Decision-making During Stress

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The course examines the neurobiology of stress, trauma, and resilience, so that students can understand how their body and mind are wired to perceive information and make decisions while challenged or threatened. We will examine habit patterns, both perceptual and behavioral, and explore how these habits can be changed to allow for more accurate situational awareness, less biased decision-making, more capacity to interrupt impulsive or reactive decisions, more intentionality, and more capacity to access choice and creative problem-solving. After exploring these topics at the individual and interpersonal levels, we will apply these topics to human organizations and systems. We will explore how organizations and systems are “enacted” through organizational habits; how groups manage stress, anxiety, uncertainty and insecurity; and how groups learn, adapt, and change (or not). This part of the course will draw out policy implications in the realm of national and international security. Students will participate in a group project to explore these dynamics in a case study related to the current global polycrisis—both to understand how and why their case study challenge developed and to explore innovative ways to address it. This course alternates between periods of intellectual learning and discussion, periods of experiential engagement with mind-body practices, and reflective discussion about those practices. Thus, this course has a large component of direct experiential practice. Students will be asked to complete 30 minutes of mind fitness exercises every day. Students are also required to attend a half-day intensive practicum on a Saturday.