🙈 The Bills You're Avoiding
Why we dodge the mail pile instead of just opening it.
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🏡 The Fix
What Happens When Investors Smell Bad News
Economists Niklas Karlsson, George Loewenstein, and Duane Seppi (2009) wanted to understand a strange pattern in investor behavior: people don't check their portfolios randomly — they check them selectively.
🙈 Using real brokerage login data, they found investors logged into their accounts noticeably less often on days the overall market was down, actively avoiding the information rather than just happening to skip it — a pattern they named the ostrich effect.
The same instinct shows up anywhere unpleasant information might be waiting — the unopened envelope, the bill you're pretty sure is bigger than usual, the maintenance issue you suspect is worse than it looks. Avoiding it feels protective in the moment. It just delays the moment; it doesn't remove it.
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🙈 Open It Anyway
- Open mail the same day it arrives, before your brain has time to guess what's inside and dread it.
- Set a fixed, recurring time to check accounts or bills. A schedule removes the daily choice to avoid it.
- If something turns out to be bad news, handle the very next smallest step immediately, even just a phone call. Momentum beats dread.
- Notice when you're avoiding something specifically because you suspect bad news. That suspicion is usually the real signal to look sooner, not later.
👉 Try This Today
Opening it is the hard part, and you just did the hard part. Whatever's inside, you can handle it from here. 💪