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https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/is-there-an-ideal-time-of-day-for-decision-making.html and “The best time of day to make critical business decisions,” https://sba.thehartford.com/business-management/best-time-to-make-critical-decisions/

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Speaker1: [00:00:00] All right, let me start today's episode with a story a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were out on a bike ride. We live in an area that's well known for the amount of road bikers that are attacking the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. And while we live pretty darn close to sea level within a few miles, you can find yourself on a gradual climb that will slowly but surely make your thighs burn. But it's not bad enough that you necessarily want to stop, or you can find yourself on a short climb so steep that your heart is beating out of your chest and you can feel it in your head and you seriously just want to jump off your bike and walk it up the hill, which I have felt like doing so many times. Now my wife is the cyclist and the runner and the swimmer, for that matter, and I have been the runner period. But over the last year or so, we've gone out almost every Saturday for anywhere from an hour and a half to a three hour bike ride, and it has been an absolute blast. I take back all the things I've said about cyclists over the years, and yeah, I have the padded shorts and the bike shirts with the pockets in the back and all of those things. And I think I definitely can look the part. But again, my wife is the one that has done the century rides or the one hundred mile rides, as well as a double century or two hundred mile ride, and the longer and longer we go in hopes of preparing me for my own century or two.

Speaker1: [00:01:10] I find that no matter how padded my seat is, my bottom at some point just is not a fan of being on the bike for hours and hours, but I'll get there. But anyway, back to the story. So we hit a particularly difficult, very short hill in the area called Chilly Hill. And again, it was hard short but hard. And when we crested the top, we stopped for a quick drink and we were going to admire the scenery and take a picture. Because of course, in this day and age, if you do not have a picture, then it perhaps never happened. But I was still huffing and I was puffing. And when she said, Where do you want to go from here? I asked about the various routes home, and when she laid out three different routes to get back, there was basically an easy route, a medium route or a hard route. And so I said that I felt like we had done amazing. We'd done so well that why didn't we just take the easy route home? We had plenty going on that afternoon and we had just killed ourselves of Chile Hill. So yeah, let's definitely go the easy route home. So the next two miles were downhill and it was just fun.

Speaker1: [00:02:02] The wind was cooling us off. I think I'm cracking jokes, and when we finally got to a stop sign, it was literally a point where left was easy. And then if we turn right, then there were the medium and the hard routes. And so I said, Oh no, what would you think about going the medium route home? And she said, Sure, more more downhill. We went from there. And then there was a proverbial and literal fork in the road and she pulls up beside me. And she said Wright is the medium route and left is the hard route. And at this point, we're going downhill. I was feeling great and so I said, You good if we go left and just go and take the harder out home. And she said, Sure, and we did it and it was really hard. It was really hard. But when we were finally on this home stretch, with all the hard work done and dusted, it was all behind us, she said. You know, you just validated what I've heard before and what I've shared with you in different scenarios that you never make a hard decision. When you're on the uphill, you wait till things level out a bit. Or better yet, when you have some downhill momentum going and the more I thought about it, I thought that my wife was spot on that when my heart was beating out of my chest and I could hear it in my ears or feel it in my ears and my head that I was absolutely happy to say that we did it and let's cruise home and we could feel good about ourselves.

Speaker1: [00:03:11] But when we were on that flat road or the downhill, I felt like I was good to take on a few more difficult challenges. And by the time we got home, I had pushed myself on the bike harder than I ever had before, which raised the heck out of my emotional baseline. And there was definitely more of a sense of a flowing through my veins, and not to mention a bit more kick in the backside to father time as we were able to add a good workout. Will both of us now in the over 50 category of age? Knowing that those workouts really do matter with us both having a value based goal of wanting to be around as long as we can so we can spoil some grandkids that are going to come along at some point. So coming up on today's episode, we are going to dig into a study or two about decision making. Is there a better time to make a decision? And we're also going to talk about do morning people or evening people make better decisions. So we're going to cover that and so much more coming up on today's episode of the virtual couch.

Speaker2: [00:04:03] The. Come on. Take a seat.

