I never realized what an offensive question, “What would you like for breakfast?” was until my youngest child came along.
Faced with the decision of what to eat, especially in early hours while shedding sleep, she fully melts down. “How should I know!” she moans with despondence. And she surely doesn’t, the answer to her body’s desires maddeningly inaccessible to her.
I’m certain some of her reaction can be attributed to low blood sugar, but it also arises from just how overwhelming the experience of making a choice can be. We’re fortunate to have a kitchen full of breakfast options, but that means a mind full of options. Waffles or eggs or oatmeal or yogurt or bagels… add in toppings or a beverage choice and her little brain is reeling.
It took longer than it should have, but we eventually stopped throwing this grenade on our mornings and started choosing for her. Fortunately, seventy-five percent of the time she is perfectly satisfied with what we chose. When she isn’t, she – after a requistie whine or an eye roll – seems more able to name what she does want: “I didn’t want cereal. I wanted a bagel.”
Coming right up.
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My daughter’s indecision meltdowns grated at me until I realized just how much I struggled in the exact same ways. The other morning I found myself with a blessedly wide open couple of hours, which on the surface seems like a lovely gift. I sat thinking about how I wanted to spend the time, throwing around ideas that ranged from reading to walking to cleaning out my garage to going on a solo Target run.
These options, which each sounded enticing in their own ways, left me stymied. I sat on my bed for at least forty of my precious free minutes paralyzed in indecision. It realized that my big ‘problem’ was having the privilege of too many good options, and for a moment that felt ridiculous. But having worked with people through decision-making for long enough, I also acknowledged that the experience of choosing is a difficult mental task.
Making choices is quite literally stressful on the brain and body. A large body of peer-reviewed research tells us that decision-making is cognitively taxing. Deciding requires a whole process of evaluating options, anticipating outcomes, and resolving our internal conflicts – all of which require a significant amount of executive functioning and emotional resources.
Demonstrating this resource burden, one study showed that shoppers who had already made a lot of decisions ended up with low levels of self-control. After a lot of time choosing, they showed less resiliency, more procrastination, and even less physical stamina. Deciding things takes it out of us, science proves. It’s one of the reasons making decisions can feel so impossible when we are grieving or depressed; it requires energy stores that we simply don’t have.
And beyond requiring a lot of brain power, making choices can also feel emotionally fraught, even when on the surface they don’t seem particularly consequential. Whether I go on a walk or read a book doesn’t seem like it should create such internal friction. When it does, though, it might point to something deeper – a way we are orienting toward our choices that is leading us to paralysis, frustration, and dissatisfaction.
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While making choices is taxing for all of us as humans, some of us struggle more than others. Those who do may be maximizers, a term used by psychologists to describe people who will search for the best possible option among their available choices. Their counterparts are called satisficers (think satisfy + suffice), people who will choose the first possible option that meets their basic criteria for the decision that they are making.
We each tend toward one of these decision-making styles, at least according to psychologist Barry Schwartz, who adapted his theory from an economics concept from the 1950s. You might instantly know which you are, but if you don’t, consider how you made a recent bigger decision. Did you spend months researching and comparing different models of cars, or did you go to the lot and buy the first one that did what you needed it to do? When you needed a new doctor, to pick a preschool, or your last vacation destination, was there a spreadsheet involved or did you feel done once you had a good option?
While most of us would say that our approach varies somewhat by the value we place on the particular decision (how much you loathe car shopping might come into play), we do tend to operate with one of the two styles. And it turns out that which style you have can have a fairly profound impact – both on the quality of the decision and the satisfaction you feel after.
The research does suggest that maximizers may end up making some objectively “better” decisions, which leads many maximizers to feel content with their approach. However, they also tend to end up feeling less happy with their decisions. It may be that maximizers are left feeling unsure or doubting themselves, even after the decision is made. Or they are more acutely aware of all of the choices they had to give up to make their final selection. Meanwhile, satisficers may have gotten fewer great features on their new car, but they drive away actually feeling more satisfied. This is sometimes called the maximization paradox.
In fact, whether we are a maximizer or satisficer at heart, being faced with an abundance of options tends to make us more anxious and less happy with our ultimate choice. In one famous experiment, Schwartz found that giving shoppers 20 options of jam to choose from made them more unhappy because they experienced greater fear of making the wrong selection. We think we want endless choices, but the science shows it actually makes us more miserable.
