Hand-Wash to Less Doubt

Are you the type of person who second-guesses yourself? If so, get a load of this.

(This isn’t exactly a spiritual-religious article, but it’s so cool that I wanted to share it with you.)

Scientists have long known that the act of ablution — of washing yourself — makes people feel like they’ve washed away their sins. (Think: Lady Macbeth.)

We know that washing the self is a metaphorical action associated with cleansing the soul. Literally, you wash away the dirt, the grime, the germs — but in a spiritual sense, you also wash away the darkness, the black spots on your conscience, to arrive at a “clean slate.” (On a related note, when I wash my car — which I do far too infrequently — I somehow feel cleaner.)

Washing not only makes clean, but it helps you feel cleansed.

Makes sense, right?

A recent study reveals something more about washing your hands: When you’re trying to make a decision you’re ambivalent about, if you wash your hands after making the decision, you’ll feel less ambivalent.

Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz conducted the study at the University of Michigan and wrote about it in Science Magazine. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:

• The scientists asked undergraduate students to review a list of 30 CDs and rank them according to the top 10 they’d like to own.

• They had the students choose between the 5^th and 6^th CDs on their ranked list, in order to receive one of those as a free gift.

• The scientists asked some of the students to perform a seemingly unrelated task — rating soap. Some students were told to rate the soap only by looking at the packaging. Others rated the soap based on actually using it to wash their hands.

• They found that students who washed their hands with soap felt less uncertain about their selected free CDs. There was less beating themselves up about their decisions. The students who had only looked at the soap packaging second-guessed themselves about which CDs they had chosen.

The moral of the story is: wash your hands.

I know it sounds silly, but try it.

Hey, you eat food frequently, right? Do you ever second-guess where you should go to eat, or what you’re going to eat? How about this: for the next week, after you decide where or what you’ll eat, wash your hands and see if you experience less “post-decisional dissonance,” as the scientists call it. (Doesn’t post-decisional dissonance sound so much cooler than regret?)

Maybe washing creates a sense of calm?

Spiritual-religious, but really more hygienic advice: Wash.