Making Informed Decisions with BRAIN
As a person with ADHD, I'm always on the lookout for ways to strengthen parts of my life that I find difficult or taxing, and I just discovered a short video[1] from The Adulting with ADHD Podcast in which ADHD coach Dusty Chipura[2] described an acronym/mnemonic to help people make informed decisions.
It can be easy when making a decision to be swept away by gut feelings, a charismatic salesperson, or emotional reactions to the decision. Doing anything to slow down the process, even for a few seconds, can help us to make better decisions. Acronyms and mnemonics[3] can be really helpful when you're mentally overtaxed, because it takes an entire idea or process and strips it down to a single word or phrase that we can easily interject where we need it.
The acronym is BRAIN, and stands for Benefits, Risks, Alternatives, Interval, and No.
| Term | Explanation | Discussion |
|---|---|---|
| Benefits | What are the benefits? | The benefits might be obvious if you're excited about the option, but they could be subtle if you're not stoked about it. |
| Risks | What are the risks? | Same, but in reverse! Depending on the situation, this is what I'm most likely to forget. |
| Alternatives | Are there alternatives? | Sometimes you can get overwhelmed with how perfect a piece of the puzzle is, and lose sight that there is a more boring, but perhaps better solution. |
| Interval | How long do I have to make the decision? | Put another way, how long do you have to research the problem? If it's urgent, should you also maybe be wary of a scam (like a phishing email)? |
| No | What happens if I say 'no'? | Consider your own tendencies to exaggerate the consequences here. If you're a people-pleaser, are your friends and coworkers actually likely to shun you, or is that all in your head? |
Intuitively, the acronym makes sense to me; it covers the areas I tend to overlook for one reason or another while making a decision, and should be short and simple enough to easily inject. I will try to incorporate this into my life, and might follow up later to say how it's going.
Which, according to the Cambridge Dictionary is pronounced with a completely silent 'm,' which I think is a condennable transgression against phonetic spelling. ↩︎