Speaker1: [00:04:21] Hey, everybody, thank you so much for joining me on episode two hundred and ninety seven of the virtual couch. That's right, I'm approaching episode three hundred, which still blows my mind. I never thought I would be in episode three, necessarily episode three hundred. So thanks for joining me. I am your host, Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and a certified mindful habit coach and a writer, speaker, husband, father for all those wonderful things. And I want to get to one. I will do one ad upfront and one ad alone. Go to the link in the show notes or the link on my Instagram account and grab the Relationship Mastery Pack today and recording this on Monday the twenty ninth, and it will be gone by the end of today. So my buddy Nate Bagley has put together. It's over 20 experts and we all pitched in courses to this relationship mastery package. And there are there's I think it's about two thousand dollars worth of courses. It's the cost is one hundred and forty seven dollars, which is the cost of less than one session of therapy. And I have put in there a new parenting course that I have unveiled, and Nate really does have some amazing speakers here and amazing courses. It's funny because I'm being super honest. I watched as he would do the promotional materials, and as he put these together, I noticed that I was about halfway down the list, including this person and this person.

Speaker1: [00:05:33] And then I kept getting bumped and bumped as he got more and more experts. But I totally understand this is not from a place of jealousy. It's from a place of Holy Cow. Nate put together quite a lineup of over 20 experts, so in his latest mailer or emailer that he sent around to us that then helped promote the course, he said that we now have Dr. Ann Louise Lockhart's course on breaking generational cycles and stopping unhealthy patterns. We got Dr. Melanie Buterin's course on overcoming, but we have Dr. Tina Shermer, Sellers and Dr. Emily Negocios Que, and a workshop on getting the shame out of sex. We have Dr. Morgan Cutler and Dr. Tracy Dalglish's course on setting and maintaining the Dr. Sarah Schweitzer's course on codependency and what to do about it. So all of these people, it's almost like one of these things is not like the other. That song I have no doctor in front of my name, so I am now in the all that. And that's not even everything, but I'll take it. And then he lays out that there's also again, this codependency perfectionism. A week long boot camp on how to help you seduce your spouse. Seven day roadmap to deep connection with your partner. Self-guided couples retreat a year's worth of meal planning, and then I made the very last bullet game changing tools to help you become a better parent right before the end, more so over two thousand dollars worth of incredible relationship resources, trainings and tools, and they're all available for just one hundred and forty seven dollars.

Speaker1: [00:06:49] So you need to go to the link in the show notes or the link in the bio on my Instagram account, or I also made a post in Tony Overbay licensed marriage and family therapist on Facebook, so you can go there as well, but I would highly encourage you to go grab that before it is done and it will be gone by the end of today. And so today I want to talk about decision making and I found a really cool article and this is from the Association for Psychological Science, and it is titled Is there an ideal time of day for decision making? And this is back from October of twenty sixteen. And I found a lot of people that referenced what this study was talking about in this article and it had to do with playing chess. So I thought this was fascinating. And there isn't necessarily a person who is credited for writing this article, but I will have the link to this in the show notes as well, and it is on the Psychological Science, Jorge's website. And here we go. And I'll read a little bit from this and I want to give my thoughts as well because they have some really interesting things here about are you a morning person or an evening person? And how that comes to affect decision making? And that's one of the questions I get often or when people say that I'm a morning person, can I become an evening person or vice versa? Typically, I find this is just my anecdotal experience that a lot of people that are evening people have often wondered if they could become morning people, but they just feel like that is something that they really struggle with.

Speaker1: [00:08:11] So the article says, when you have to make a big decision, just the time of day make a difference in your abilities. Are your which sharpest first thing in the morning or perhaps after you've had the time to get a few cups of coffee. If you're like me personally, I am such a morning person, and especially if I can get up and I can get a workout in regardless of I don't care if it's 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning or whatever it is that that really gets me going and I get to the office. And this is when I write and I record podcasts and I do everything that I can. It's early in the morning and I just absolutely love that time. And the article, I guess I'll just be referring to they and I feel somewhat bad saying they say, because I know that that's one of the ways we go. Here's a plug for my narcissism podcast waking up the narcissism, which continues to just go nuts on with its episodes and the feedback that I'm getting. But the proverbial they suck when someone doesn't even know or they don't have things to back things up.

Speaker1: [00:08:59] Oftentimes they will say they. So I completely understand that I'm going to say they a lot, but I mean it in the good kind of way. So they say, Are you? If you're more of a night owl, maybe you do your best decision making in the middle of the night. So when? Order to investigate realistic decision making in a large group, a large group of people throughout the day. A team of Argentinean psychological scientists turned to an intriguing source of data online chess matches. So even if you're not a chess player, hang in here because I will tell you I am not a chess player, but the data here is really fascinating the way they found this group of chess players and the ability to take some data there and extrapolate it out to the general population, I think it really makes sense. So they said online chess matches, so immense databases of time stamped chess games allowed the researchers to investigate real world, real, real world variations and decision making across all hours of the day. So the research team, which included postdoctoral fellow Maria Juliana Leon, who won a woman international master chess title in Nineteen Ninety Nine, and the app's fellow Mariano Sigman, found that decision making abilities do appear to fluctuate across the day. In the morning and this is here we go. We're getting right into it in the morning.

Speaker1: [00:10:14] Decisions tend to be slower but more accurate, and late in the day, decisions were made more abruptly with less accuracy. And I think even if you hit stop right now, that's pretty fascinating data. So in the morning, decisions tended to be slower but more accurate, and decisions made later in the day were more abrupt with less accuracy. So, according to the researchers, chess provided several research advantages compared to other decision making domains. The quality of chess players is determined through a standardized rating system, and the online play allows each move and decision in a game to be analyzed based on standardized criteria. And I think that was the key is that they were able to take this data of the decisions made while playing chess and again as a non chess player. Apparently, there are some very obvious things that one would do in certain situations, especially based on the level of expertize of a particular chess player. So when they were going against what their normal level of expertize would do, they were able to look and see if that was decision making fatigue and at what time that that occurred. So they said that when it comes to our behavior and time of day, individual differences in circadian rhythms called corona types play a role in when people prefer to go to sleep and when they wake up. So individuals who prefer to stay up late are called owls, and I think we all are familiar with the night owl and then those who prefer to get up early are called larks.

Speaker1: [00:11:35] And I have completely forgotten about this. And I did an episode somewhat similar about four years ago and for a little while was calling myself a lark. So you've got a night owl. But for some reason we don't refer to the morning lark, but that is what what they're referred to. And then other individuals, they say, are somewhere in the middle. So prototypes have been shown to influence a wide range of behaviors, including whether people are prone to cheating. So, for example, in a study published in Psychological Science that suggested that morning people also known as larks tended to be the most ethical in the morning, whereas evening people known as the Owls tended to behave more ethically in the evening compared to the morning. So I am just being a little bit facetious with this, but that would theorize that if you have a night owl that you have drug out to go do something in the morning, they may not be as ethical. Or if you have a morning lark, stay up incredibly late in the evening as I know that will happen oftentimes. Then they aren't maybe as ethical as well, and I feel like I can identify with that one where at times I'll say whatever I need to if we can just get the bed, and I wonder if that's where that comes from. So lone and colleagues then hypothesize that players would exhibit circadian fluctuations in speed and accuracy of the decisions revealing diurnal variations, which depend on specific prototypes.

Speaker1: [00:12:52] So that's a nerdy way to say that is, larks would play best in the morning, while the Owls would play best in the evening. So the chess data came from the free internet chess server fix, and it's a free server for playing internet chess games with more than 400000 registered users. And all the registered users have a standardized skill rating, which is updated after every game. So you can see their data is pretty amazing. So every time someone plays every move and then that overall rating is registered and then put into this database with more than 400000 registered users. So the researchers then recruited samples of players who had played at least two thousand games, and approximately 100 participants were asked to note their time zone their age and then to complete a morning miss evening questionnaire. Or it's called the McHugh, which indicates your morning or evening preference. And then the players also completed a short questionnaire about their daily sleep routines and their meal habits and their wake up times. So as a control group, then the researchers also included games from 14 computers that regularly play in the free internet chess server, since computers are not expected to have these diurnal fluctuations in the decision process. So I love that they could pull 14 computers and then pull all of their data because the computer should not care what time it is or if they got a good night's rest, or if they had a good meal or that sort of thing.

