How to avoid your worst decisions.
My spy-like adventure landing in Russia, and what it taught me about irrationality of my brain.
I landed in Russia and immediately felt like a spy in an adventure story.
None of my usual services worked.
Work apps - kept loading. Instant messengers - no updates since I landed. Banking - not available in my region. Social media, learning apps, everything I run my life on - stopped till further update of my geo location. My bank cards became useless pieces of plastic because of sanctions. And the taxi driver, on the way to my sister’s place, cheerfully informed me that with the big economic forum happening right now, I could forget about any reliable VPN access to the outside world for a few days.
I wanted to turn around then and there, buy a return ticket, and fly home the next day without seeing my parents (the entire reason I landed in Russia).
That impulse felt completely rational in the moment.
Fortunately, somewhere on that long flight over, I’d been reviewing some decision-making books. And the reminder I needed was very fresh.
Before making any big, drastic decision, I need 3 things:
1. Temporal distance. Sleep on it. I’d spent the last 36 hours on planes and in airports. I was not equipped to decide on anything. Not even my dinner.
2. A recovered body and brain. Good rest. Food. Movement. Breathwork and meditation. You cannot think your way out of a biological stress. Biology always comes first, good thinking and decisions follow.
3. Outside perspectives. Talk to people. Diverse ones. Check your sources. Not just a taxi driver who’s probably not a major thought leader on internet outages, VPN and how to set up things in a smart way to run your online business from anywhere in the world.
I wasn’t in immediate danger. I wasn’t being chased. I had time, and time was exactly what I needed to decide better.
Time, sleep and some brain-care.
The main thing I’ve learned from decision-making research, CBT-like approaches to question my thinking, mindfulness training, and high-performance psychology: your decisions are not separate from your biology. They are your biology.
The same way hunger makes you snappy, and sleep deprivation makes you anxious and 60% more reactive — stress, exhaustion, and overwhelm corrupt your judgment. Not a little. A lot! Your ability to see options, weigh tradeoffs, feel empathy for yourself and others, zoom in and out between short and long term — all of it degrades when your body isn’t in a resourceful state.
There’s only one right thing to do in that state: wait it out, while taking good care of yourself first.
I did yoga. Had a proper breakfast. Meditated. Took a long walk outside.
My sister, gently and with enormous affection, pointed out that maybe a sleepless taxi driver wasn’t my most reliable intelligence source. That made me giggle a bit - at the silliness of the situation, and at my own thinking and catastrophizing.
A few days from now, this whole thing will be nothing more than a good story and a blog. A laughable adventure. A reminder of what good decision-making looks like when the stakes feel high and the body is depleted.
The decisions are still ahead. And I’ll be making them from a better bio-psychological place.
Before your big calls do you check your biology first? Are you rested? Fed? Moved? Hydrated and regulated?
