Decision paralysis: when thinking it over becomes a way of avoiding

The tab with the flat listing has been open for three weeks. The application for that call is waiting for “one more think”. In a restaurant you’re the last to order, and even then with the quiet feeling that the other dish would have been better. Not because you don’t care — quite the opposite: because you do, and because it seems to you there must be a choice that is right, final, with nothing lost.

Decision paralysis is not laziness and it is not stupidity. Most often it is a form of rumination dressed up as conscientiousness: as long as I’m weighing things up, I can’t get it wrong. But every day of weighing has its price — and the research on decision-making says something liberating: the problem is almost never that you thought too little. The problem is what you expect from the decision.

In this piece I explain why more options mean less satisfaction, what is really hidden underneath postponed decisions, and I give you a few proven tools for moving — not towards the perfect choice, but towards a good enough one.

The paradox of choice: why more options paralyse

Common sense says: more choice, more freedom, more happiness. The psychology of decision-making says otherwise. The American psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice: up to a point, options really do help us, but beyond that point every additional option raises the cost of deciding — more comparing, more fear of missing out, more grounds for regret — and lowers our satisfaction with whatever we choose.

The most famous demonstration of this is the experiment by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper (2000). In a grocery store they set up a jam stand: once with six flavours, once with twenty-four. The large stand attracted more curious passers-by — but only around 3 per cent of those who stopped bought any jam. At the small stand, around 30 per cent bought. Ten times as many. An abundance of options did not strengthen deciding; it suffocated it. (An honest note: later meta-analyses show the overload effect isn’t always so dramatic and depends on circumstances — but with important, hard-to-compare decisions, the kind that paralyse us, it is most pronounced.)

Schwartz and colleagues described another key difference — between two decision-making styles. Maximisers want the best possible choice: review everything, compare everything, pick the optimum. Satisficers (after the concept Herbert Simon introduced in the 1950s) have clear criteria in advance and take the first option that meets them. The surprising finding: maximisers objectively do often choose “better” — but they are less satisfied with their choices, more prone to regret, comparison and depressive feelings. Satisficers choose faster and live more calmly. So the hunt for the best doesn’t pay off even when you catch it.

Hence the key term of this piece: a good enough decision. This is not a decision that doesn’t care how things turn out — it is a decision that meets criteria set in advance, made within a reasonable time, with the conscious acceptance that some information will always be missing. A perfect decision doesn’t exist, for a simple reason: you can only judge it in hindsight, with information that nobody had at the moment of choosing. To demand a perfect choice of yourself means demanding clairvoyance — and then punishing yourself for not having it. If you recognise yourself in that demand, the root is probably deeper than the deciding itself; I write about it in the piece on perfectionism and overthinking.

What is really hidden underneath the postponing

So much for the mechanics. But in my work with people I notice that decision paralysis rarely arises from the number of options as such. Underneath it there are almost always two deeper things.

The first is avoiding responsibility. As long as I don’t decide, I haven’t ruined anything; a decision means a signature — I chose this, and if it goes wrong, it will be mine. Not deciding is therefore often a quiet hope that life will decide instead of us: that the deadline will pass, that someone else will choose, that circumstances will force the issue. In the short term that really does take the weight off. In the long term it leaves a person in a life they didn’t choose — responsibility included, only without authorship.

The second is even more overlooked: every decision is a small loss. When I choose one path, the others die — and the unchosen has to be grieved, if only a little. Anyone who doesn’t tolerate grieving well avoids decisions not because of the option chosen, but because of all the ones they would have to say goodbye to. So decisiveness is, paradoxically, also a skill of losing. How grief unfolds and why it can’t be avoided, I’ve described in the piece on sadness as a process of change — and many people only recognise there why even a choice between two jobs paralyses them.

Connected to this is the fear of regret (in behavioural economics: regret aversion). Research shows that we fear regret more than loss itself — and that we therefore often prefer to choose nothing rather than risk the feeling of “you have only yourself to blame”. But here emotional memory deceives us: in the long run, what people regret most is precisely what they didn’t do. Unchosen paths don’t hurt less than mistaken ones — they hurt longer, because imagination can go on for ever attributing beauties to them that reality would never have confirmed.

Deliberation as avoidance: when weighing up is no longer weighing up

Postponed decisions have one more quiet consequence that people rarely connect to its cause: fatigue. Every unmade decision stays in your head like an open tab — and open tabs use up working memory even when you aren’t attending to them. People with a dozen pending decisions often complain of an exhaustion they can’t explain, since “I’m not even doing anything”. That is exactly the trap: not deciding is not rest. It is work that never delivers a product.

How do you tell serious deliberation from paralysis? A simple test: is your thinking still producing new information? Real deciding has the shape of a funnel — the questions narrow, options drop away, the picture clarifies. Paralysis has the shape of a circle: the same pros and cons, rearranged endlessly, with a sense of effort and no movement. If you’re drawing up your pros-and-cons list for the fifth time, you’re no longer looking for information — you’re looking for certainty. And with important decisions, certainty is not in stock; that is exactly the mechanism I’ve unpacked in detail in the piece on why thinking is not solving.

