Slow Down to Make Better Decisions in a Crisis

Psychological reasons why we find decision-making difficult right now:

• The realness of the present threat: the new virus is really contagious and people are dying from it around the world.
• The amount of uncertainty about the virus: the real number of infected people, the speed of its spread, future projections.
• We have little control over the situation. This creates anxiety. In addition, we may be doing our part, but it is hard to know which actions and programs are having an impact on creating the absence of the disease.

The threat, uncertainty, and anxiety related to the pandemic lead us to make short-sighted decisions:

• we crave more information so we are spending a lot of time looking for news updates relating to the virus and its spread. But too much negative news causes stress and distraction.
• the lack of agency causes people to seek out actions that will make them feel more in control. Early on, this took the form of buying hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol.