The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation in Making Personal Decisions
While the mental health benefits of mindfulness meditation have been well documented, new research points to real personal decision-making advantages with only a few minutes of practice daily. An article that appeared in Psychological Science looked at four studies, each of which consistently showed that mindfulness reduces the sunk-cost bias that often influences individuals to make poor decisions. In economics, the expression “sunk cost” points to unrecoverable investments, such as the money paid to rent office space. Psychology has adopted the term to discuss a phenomenon in our personal lives. Often, individuals allow time and energy investments to influence their decisions, which is called the sunk-cost bias. For example, perhaps all signs indicate that an individual should break up with his or her significant other. When sunk-cost bias comes into play, however, the individual may think about the time investment already made in the relationship and decide against a breakup, despite knowing that it is a bad decision. Mindfulness meditation allows individuals to avoid the sunk-cost bias and judge a situation more clearly, which can lead to better personal decisions.
