case scenario is true.

Said senior author Professor Tali Sharot:

Many of the most significant choices you will make, from financial decisions to medical and professional ones, will happen while you feel stressed. Often these decisions require you to first gather information and weigh the evidence.”

For example, deciding on second-opinions and treatment for a serious condition. The illness is already stressing you out. Or making a major financial decision, when the stock market is tanking, or your house is being foreclosed, or something. How does this stress affect your subsequent decision?

The authors:

We show that this decision is significantly influenced by perceived threat. In particular, under threat, the rate of negative information accumulation increased, such that weaker evidence was required to reach an undesirable conclusion.”

And Sharot added:

Under stress, people weigh each piece of evidence that supports undesirable conclusions more than when they are relaxed.”

Everything is thought through and weighed and analyzed far more than when one is unstressed.

But that’s not true for evidence that supports desirable conclusions, unfortunately, only for those leading to undesirable ones.

As a result, people are more likely to conclude the worst is true when they are stressed.”

In the rather small experiment, the scientists performed, the stressor was that half were told they had to give a public speech to be judged by a panel of experts (apparently public speaking is the #1 fear of all Americans; even death, they say, is only #7). The decision making was part of a game wherein they had to decide whether they were in a desirable environment (that would get them rewards) or an undesirable one (associated with losses).

Well, guess what? The stressed (public-speaking scared) volunteers needed weaker evidence to reach the conclusion that they were in an undesirable environment. But stress did not affect their ability to reach the opposite conclusion. Stress skewed everything to the negative!

Essentially, stress makes one a pessimist.

While this may have its advantages in making the decision-maker more cautious, the fact is that believers in God can afford to be brazen optimists!

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good
to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
…
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing,
will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:28, 31, 38–29

Well, alright, be a short-term pessimist, cautious and careful. But definitely, be a long-term optimist, for …

… if God is for us, who is against us?
Romans 8:31

So while we are under stress—and who isn’t, most of the time?—hang in there, …

… rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer.
Romans 12:12

God’s got it!

SOURCE:
Yahoo! The Journal of Neuroscience