Hey everyone, thank you for radio. I hope you are having an awesome day. I've got Tom with me for today show Tom.

How you doing, Ben?

Do you know what, mate? I've just been musing on an interesting talking point. This has come up before in the podcast where we look at sleep and recovery and stress and previously on this podcast and sort of recently I've talked a little bit about the

old long COVID experience and where I'm at right now and as someone that's not currently exercising and has an exercise for quite a while.

One interesting thing I'm noticing and this is helpful because I'm really freaking busy at the moment is I don't need as much sleep to feel fully rested compared to when I was exercising quite intensely.

I kind of almost feel like you always need like another hour of sleep when you're exercising really hard and it was just an interesting not observation because I kind of know it but like reinforcing that it's really important that when there's a lot of something going on in your life.

Sometimes something else has to give because if you can't you know stay in bed for nine hours then you're always going to be kind of a disadvantage if you know if there's other things that are more important and it's just a nice little observation said like six hours sleep again last night and feel fine today feel great.

I don't have any any data to back it up or anything but I definitely feel the same like if I'm if I've trained like three days in a row so usually I don't train more than two days in a row just for scheduling and that.

But let's say I'm doing something that train three days in a row that fourth day getting out of bed is difficult not because I'm like rack with doms or anything I just feel like generally fatigued so yeah I can imagine I can imagine that being the case.

I don't know if you can tell but my voice sounds a bit different as well just on the topic of training I don't have a cold what happened is I'm learning how to do power cleans at the minute I've never really done Olympic lifting before and I clocked myself in the in the Adams apple with a hundred kilo barbell the other day so.

If you're wondering why my summary voice is a little deeper than it usually is it's because my throat is really inflamed because I just about got it myself with a hundred kilos so.

See there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that will be like oh yeah I can see how that happened but if you if you kind of told that story down the pub to people that don't go to the gym people just look at you with a blank face tonight i've no idea what you just said and what is that yeah there's a bad idea is what it was there we go.

So today's podcast we're going to focus on a topic we have framed as how to make difficult decisions and this got kind of stimulated by something that Tom experienced at an event and then sort of had a bit of a discussion around sort of a loose framework.

And a process that you can go through in kind of decision making because if there's one thing the really defines any of our paths in lives is our ability to make good and sound decisions like we're doing it all the time is adults like decisions with money decisions with fitness decision with kids like everything we.

In theory wants to always make the best decision so you know normal day today decisions we hopefully don't struggle with but what if you're faced with a kind of bigger decision like you're like you know is fitness or the fitness i'm doing right for me right now like should I go on a diet like things where you have to sit down and think what is the right decision for you we're going to kind of discuss a bit of a framework to help you get to.

The outcome of making the right decision.

Yeah so I mean this is not like a new theory or anything I think I learned about this on my level 3 pt course about 100 years ago but yeah one of the talks brought it up and I just thought you know what this is actually is a really good way to view these things so.

Where to begin so humans like we like to think of ourselves as being like rational actors and what that means is we'll we'll decide on something and then we can explain to another person if they asked us why we decided on that thing so you're making a decision or.

Do I want to pay for those car repairs or do I want to go on holiday and then you'll decide either way and then afterwards you'll be able to explain to someone else who asked you why you decided the way you did oh well.

I repaired the car it's the most sort of like responsible thing to do I don't want the car to break down blah blah blah or I went on holiday i'm really tired the cars have been like that for a while it's going to be fine like you can explain whichever decision you make.

But there are a number of different ways of conceptualizing it.

Daniel Kahneman and in thinking fast and slow talks about what is like the the first brain system and the second brain system.

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