Choice 1: searching through more than one hundred dating profiles
Choice 2: looking at the menu at an Italian restaurant
Choice 3: scanning through countless types of nails to hang a painting at home
Choice 4: researching hundreds of types of mattresses
Choice 5: exploring the destination for your next vacation
Choice 6: deciding who to invite to your birthday party
Choice 7: choosing a name for your baby
Choice 100: . . .
Choice nnnnnnnnn
How often do you have to make choices, decisions, and solve problems in your day?
Quite likely, it’s very often because that’s the time we’re living in. How do you handle those deciding moments?
- Do you spend hours playing out in your mind the best choices, smartest decisions, and most efficient ways to complete a task?
- Do you play out in your head all kinds of what-if scenarios about things that could go wrong to help you make the best decision?
- Do you check all the best resources before making a choice?
- Are you afraid that a better option might come your way after you’ve made a decision?
- Do you second – (or third-) guess yourself when having to make a choice?
If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may be dealing with decision-phobia—also referred to as decidophobia, decision paralysis, or indecision paralysis.
Decision-paralysis is a very common struggle for high-achievers, go-getters, anxious procrastinators, or people struggling with perfectionism, procrastination, or chronic worry.
The bottom line is that it’s hard for you to make choices, from the simple ones, like what type of tea to buy, to the complex ones, like whom you should marry.
Why is it hard for you to make decisions?
What are the things your mind tells you that cause you to dwell on decisions?
Our human minds do human things. And our minds are vulnerable to the coherence trap that says, If I don’t carefully think this through, then bad things will happen, and I’ll regret it later. So your mind will often come up with reasons to think and think and think again, all the way through. And yet, where does it lead you?
Think about the times you’ve gone to a store and, after hours of investigating and examining a particular product, you left without buying anything.
You need to get to the root of your difficulty with making decisions. Here are some reasons why decision-making might be hard for you:
(1) You’re afraid of screwing things up.
(2) You’re afraid of missing a better choice later on.
(3) You’re afraid of the feelings of regret, sorrow, and remorse that may come with a given choice.
(4) You’re holding on to thoughts about a decision representing who you are or what you’re worth.
Which one of these reasons applies to you?
It’s possible that over time, you have developed a particular decision-making style that makes decisions easier or harder for you. Let’s dive into it.
What is your decision-making style?
Barry Schwartz (2004), an organizational psychologist, has described two types of decision-makers: maximizers and satisficers.
- Maximizers strive to make the best decision possible, so they collect and optimize all the information needed with that purpose in mind.
- Satisficers consider their gains and losses in a given situation, evaluate their options, and make a decision.
Which one describes you? Do you like to gather as much information as possible about your options so you can make the optimal decision? Or do you make a decision when you find a suitable “good-enough” option and move on?
Keep in mind that despite what most people might think about maximizers making better decisions, Schwartz’s research demonstrated that creating many choices impedes our ability to make decisions, triggers excessive searching, and, in fact, leads us to make worse choices (Schwartz, 2004; Yang and Chiou, 2010).
What if you deeply care about a decision?
In general, it’s annoying to make a bad decision—but it is much more bothersome when you are genuinely invested in that choice and what it means to you.
In fact, when people care deeply about things, they get very fearful of making wrong, poor, and thoughtless choices, so, as a result, they spend countless hours analyzing, mulling over, and scrutinizing every potential path they could take.
Do you know what I mean?
Think about it: When something is important to you, don’t you want to make the best decision possible? Don’t you want to exhaust all the possibilities and make sure you have all the information needed to make an optimal decision? And then, do you go on and on, searching, researching, and acquiring as much information as possible to the point that it’s overwhelming?
There is also another important variable to consider in decision-making: your emotions.
How do your emotions influence your decisions?
A study conducted by Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000) found that “fearful people made pessimistic judgments of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgments.”
These researchers explain how every emotion we experience comes along with a perception of what’s in front of us in ways (appraisals) and influences our choices. Whenever we are making a decision, our emotions tell us how to judge the situation and what to do about it.
How to make values-based decisions
Because we have to make decisions every day in every area of our lives, it’s important to approach them in a way that expands and nourishes our lives.
You certainly need to be aware of your decision-style, your fears, and the emotional state you’re in when considering a choice. You also need a framework to approach all the choices you have to make.
I want to invite you to consider the following principles to approach when facing a decision:
- Ask yourself: What’s my mind guarding me from if I don’t make the best choice?
- Watch out for your decision style: maximizer or satisficer.
- Check your values: ask yourself, what really matters to me in this situation?
- Ask yourself, what’s the feeling that is going to be hard for me to make room for?
- Set a time limit for searching for information.
- Set a deadline for any decision you have to make.
- Set which variables or factors will help determine your choice (instead of dealing with countless criteria).
- Approach each decision as a process (not as a life-and-death situation).