Given that we live in a world of seemingly endless options these days, I’ve wondered what it might mean to try to practice a more satisficer approach. Is it possible to adopt this way of being, and thus reducing the proven dissatisfaction, regret, and perfectionism that can result from maximizing? Or is maximizing so hard-wired that we’re destined to to always be second-guessing our decision? What can help reduce the burden of choice?
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Given that even a decision of how to spend a couple free hours could feel stressful, I’ve been personally interested in figuring out how to be more satisficing. At first I tried to simply do what a satisficer would do, such as pick the first thing on the menu that looked good and putting the menu down. This helped some, but the truth was that the nagging maximizer in me would still question if it could have been better, especially when I’d see other delectable dishes come out of the kitchen.
I realized that I needed to get underneath the challenge – to understand what was going on in our internal worlds that actually drives overthinking and the self-doubt. In that vein, I thought about what it really meant to make a choice, and recognized that there is a belief for most of us that in making a choice, we are the arbiters of our own outcomes. If we make the so-called right choice, we can increase our chance of happiness.
This seems obvious and logical because it’s so woven into the fabric of our culture. As individualists, we’ve been shaped by the notion that we determine our destiny, and we are responsible for our happiness. But science actually undermines the idea that we are all that good at knowing what we will make us happy – or unhappy, for that matter.
In fact, we’re remarkably bad at both. Daniel Gilbert is a leading researcher in the study of affective forecasting – how well we can predict our future emotions. Through a variety of studies, he and colleagues have shown that we tend to overestimate how good or bad something will make us feel. We expect that a positive choice or event will make us more happy and for longer than it actually does. But even winning the lottery or getting a big promotion tend to have much more short-lived effects on our baseline emotional state than we expect.
Perhaps fortunately, the same is true for hardship. Gilbert calls this phenomenon ‘immune neglect’ and has also borne this out in research. We see that people expect that when something terrible happens – like losing an opportunity or even a person, they will continue to be deeply negatively impacted for a long time. But people tend to recover to baseline much more rapidly than they predict.
What might this mean for our choices – whether those choices are about whether to move to a new city or whether to order the fish at the restaurant? I take it to mean that all of our deliberation may have minimal net impact on our happiness, at least in a long-term or meaningful way.
This might sound a little nihilistic – like I’m suggesting none of it matters. I do think choices matter, but maybe not in the ways that we typically evaluate choices. As I talked more about in this essay, maybe happiness is the wrong yard stick. If we instead orient our choices toward things like having a new experience or an interesting experience or another one of our core values, perhaps we get out of the cognitive trap that happiness sets for us in decision-making.
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Taking this even one step further can also serve to reduce the weight of indecision. It’s taken me quite a while to get here (and still struggle with it plenty at tmes), but I’ve come to believe that we can approach every single thing in front of us as an opportunity for growth and awakening. (This is part of the You School principles.) That doesn’t mean that we like or want everything that happens, but that even – and maybe especially – the frustrations, the obstacles, the wrong choices lead us on our path.
It my opinion, we don’t have to believe in a spiritual or externally-guided destiny to take this view – though we can if that fits for us. It can be more of an orientation to life.
There’s a way in which this view can soften our decision-making angst. Our choices are our path of learning, regardless of the outcome. Our choices sometimes operate beyond what our conscious mind knows we need. If I ordered the fish and hated it, I’m clearer now on how I feel about branzino. If I choose the road that ends up the longer route home, I may have needed more time to decompress. If I decided to stay with my partner instead of ending the relationship, maybe there was something I still needed to discover about myself in the context of this relationship.
It goes hand in hand with an idea I talked about recently that we may not be denied, but spared – that within even the most disappointing of outcomes, there is wisdom and grace for us to gather.
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This ended up being one of the harder essays to create in my years of writing here. In what felt like grand irony, I had almost twenty pages of notes about this topic. Snippets of spiritual teachings, screenshots of research artciles, notes on examples and ideas… deciding what to include felt like a feat. It ended up taking me much longer than usual to write, and I found myself caught frequently in frustration and self-doubt.
I have to laugh at how the universe will give us the experiences we need to understand the challenge at hand. And my last challenge is when and how to say, “I’m done. I’ve made my choice. It’s out of my hands now.”
So here you are. If you’ve made it to this point, I hope this has given you some things to consider about choice. I offer this to you in it’s incompleteness, it’s too-muchness, it’s imperfection.
May we choose with care, release with tenderness, and trust that even our imperfect choices can carry us somewhere true.
