Nudge Your Brain to Make Better Choices

Your calendar is full. You stay busy. But at the end of the day—or week or year—it seems the things you hoped to do never make the list. Whose agenda are you living?

You care about friendship, yet postpone calling someone you haven't seen in ages. You value creativity, yet spend your free hour scrolling. You are not alone.

How do our choices drift so far from our intentions?

In What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change, neuroscientist Emily Falk, Ph.D., offers a useful explanation for our failures to follow through with our intentions.  Fortunately, she also offers user-friendly advice for bringing our choices closer to what matters most.

Our brains continually perform a “value calculation,” Falk explains.  They are constantly weighing what seems worthy of our time, attention, and effort. This process means that immediate rewards are likely to capture our attention and get weighted heavily, while more distant rewards may be diminished or overlooked. That’s why it is so easy to ignore an important, challenging project in favor of spending an afternoon rearranging our desk or “procrasti-baking.”

How to Bring Your Deeper Priorities into Focus

Falk describes two brain systems that help inform this value calculation.

Our self-relevance system brings in our sense of identity, including our deeply held values. Choices that align with our identity can seem more worthwhile and appealing. By deliberately reflecting on those values, we can broaden our perspective beyond the immediate situation and make choices that serve our long-term well-being.

Imagine you've wanted to learn Spanish, but instead of opening the next lesson, you keep scrolling on Insta or TikTok. To tweak your brain’s value calculation, you might put a reminder on your phone’s lock screen: “What matters to me now?” Let it prompt you to pause and ask why you wanted to learn Spanish and how learning reflects who you are—tipping the scale in favor of choosing to  practice a new language.

Our social relevance system brings information about other people into our value calculations. Whose approval do you seek?  Whose example do you follow?  Whose expectations matter?  All of these can influence what seems worth doing. A deliberate pause allows us to consider how our choices reflect the relationships that matter most to us.

Making Good Choices in a Nutshell

Whether you are deciding how to spend an afternoon or considering a major life change, use this mantra to prompt a pause:

WIN-WIN: What’s Important Now? What’s Important Next?

As you consider your answers, ask:

• Who am I, and what matters deeply to me?

• Who matters to me, and whose perspective and well-being do I want to consider?

• With these in mind, which choice seems most worthwhile?

Falk’s book can aid us in moving away from autopilot to create our best lives. Understanding how we choose gives us opportunities to shape our choices. By intentionally bringing our identity and important connections into focus, we can influence what feels worth doing.

What choices are you making today that deserve your attention?

© 2026 Gayle Scroggs, PhD, PCC.  All rights reserved.