Decision-making under pressure: when the stakes are high and the responsibility is yours

It is eleven at night. The phone buzzes once more: “I need an answer by eight tomorrow morning.” There are three options on the table and none of them is good. With each one, someone will lose something — money, a job, trust. And whichever you choose, it will be your name in the minutes.

People who run companies, departments, teams, schools or hospital wards know evenings like this. So do those who don’t do it professionally but are “the one who decides” in their family — about care for an elderly parent, selling the house, moving abroad. They share two things: the consequences are large and the responsibility is theirs. Not shared, not spread across a board, but theirs.

In this post I write about what happens to our thinking when we decide under pressure, why we feel like a lesser version of ourselves in such decisions, and what you can do so that your judgement stays your own even when everything is on fire. This is not management advice. It is about the part of decision-making that happens in the body and in relationships — and that nobody talks about in meetings.

When the decision is yours

Everyone has to make decisions. But a decision you alone will answer for weighs differently from one you make only for yourself. When you choose between two flats, you carry the consequences. When you choose between two plans that will affect fifty families, you carry them too — but others feel them.

This difference is not only moral, it is psychological. When a decision affects others, everything we ever learnt about guilt wakes up in us: about who is good and who is bad, about whether we are allowed to disappoint someone. And because time is short, all of it runs at once, in a few hours, often at night.

People in positions of responsibility often put it in one sentence: “I have no right to be wrong.” The sentence is understandable. But it is precisely this sentence that is one of the main reasons we decide worse under pressure. Someone who is not allowed to miss cannot think freely — they think as if they were already in the dock.

What stress does to the prefrontal cortex

The neuroscientist Amy Arnsten of Yale University spent decades studying what happens under stress to the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain behind the forehead that lets us plan, weigh consequences, hold back the first impulse and keep several options in mind at once. In 2009 she summarised the findings in a review whose message is surprisingly clear: even relatively mild but uncontrollable stress can quickly and markedly weaken exactly these abilities.

The mechanism is chemical. Under stress the brain releases more noradrenaline and dopamine. The prefrontal cortex behaves like a very sensitive instrument: it works best at moderate levels of these chemicals, and at excessive levels its network quite literally “goes offline”. Older, faster systems take the lead — the amygdala and the areas that run our habits. I described how this feels in the body in more detail in What happens in the brain during anxiety.

In danger this is precious. If you are standing in the road in front of a car, you don’t need deliberation, you need to jump. In complex decisions, though — where many people, long-term consequences and uncertainty all have to be taken into account — this switch is harmful. Our view narrows. We reach for whatever we did last time. Short-term relief (that the decision is finally behind us) becomes more important than the long-term consequence.

A review of research published in 2012 by Katrin Starcke and Matthias Brand paints a similar picture: people under stress rely more often on quick, habitual strategies and less often examine all the options thoroughly. Their decisions are not always worse — but they are different, more automatic.

Decision fatigue: what holds up and what doesn’t

Pressure does not come only from one big decision, but also from the hundred small ones that came before it. In 2011 Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso published a study that went round the world. They examined more than a thousand parole decisions made by Israeli judicial panels. At the start of each session of the day, the panels ruled favourably in about 65 per cent of cases; towards the end of the session the share fell almost to zero — and after the meal break it returned to the starting level.

The finding quickly spread as proof of decision fatigue: the more we decide, the more we fall back on the default, safest option — in this case, refusal. It is only fair to add that other researchers pointed out an important detail: the order of cases may not have been entirely random, as prisoners without a lawyer tended to come up later in the session. The broader theory of “willpower depletion” also produced considerably weaker results than expected in a large replication effort in 2016.

So what remains? A less dramatic but useful truth: deciding costs something. We don’t know exactly how much or why, but we do know that a tired, hungry and frightened person prefers the option that is easiest to defend over the one that is best. If you put big decisions at the end of the day, after ten meetings, you have set yourself up with worse conditions.

The loneliness of a decision

One of the hardest sides of deciding in a senior role is not the decision itself, but having no one to really talk to about it. Advisers have their own interests. Colleagues are waiting for your decision and must not see you wavering. Your partner at home loves you but doesn’t know all the circumstances — and you may not want to burden them. I wrote more about this in Loneliness at the top: why leaders have no one to talk to.

Loneliness makes deciding harder in two ways. First, you are left without what psychologists call co-regulation — the calming that comes from contact with another person. When you say out loud to someone you trust what you are afraid of, the body often settles more than after an hour of brooding alone. Second, you are left without disagreement. Decisions that nobody challenges can be quick, but they are not necessarily good.

Many people in positions of responsibility therefore develop the habit of “thinking it through alone” and only then announcing the decision. From the outside it looks like strength. From the inside it is often just a very long night.

How it sounds in conversation

This is how part of a conversation in a session might sound (composite, not a real person):

“Everyone thinks I know what I’m doing. I haven’t slept for three nights.”
“What happens when you wake up at night?”
“I play out every version. What the supervisory board will say, what people will say, what will be written.”
“Where are you in those versions?”
“… Nowhere. Just the one who’s to blame.”
“And what would someone say who owes you nothing and wishes you well?”
“That I’m too tired to decide this today.”