Speaker1: [00:14:10] So then the researchers were able to calculate a. Quality score for each of the participants games by including the analysis of each position using an open chest engine called Stockfish. So not only do you have all this data, you have these people playing, you have the data coming from computers, but then you also have this chess engine called Stockfish that you can literally analyze every move. And I know in speaking with a couple of clients over the years that have been pretty adept at chess that they know right away if someone is making certain moves, if the person is good or not good. So this is the part where I just have to trust the data trust, trust the science here. They said that we found that players changed their decision making policy throughout the day, that players decided faster and less accurately as the day progresses, reaching a plateau. Early in the afternoon, the researchers wrote that this effect was observed observed for all players, regardless of their chronotype, indicating that changes in the decision time were mainly determined by the time of day. So what they did was using this creating this quality score using this chess engine called Stockfish. The results showed that chess playing activity tended to follow along with a player's chronotype. So Lark's that's the morning people played more games in the morning and Owls played more games in the evening.

Speaker1: [00:15:20] However, the chronotype did not appear to have a significant impact on the play performance. So regardless of the player's chronotype, the researchers observed a consistent pattern and decision making quality and the time of day. So what they're saying is that that is that there wasn't a time of day when the players were definitively efficient decision makers. Instead, that data suggested that the player employ slightly different decision making strategies, depending on the time of day. So they said that indeed, during the morning, players adopt a prevention policy. So the morning players are these larks would play slower and they would play more accurately as if they were playing with higher level opponents. And then during the evening, they adopted a more risky or policy where decisions were faster but less accurate. So what they found was that people then in essence showed up at the wherever they were, depending on if they were playing in the morning, then the larks had the advantage. And if they were playing in the evening, then the larks even tended to be a bit more risky. And then the night owls playing in the evening while they were more risky seemed to be able to perform with a little bit more accuracy because that was the time that they really flowed. But then if you took that night owl and played, they played in the morning that they were trying to be a little bit more protective.

Speaker1: [00:16:29] But then since that wasn't their go to time to play, that they weren't necessarily as effective. So it really does say that you play to your strengths, whether you play to your chronotype, whether you're a morning lark or you're a night owl. And I remember and this is where I questioned my memory, but I remember when I was looking at data three or four years ago when I did an episode that the theory was that the morning people or the larks were maybe about. I think it was anywhere from 10 to 15 percent more effective or more productive. And so I think that maybe that leads to this place where they're they might be a little bit more deliberate, but they might be a bit more accurate in their work, where the people that are natural night owls then may be a little bit more quick with their decision making, which might lead to less accuracy, but then they may make more decisions on the whole. And again, playing off of that there, there really isn't a right answer to this. Should you be a night owl or a lark, but there's a lot of belief that you are a night owl or a lark. And so when I have had people before say that they wanted to be more of a morning person or more of This Morning Lark, but they were a night owl, then how does that happen? And I think this is one of those or when you step back, I hate to pull the word common sense here, because common sense can be so different to so many people.

Speaker1: [00:17:46] But I have found that the clients that I've had that have successfully been able to make at least we'll call it a successful transition from Night Owl to Morning Lark that in essence, one has to set their alarm early and get up early. And then over time, they will get really tired and they have to, in essence, fight through the desire to take naps and to just check out at some point during the day because they will get tired in the evening. And at some point that getting up on time or getting up at the same time every day and early time every day becomes the the peace that that consistency that allows them to start to shift. But I've found that for those night owls, when they get up early in the morning, it is almost impossible at times to have that person not want to take a nap or not want to just check out for a while in the afternoon. And here's where when I throw my acceptance and commitment therapy brain around this whole problem, it really depends on what your goal is. So if you have this value based goal of becoming a morning person, then your brain will say, Well, yeah, but I'm going to be tired in the afternoon. I might not be as good at my job.

