In his TED Talk How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed, Daniel Levitin encourages people to practice a pre-mortem instead of a post-mortem. Post-mortems (which literally means after death) are investigations to discover and understand the cause of something after it has happened. Pre-mortems are about planning in advance to avoid foreseeable problems. This is especially useful because in stressful situations our cortisol hormone levels increase, potentially compromising clear thinking.
Caveat for the talk: The numbers and stats Levitin shares about medical practice seem to be incorrect or misinterpreted (I haven’t done further study to verify).