This short excerpt condenses something I often notice in decision-making under pressure: the person is no longer thinking about the decision, but about the verdict awaiting them. The decision has turned into a trial of themselves. And someone defending themselves in court does not think as freely as someone solving a problem.

Under pressure we go back to the old

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we pay particular attention to how we bring emotional patterns from the family we grew up in into adult situations. Christian Gostečnik describes how these patterns show most strongly precisely when we are under stress — when there is no time to reflect and the body reaches for what it knows best.

If as a child you were the one who had to calm your parents down, you may decide as a leader in a way that leaves as few people unhappy as possible — even when the better decision would anger someone. If at home every mistake cost you love, you may decide too late, because every decision carries the risk of a mistake. If you were the family “hero”, you may pull every decision onto yourself, including those you could share. How such roles take shape is the subject of Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child.

This is not a judgement. These patterns were once clever — they helped you survive in the family as it was. The trouble is only that under pressure we don’t choose them; they choose us. Part of working on yourself is learning to recognise them before they decide for you.

This is also where deciding under pressure connects with self-doubt. Someone raised to believe they must always be certain will find it hard to admit they are not. How doubt and the feeling that you got your position by mistake intertwine is explored in Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves.

A simple question can also help in the middle of night-time brooding: “Am I the one deciding now — or the child who, many years ago, had to decide things so there would be peace at home?” The answer is not always pleasant. But it is almost always useful.

When pressure is not the enemy

It would be wrong to claim that pressure is always harmful. An observation more than a hundred years old, known as the Yerkes–Dodson law, says we perform best at moderate arousal — not when completely relaxed and not in panic. A certain amount of tension gathers us, sharpens us and gets us moving.

The researcher Gary Klein observed firefighters, military commanders and intensive-care staff — people who have to decide within seconds. He found that experienced experts under pressure often don’t compare options at all. They recognise the situation, because they have seen similar ones a hundred times, and the first solution that comes to mind is often a good one. For people with a lot of experience in a particular field, a quick decision under pressure can even be better than long deliberation.

But there is an important limit here: this applies to situations that repeat and in which you get quick feedback. The decisions leaders make once every few years — restructuring, redundancies, a major investment — are different. Here experience helps less than we would like to believe.

And one more limit of this post. If you have been sleeping badly for months, if your heart races at every message, if you can no longer switch off even on holiday, the problem may not be your way of deciding but a load that nobody can carry in the long run. Then you don’t need a better decision-making technique, you need a change of circumstances and perhaps a conversation with your doctor. I gathered the signs worth watching for in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break. And sometimes the problem lies in an organisation that loads responsibility onto one person without giving them the means and the support — no personal exercise solves that.

Exercise: ten minutes before a big decision

You can do this exercise today, even if no decision is waiting for tomorrow. You need paper, a pen and ten minutes in which nobody calls you.

1. Settle your body first. Before you think, take five slow breaths in which the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. Not to relax, but to give your prefrontal cortex some room back.
2. Write down exactly what you are deciding. In one sentence. It often turns out that we were not deciding one thing but five at once — and that they can be separated.
3. Separate the urgent from the important. Ask yourself: what happens if I decide tomorrow afternoon instead of the morning? What if in a week? A deadline is sometimes real and sometimes just loud.
4. Name the fear. Finish the sentence: “What scares me most about this decision is that …” A fear that is written down works differently from one hiding behind rational arguments.
5. Find one objection. Think of one person who would disagree with your first choice and write down what they would say. If nobody comes to mind, that is information too.

For more questions to ask yourself before you decide, the knowledge base has a short tool, Questions before a big decision. And if what troubles you is less the pressure than endless doubt even over smaller decisions, you may find Deciding without endless doubt: how to trust your own judgement closer to home.

After the decision: carrying the consequences

Many people think the hardest part of deciding is the moment of choice. Often what comes afterwards is harder. The decision is made, the consequences are arriving, and with them the voice that reopens the case every evening: “What if I had …”

Here it helps to separate two questions that we often mix up in our heads. The first: did the decision work out? The second: was it good given what I knew at the time? Often you have no influence over the outcome — it depends on the market, other people, chance. Over the quality of the decision you do. If you gathered what could be gathered, heard the people you should have heard and decided in good conscience, the decision was good even if it didn’t work out.

That does not mean you mustn’t regret. Regret is a normal response and sometimes it teaches us something. But regret that goes round in circles isn’t learning, it is rumination. It helps to set, at the moment of deciding, a day when you will review the decision — and not to reopen the case every evening until then. That way you can learn from a mistake without having to live in it.

And one more thing: the people your decision hurts have a right to their feelings — including anger at you. That doesn’t mean you decided wrongly. It means you decided about something that mattered. Compassion for them and compassion for yourself are not opposites.

What to remember

• Under intense, uncontrollable stress the prefrontal cortex gives way — the view narrows and we reach for habit. That is not weakness, it is biology.
• Deciding costs something. Research on decision fatigue is less clear-cut than it is often presented, but big decisions still don’t belong at the end of an exhausting day.
• The loneliness of a decision is part of the problem: one person who disagrees with you is worth more than an hour of brooding alone.
• Under pressure we go back to patterns from our family. Once you recognise them, you decide, not they.
• Measure a good decision by what you knew at the time, not by how it turned out.