A 3-minute read on a two-minute check that tells you whether a decision is coming from your plan or from your stress.
A trade sold right after a rough call with a boss and a workout skipped right after the same call can trace back to the identical hour, even though one shows up in a brokerage app and the other in a calendar. The decision itself rarely gives away which kind it is. The gap between the stressful thing happening and the decision getting made usually does.
The check: before placing the trade, closing the account, skipping the session, or buying the thing that wasn’t on the list, set a timer for two minutes and ask one question, would this still happen if the last hour had gone ordinarily. Not whether it’s defensible in general. Whether it survives being asked once the adrenaline isn’t the one answering.
Two minutes is short enough to avoid becoming its own stall tactic, and long enough for an actual stress response, the tight-chest urgency to act right now, to get noticed rather than obeyed automatically. A decision made on an ordinary Tuesday doesn’t need two minutes to still sound right. A reaction rarely survives them.
The trade or the skip might still be the right call either way. What the two minutes changes is who made it, the person running the plan or the version of them that just got startled.
P.S. Tomorrow: why the size of your emergency fund quietly decides how long you wait before calling a doctor.
Leave a Reply