Speaker1: [00:18:47] And so in acceptance and commitment therapy, then we're saying, yeah, we're not even arguing that that might be a true or false statement. Probably a true statement. But is that a productive thought to your value based goal of becoming a morning person? And so that's one of those things that I love about act is it really matters on where you point your goal and then your brain is going to come up with the yeah, buts. It's going to come up with the ways that it's going to try to get you to Fuze to these thoughts or stories so that you don't have to go. This unknown path. Your brains continually wanting to pull you back to this path of least resistance, and I was just talking with my kids over the weekend, we were on a on an amazing I just loved it family vacation over the Thanksgiving break and I kept talking about how the brain is just so fascinating. And I'll go on a quick little jag here. But we were talking about that. The brain is working off of this flawed principle, this that it has this finite amount of electrical activity. So whatever the brain can that that it can create a habit around, then it can file it away. In this area of your brain, the basal ganglia, the habit center that will take less electrical activity. So in the long run, your brain, honest to goodness, thinks it's doing you a favor is it creates these habitual patterns now when we're talking about back in a car, out of the driveway or tying your shoes.

Speaker1: [00:19:56] Perfect. No problem. But when your brain's starting to fuze to the old, I'll do it later story. Or we'll figure this out at a different time when it starts to go down that path that over time, the more we do that, the more the brain is saying, there you go. That's what we're trying to do. Just lull you into this. I'll do it later. I'll do it later. I'll do it tomorrow. And the more that our brain does that repetitively, then that does become the habitual pattern, the habitual pattern of procrastination or the habitual pattern to put things off until things are better, till I'm more tell, well-rested until we have more money, till the kids are out of the house, until, until, until. But in reality, we need to recognize that those are just thoughts. We have a lot of thoughts, we have a lot of thoughts, we have feelings, we have emotions and we have them because we are human. When we can start to look at when someone says to me, I know I shouldn't think this or is it bad that I think this? That's the part where we really need to start rewriting the whole narrative around our thoughts. I'm going to start talking about this a lot in the coming weeks or months even. But I personally feel like we do three things wrong.

Speaker1: [00:20:58] Wrong is a very judgmental word. There are three challenges we have to our thoughts. The first thing is we say, don't think something. So when we say, don't think something, then immediately our brain says, if we say, don't think of chocolate cake, our brain is literally right now thinking of chocolate cake. Or if we come to a situation, let's say where one that I had recently in my office was someone that was saying, I know that I shouldn't care about what other people think. And I said, OK, let's work with this, this new data that I'm kicking around. The first thing is when they say they said so, they try to tell themselves, so don't care what other people think. Well, first of all, then the brain is going to absolutely do its own psychological reactants your own brain. And this is why I thought suppression doesn't work. Your own brain is going to say, Wait, what's that? You don't want me to think, Well, I will think it's in essence the survival mechanism. So your brain is going to think of the chocolate cake or your brain is going to think, Oh, if you were telling me, don't think that you should care what people think that I'm definitely going to care what people think because it's this innate part of us that is there so that we don't get dominated by an alpha male or a corrupt society. So the first thing we do is we say, don't think something and that does not work.

Speaker1: [00:22:05] The second thing we do is we say, What's wrong with me? Why do I care what people think? Nothing's wrong with you? Let's go back to that. You think, feel and behave the way you do because you are a human being version of you that's ever walked the face of the Earth. So the fact that you think, feel or do the things that you do, we need to look at that with curiosity and say, Hey, check this out. I care what people think. That's fascinating just to feel the difference. The shift in energy there, where we're not being as accusatory and we're not being as there's not this what's wrong with me vibe. It's a Hey, check this out. So now we can take a look at it. Why do I care what people think in this scenario? So it's because I'm a human being, and in this particular scenario, I have these certain things or situations. I'll give you a real life example. We rented these bikes. We were in Santa Cruz and we rented these bikes and we were biking along this bike path. And there were so many people on the bike path that it really was difficult to maneuver in and out of the people. And several of my kids were saying things about that, that it felt pretty annoying and I would stop and go. My wife and I were having this conversation that maybe it does just come with age where we weren't as worried about being the person somebody came upon and then they couldn't get around.

