A neuroscientist who studies decision-making reveals the 6 most important choices you can make

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Neuroscientist Moran Cerf has made a living studying how people make choices.

Turns out, humans are pretty lousy decision-makers. We fall victim to bias, let emotions cloud our judgment, and tire of making choices pretty quickly.

But Cerf has also learned that making a handful of really smart choices at the right moment can eliminate the need to make hundreds of smaller, nagging choices.

Here are Cerf's recommendations for living a happy, successful, stress-free life.

1. Choose your friends wisely

Cerf has said this is the most important choice a person can make in life.

Since decision-making is both faulty and exhausting, he argues that picking your social circle maximizes your chance of reaching happy, fulfilling outcomes.

It's based on research that has found people's brain waves sync up when they're in each other's presence. So if you want to become a funnier or more physically fit person, Cerf's advice is to seek out funny or physically fit friends. You'll naturally start becoming more like them.

2. Keep track of your luck

Cerf argues that people are much luckier than they think. Each semester, he encourages his students at Northwestern to keep track of times they took a risk and it paid off.

Every time they speed on the highway and don't get a ticket, they make a note. Every time they do get a ticket, they make a note. At the end of the month, they can divide their bad outcomes by their good ones. Often, people are surprised to see just how lucky they were, Cerf said.

"You see that you were lucky," Cerf told Business Insider. "Most of us are lucky. That's the point."

3. Avoid data overload

Many people like to think that information is the key to unlocking their potential, Cerf said. But the numbers on a scale or the paces counted on a watch don't necessarily change people's habits.

Cerf's advice is to stop basing day-to-day choices about fitness and diet on individual numbers. They too easily become the goals themselves instead of a metric for tracking progress.

In his own life, Cerf covers the number on his bathroom scale. The scale logs each weigh-in, but he looks just once at the numbers at end of the week. He said it helps him think less about numbers and more about the bigger trend of weight loss.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider