A shared universe › Blog › Making a hard decision · Español
To make a hard decision it helps to boil it down to what really matters to you, to look for an option that is good enough rather than perfect, and to set yourself a date. It is also worth knowing that, afterwards, we usually cope with what we chose better than we imagine. Changing jobs or staying. Staying with someone or leaving. Moving house or not. Some decisions sit on the table for weeks because no option is clearly the right one.
For years it has been said that having lots of options, which looks like an advantage, makes deciding harder and leaves us less satisfied afterwards, because we keep thinking about what we let go. This is what is known as choice overload.
But the idea is more nuanced than it is usually told. When Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd brought together fifty experiments with more than five thousand people, the average effect was virtually zero, with big differences from one study to another. It can happen in some situations, but it is not a law. If lots of options overwhelm you, there is nothing strange about you, and it is not written that it will always happen.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz distinguishes two ways of choosing. Some people look for the best possible option and don’t stop until they are sure. Others look for one that is good enough and, when they find it, they choose.
In a 2002 paper with seven groups of people, Schwartz and his colleagues found that those who tended always to look for the best were less happy and less optimistic, felt more regret and compared themselves more with others.
And in a 2006 study of students looking for their first job, those who looked for the best got starting salaries 20% higher, but were less satisfied with the job and had a harder time during the search.
Looking for good enough means deciding beforehand what you need and choosing as soon as something meets it, without carrying on searching in case something better turns up. For many of life’s decisions, that approach brings more peace of mind than the search for the perfect.
If you are torn between two very similar options, it can help to toss a coin and notice what you feel when one of them comes up. Relief or disappointment says a lot about what you really prefer, and you don’t have to do what the coin says.
It also helps to separate what is up to you from what is not. You can decide with what you know today, but you can’t control everything that happens afterwards. We talk about it in the article on what is up to you and what is not.
Hardly any decision is as final as it seems while you are making it, and we adapt to what we chose better than we expect.
Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues saw this in six studies published in 1998: faced with blows such as a break-up or being turned down for a job, people expected to feel bad for much longer than the distress actually lasted. They explain it by the fact that we don’t take into account what they call our psychological immune system, that ability to rearrange things inside and carry on which kicks in when something goes wrong.
Sometimes what weighs most is the time spent not deciding.
If you have spent weeks sleeping badly over a decision, or the doubt has turned into a constant worry, you may find it helpful to read about how to live with uncertainty. And if it comes with a lot of anxiety or a sadness that won’t lift, it is worth talking to your GP or a psychologist, who can help you think more calmly.
In A shared universe you can light a star with “What I hope for” and tell of the decision in front of you, in a few words and without anyone knowing who you are. Nobody will tell you what to do. They will keep you company while you decide.
Once you have chosen, you can come back to your star and tell how it went.