Speaker1: [00:23:06] Or we had to stop and wait till people that weren't even aware that we were behind them moved out of the way. And it was because we weren't as worried about what people think, because we realize that this we were on bikes, we were in a crowded area and there was an area that was for people on bikes and people that were walking. And so there was going to be a lot. They were going to be confusion. There was going to be people that were thinking that we should move or they should move or. And so it was just interesting just to notice and to not have judgment in that environment. So again, we tell ourselves not to think something that one doesn't work well, it doesn't work at all. Then we tell ourselves, Man, I shouldn't care what people think or I shouldn't be thinking, whatever it is, I'm thinking and and give yourself some grace and you are just thinking it. It's not that you should or shouldn't think it just it's a check this out. I'm thinking it. And then the third piece of that puzzle that I feel like we need to work on and do better. And the third challenge that I really feel is best, I feel like it's best exemplified by this metaphor that is used in acceptance and commitment therapy.

Speaker1: [00:24:06] It's called the numbers metaphor, and I did an episode about it quite a while ago, but the numbers metaphor says that. Suppose I tap you on the shoulder and I tell you that I want you to just remember the numbers one, two and three, and if I bump into you in 20 years from now and I say, what were those numbers and you say one, two and three, then I will give you a million dollars. And then before we part, I say, Actually, you know what? I want you to be the one that comes up with the numbers, because that way it will probably be more effective or you'll be able to remember them more. And so they can't be one, two and three. So as long as they're not one, two and three, then whatever the numbers are, then those are the numbers that I will ask you for. And if you get them right, you'll get the million dollars. So most of the time when I would ask somebody if I'm using this metaphor? Ok, so give me three more numbers than they would typically say. A lot of people would say four or five and six, so I'd say, OK, great. Now, how do you know that those those numbers will work and they say, well, because they're not the numbers one, two and three. So what we're telling our brain is that instead of thinking one, two and three, think four or five and six, but we still have to think one, two and three to get to four or five and six.

Speaker1: [00:25:04] And if that sounds confusing, I can totally understand. But this is the thing where let's say that there's trauma around something. And so we notice that we are thinking about the trauma and then we think, OK, instead of thinking about this trauma, I need to think that actually that there could be this other outcome that eventually someday, then I'm going to overcome the trauma. But that means that we have to give the trauma thought to get to the and someday I'll overcome the trauma. So in reality, what we need to do is we need to acknowledge that we're thinking about the trauma and we don't try to stop it. We don't try to change the thought. We just trying to. We accept the fact that we are thinking about that trauma and then we note it and then we just gently lay down the rope of the tug of war on why are we thinking this? I shouldn't be thinking this. Just think something else. And we just note the fact that our brain thought of this trauma and then we gently move in a direction of value. We take action on something that matters. We connect with someone we get. We do something to bring us grounded. In the present moment, we notice that we're thinking about the trauma and then we turn to our breathing.

Speaker1: [00:26:04] We breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, or we hear the waves of the ocean or we we take in a smell in the air because what we're slowly starting to train our brain is that when we notice that we are thinking, then we turn to something more productive. And over time, your brain is going to start to get right back to that, trying to create a habitual pattern. And it's going to notice the thought. And it's going to know that you are now going to turn to something in the present moment and your brain is going to start to work and try to shortchange that entire procedure. And when you start noticing this thought and if your heart rate starts to elevate your brain knows because of it's the practice that you've done that you're going to bring yourself back to the present moment. And so therefore it will start doing that ahead of time because it wants to be as efficient as possible, because that's the way your brain thinks it's going to live forever. All right, there's one more article that I have attached in the show notes to this episode. It was published in Twenty Eighteen and updated just in October 14th of Twenty Twenty One, and it is the best time of day to make critical business decisions in this one. And this is from its sbem, the Hartford and in the small biz, the head section. They say that there's truth behind the phrase sleep on it.

Speaker1: [00:27:13] As small business owners know, every decision you make impacts your business, and it can mean the difference between positive profits or a torpedo headed for your bottom line. So new studies over the past few years of narrow the timing around decision making to an exact science so you can now arm yourself with the tools you need to make smart decisions for your business and this is coming from they quote a book by Daniel Pink in Twenty Eighteen called Win the Scientific Secrets to Perfect Timing. And so I think this was interesting. So they don't go into all of the chess data, but they say that most people are the most productive within the first two hours of waking up because our brains are wired to make optimal, analytical and reason based decisions at this point in the day. And he said, however, exceptions exist based on your biological clock or your circadian rhythm, and the reason I wanted to include this is, I think that they give a really nice description of what that how to determine your circadian rhythm. So they said, think of your circadian rhythm as being a twenty four hour internal clock in your brain that cycles between when you're drowsy and when you're alert. It's the reason you fall asleep around the same time every night, and it can account for that feeling of being run over by a truck when you fly across time zones. They say in the article To figure out your optimal flow, imagine a day when you have nothing to do.

