Are you too attached to your house and having trouble taking the decision to sell it or even putting a price tag on it? Taking two Tylenol pills could help you make that decision, according to a feature by the Wall Street Journal.
After a new study found that the popular painkiller medication acetaminophen - generally known by brand name Tylenol - could relieve the stress of decision-making, the Journal decided to compare the results of the study to how it could affect the seller's psychology when it came to real estate deals.
The study, which will be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology next year, conducted an experiment on 95 undergrad students to find out how Tylenol could affect decision making and help deal with emotional pain.
The students were divided into two groups of which one was given 1000 milligrams of Tylenol and the other was given a placebo.
The two groups were then divided where half of them were asked to keep the mug (own it) and the rest were told that the mug belonged to the lab (no ownership here). The students were asked to study the mug as if it were their own in both groups.
After 30 minutes, when the Tylenol effect reached its peak, all students were asked to sell their mugs. The results were fascinating.
Students from the group that took Tylenol priced their mug reasonably lesser than those that took the placebo, showing that the pain of parting with the mug was lower in the students that took Tylenol.
"When people talk about decisions they have to make, they talk in terms of pain," Nathan DeWall, co-author and professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, was quoted by The Journal.
The professor explained that "it was easier for them to give up something they owned-and that's really hard for people to do." The professor added that further research was needed to explain the phenomenon and complex experiments would be required.
Selling a home can indeed be stressful. Homeowners end up having arguments and disagreements with their realtors when pricing their homes, especially when they are too attached to the place. Just because they perceive the value of their home to be high, they end up pricing their home on a completely unreasonable price range.
So if you are unsure about the Tylenol theory, Zillow has some tips through which you could get detached to your home before you sold it, which is almost like coping with the loss of a loved one. The first step is to acknowledge that parting with the home can be stressful. You must also be completely ready to sell.
