Too much choice?
What to eat. What to buy. What to study. Which job to take. Spend or save. Where to live. Where to go on holiday. Which is highest-rated. Which person to settle down with. Whether to settle down at all. Whether to have children. Whether to retire. To take a leap, or to stay as we are.
Click, swipe, browse, scroll. We’re surrounded by a cacophony of choices every day - the minutiae mingled in with the truly important.
Generally, we have more choices than humans have ever had before. While that can bring a feeling of abundance and freedom that previous generations could only have dreamed of, it can also feel overwhelming. Really, our brains just aren’t evolutionarily geared up for it.
Being faced with almost infinite options of how and where to spend time, money, effort, or attention can make us question those choices in just as many ways.
Couple this with an endless reel of idealised lives being ‘lived out’ on social media and it can become not just about making a decision, but about making the optimal decision.
Our culture is geared up to making us feel like we need to optimise everything, from the trivial (like where to go for dinner) to the most consequential (our time, our careers, our bodies, our relationships).
Faced with calls to live our best, most perfect, most productive, or most ambitious lives, I’ve noticed that it often leaves people with a fear of making the ‘wrong’ decision. The sense that one wrong step will put them on the wrong path forever.
With that worry hanging over every decision, it’s no wonder we can feel paralysed by choice. When we’re bombarded with a plethora of options for virtually every decision we make, it can be hard to hear our own intuition.
Even harder when we’re carrying around a load of beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world that we’ve unconsciously built from the earliest age. These beliefs can be so ingrained that we don’t even notice they’re influencing our decisions.
By contrast to the fear of ‘one wrong step’, here’s an illustration that I find useful to consider:
This graph can feel reassuring: There isn’t one single ‘correct’ path for us to choose. Instead, there are almost endless possibilities open to us.
But you might look at the graph and feel that familiar sense of overwhelm. How to choose from the many future paths?!
Well, that’s where therapy can come in. A good counsellor or psychotherapist can explore the decision you’re struggling to make, along with what’s sitting behind it, to help you overcome the impasse.
They won’t make the decision for you, but they’ll help you to explore what’s really important to you, and how to hold true to that - in this and any other choice you make.
A few things to consider if you’re feeling stuck with a decision:
If I wasn’t afraid, which option would I choose?
What would I have to let go of in order to make this decision?
Whose opinion worries me most about this decision?
Which ‘cautionary tales’ am I replaying for myself about this choice?
Have I felt this indecisiveness before, and in what kind of situations? Is there a common thread between them?
Try journaling and see what comes up for you. Consider sharing the notes with your therapist, to use them as a way of digging deeper into what’s going on for you.