Speaker1: [00:28:18] This could be a weekend or your day off. When do you fall asleep and when do you wake up? And more importantly, what's the midpoint between those two times? And I never heard about the midpoint in this way. So, for example, they say, if you fall asleep at 10 p.m. and you wake up at 6:00 a.m., then your midpoint is 2:00 a.m., which makes you an early bird. So according to chronobiology, which I love that there's a study or science of chronobiology, so they just said translation. That's the study of the internal clock. Professor Till Rosenberg's research says if your midpoint lies between 12:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., then you're an early bird or hears that name again or a lark. If your midpoint occurs between 6:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m., then you're a night owl. If your midpoint lies between three 30 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. where most people reside, which I thought was interesting that they said that then you're in between. So larks and the middle group that Pink calls the third birds make their best decisions in the morning. Night owls, which only average five to 20 percent of the US. Population, depending on the studies consulted, find their stride in the late afternoon and early evening. So then they go on to say that timing isn't everything, but everything comes down to timing for most of us, we start the day strong.

Speaker1: [00:29:22] We're ethical, we're focused and we're energized. And then between two and four p.m., we slide into the midday productivity slump and then we get a second wind come dinnertime. And so they say that the seemingly innocent midday lull can translate into bad news for your business. And this is the part that I wanted to get to that I thought was so interesting. This time of day. This is the time of day when you're more likely to be irritable, sluggish, fresh out of ideas, impatient and prone to making mistakes. Case in point, as reported in Pink's book, according to an analysis of ninety thousand surgeries, researchers at Duke University discovered that operating room errors occurred more often at three p.m. than at eight a.m. and then the University of Pennsylvania researchers found that doctors and nurses were less likely to wash their hands as the day progressed, and we'll just let that one sit. So timing doesn't only affect health. Children who took standardized tests in the afternoon perform worse than morning test takers, and then researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Columbia University found that Israeli judges were more likely to grant convicts parole requests during the morning session or right after their lunch break. Then later in the day, and in a study conducted in the inner Golan Neuroscience Lab at the University of DTLA in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the lead author, Maria Juliana Leone, which this is who was quoted in that first study we talked about today, determined that we make slower yet more accurate decisions in the morning while we make snap choices that are more prone to error during the afternoon.

Speaker1: [00:30:41] So they just said, perhaps you want to remember this when you're disputing a parking ticket or negotiating a new vendor contract? I have links to both of those articles in the show notes, and I appreciate you letting me go on a little bit about the thought and how that how that works, how I would love for us to start noticing, thought, recognizing, thought, not beating ourselves up about thought, not feeling like if we can't change our thoughts that something's wrong with us, but just noticing that we're human beings and we think and feel and behave because we do. And then the more that we notice that and the more we turn ourselves toward things that matter things of value that the more we'll start to create these deeply rooted neural pathways that are going to be far more advantageous and successful than the ones where we continually try to ruminate, worry and think our way out of these thinking problems. All right, so do not forget to go check out that Relationship Mastery Pack. The deadline is today and the link will be it's in the show notes as well in my Instagram bio and on Tony Overbay licensed marriage and family Facebook page. All right, have an amazing day. Take a per usual is a wonderful the talented Aurora forum and

Speaker2: [00:31:40] Smith, it's wonderful to see you next time. Emotions flying past our heads and out the other end, the pressures of the daily grind.

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Speaker2: [00:31:57] Past the midnight hour. They push aside the things that matter most wonderful. News of discount

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Speaker2: [00:32:54] Funds are always on the back burner until the opportune time is pushed

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Speaker2: [00:33:42] I've develop distance, don't explode, allow the gun.