Why small decisions feel enormous

The decision someone brings me is almost never the one you would expect. Not the house or the job offer. It is the sofa. The dentist. Which of two near-identical laptops. Something small enough that saying it out loud feels faintly ridiculous, and which has been sitting on their chest since June.

The size of a decision and the size of the struggle come apart for a reason.

The short version

• The decisions that jam are usually the small private ones, because nothing outside you forces them to end.
• What is stuck is rarely the information. It is the standard: aim for the best option and there is no point at which you can stop looking.
• Lots of options only overwhelm under particular conditions, one of which is not knowing what you want before you look.
• Writing down what would be good enough, in advance, gives you a point at which you can stop.

Why the small ones are the sticky ones

Big decisions come with structure: a closing date, a form, other people waiting on you, a moment when it gets decided whether or not you feel ready. Small ones have none of that. Nobody is chasing you about the dentist, so the search can run indefinitely, and it does. You are not stuck because the decision is hard. You are stuck because nothing in it will end it for you.

The standard is the problem, not the options

If you are trying to make the best choice, you have set a target you cannot check. There is no way to know you have seen the best option, because there is always another tab.

Psychologists call this maximising, as against satisficing: taking the first option that meets your conditions. Across seven samples and 1,747 people, Barry Schwartz and colleagues found that the stronger someone's tendency to maximise, the more regret they reported, and the lower their scores on happiness, optimism and life satisfaction.

Be careful with that finding. It is correlational: these things travel together, which is not the same as one causing the other. Anyone who recognises themselves in it knows the feeling of buying the thing and then checking whether the other one was better.

You are not short of information. You are short of permission to stop looking.

The doubt is usually about you, not the choice

There is a pattern in the worry research called negative problem orientation. It is not a shortage of problem solving skill but a stance towards problems: treating ordinary difficulties as threats, doubting you can handle them, expecting it to go badly.

A 2017 meta-analytic review by Clarke and colleagues pooled 33 effect sizes across 5,376 people and found negative problem orientation and worry strongly related, at a correlation of 0.57.

The same review found negative problem orientation and intolerance of uncertainty correlate at 0.71, high enough that they may not be cleanly separate things. It is a description, not a diagnosis, and it is measured against worry rather than choosing. The stance is the same one.

What I hear underneath it is rarely a question about which sofa is better. It is a question about whether you can be trusted to pick one, and cope with getting it wrong.

Too much choice is not quite the law people think

The idea that more options make us miserable is now common knowledge. The evidence is more interesting.

In 2015 Chernev, Bockenholt and Goodman pooled 99 observations from 53 studies covering 7,202 people. Taken together, with nothing else accounted for, the effect of a bigger set of options was not statistically significant. It became reliable only once they took four conditions into account, one of which is preference uncertainty: how clearly you have worked out what you want before you look.

So the problem is often not the twenty options. It is arriving at them with no criteria, and asking them to tell you what you want.

A method duller than it sounds

Write down what would be good enough, before you look

Two or three conditions, on paper, before any browsing. Under 500 pounds, delivered this month, fits the alcove. Then the first option that clears all three wins. Not the best one. The first one.

The order matters more than the content. Criteria written after you have seen the options are not criteria. They are justifications.

Give the decision a size

Match the container to the stakes. Cheap and reversible gets ten minutes. Expensive and permanent earns an evening and a conversation. Most stuck decisions have been handed the wrong one.

The same logic sits behind brightloaf being built around 20 minutes rather than an hour you have to clear the diary for.

Decide when you will decide

Pick the moment, put it in the calendar, and treat arriving at it as the decision. It is the deadline small choices never came with.

Expect the hard part to arrive afterwards

Most people brace for the choosing. The uncomfortable bit is the hour after, when you want to reopen the tabs. Leaving them shut is the skill. It runs in the same direction as the NHS's general anxiety advice, which is to build up the time you spend in situations that make you anxious rather than avoid them.

When it is more than a habit

Occasional dithering is ordinary. It matters more when the worry has spread: when you worry about a wide range of things, when it is hard to control, and when it is affecting your daily life. Those are among the things a GP considers for generalised anxiety disorder, along with feeling anxious a lot of the time for at least six months.

If that describes your last year rather than your last fortnight, see a GP. In England, if you are 18 or over and registered with a GP, you can refer yourself straight to an NHS talking therapies service, with no GP referral and no diagnosis needed. A GP will usually suggest talking therapy before medication.

If the sticking point is more about standards than choices, the perfectionism and anxiety loop covers that. If you are postponing the decision by thinking about it, worry time is the better start.

This is general information and not a substitute for personal medical advice. If you are in crisis or feel unsafe, NHS urgent mental health help is available, or call 999 in an emergency. brightloaf is not a crisis service.