Behind endless weighing there is often catastrophising too: the mind attaches the blackest scenario to each option and then chooses among nothing but catastrophes — of course it can’t decide. If you recognise yourself, the piece on “what if” thoughts will help. And one more trap I see again and again: deciding on the basis of what other people will say. A decision made for other people’s eyes stays foreign — and so the mind keeps chewing it over, because it wasn’t really made. The one compass that truly ends the weighing is your own values: what matters to me, what kind of life I am building. On how to stay yourself in the middle of other people’s expectations, I write in the piece on differentiation.

One-way and two-way doors

Before we get to the techniques, one more distinction that by itself dissolves a good part of paralysis: decisions aren’t equally hard, because they aren’t equally reversible.

In the world of decision-making, the image of two kinds of door has caught on. Two-way doors are decisions you can reverse: if it turns out badly, you step back and try differently. A job can be changed, a flat given up, a course dropped, a subscription cancelled. One-way doors are decisions you go through only once — there is no way back, or it is extremely expensive.

The trouble with most chronic ruminators: they treat every decision as though it were a one-way door. Every choice of restaurant, every email, every purchase gets weighed with a solemnity that would suit the decision to have a child. This is exhausting and — crucially — unnecessary: the great majority of life’s decisions are two-way. For those, a simple rule applies: decide quickly, on incomplete information, because the cost of a mistake is small while the cost of delay adds up daily. Save slowness and thoroughness for the rare genuinely one-way decisions. The question “is this a one-way or a two-way door?” alone dissolves many a paralysis in a few seconds.

Tools: how to decide when you can’t decide

A few techniques I recommend most often for decision paralysis — all with the same aim: to break the loop and return the decision to the real world.

• Set a deadline. A decision without a deadline is open-ended rumination. Fix a date (for smaller things: an hour) by which you gather information — and on which you choose the best option you have at that moment. A deadline isn’t violence against deliberation; it is its container.
• Limit the options to three. The jam experiment in practice: before you start comparing, use a coarse sieve (budget, values, first instinct) to cut everything down to three candidates. Comparing three is deciding; comparing seventeen is suffering.
• 10-10-10. A question popularised by the decision-making approach of the same name (Suzy Welch): how will I think about this choice in 10 minutes, in 10 months and in 10 years? The question stretches your perspective and separates this moment’s fear (which shouts loudest) from what will actually matter.
• Values as a compass. Instead of “which option is best?” ask “which option is more mine?” — closer to what I want my life to be. “Best” is the maximiser’s measure and it has no floor; alignment with your values does.
• Decide — and stop comparing. The last step is the hardest: after deciding, close the other tabs, literally and in your head. Research on maximising shows that what most erodes satisfaction with a choice is precisely comparing after the decision. A decision also becomes good by being watered — the energy that would go into regret goes into carrying it out.

If you notice thoughts about the decision intruding all day long, the technique of a postponed slot for worries helps too — I’ve described how it works in the piece on postponing worry.

And a warning from experience: none of these tools will work if you use them as a new way of seeking certainty. I know people who have run the 10-10-10 technique ten times over the same decision — hoping that one time it would finally give an unambiguous answer. Tools are containers for deliberation, not machines for guarantees. Their purpose is to give deliberation a shape, an edge and an end — while that last step, the signature, stays yours. No one and nothing can take it from you; and that is exactly why nothing can really make it easier either.

Not deciding is a decision too

Finally, a truth we can’t get around when it comes to decision paralysis: not deciding is not neutral. While you postpone, life doesn’t stop — options close, other people choose in your place, the default path runs on. Not deciding is a decision for the status quo, only without a signature. And because it has no signature, it doesn’t even bring the solidity that comes with a choice that is imperfect but genuinely made.

It helps to translate not deciding into the language of choice and say it out loud: “I am deciding to stay in this job for another month.” “I am deciding not to accept the offer this week.” The content is the same as with postponing — but the stance is entirely different. From a victim of circumstance you become the author of your own pause; and often it is this sentence that first really reveals whether there is a considered reason behind staying put, or only a fear that finds the dark comfortable. If there is a reason, you will say the sentence calmly. If it is fear, something will tighten as you say it — and that is exactly the place where it is worth looking deeper.

In the therapy room, decision paralysis therefore rarely turns out to be a problem of information. Almost always it is a problem of relationship — to mistakes, to loss, to one’s own authority. Somewhere a person learned that they are not allowed to be wrong, that their judgement is worth less than someone else’s, or that they will pay for a wrong choice with the affection of those close to them. The good news: these are learned stories, and what is learned can be changed. If you recognise yourself in what I’ve described and would like to put your signature back on your decisions, do get in touch — I’m here. The first decision can be a very small one. And an entirely two-way door.