there is no such thing as a wrong decision

the psychology behind indecision and the paradox of choice

The paradox of choice was introduced by Barry Schwartz, and it’s the idea that the more choices we are presented with when making a decision, the more stressed and anxious we feel. Having too many choices makes us feel overwhelmed, and he actually found that the more choices we have, the less decisions we make.

Having too many choices not only makes it harder to make a decision, but once we do make that decision, it also makes us feel more feelings of regret and dissatisfaction after making a choice. This happens because we start thinking about the other options that we didn’t pick, and we wonder if they would’ve been better and we convince ourselves that we chose the wrong one. This phenomenon is called opportunity cost.

The paradox of choice theory actually stems from economics; Schwartz identified that the range of choices we have (as consumers) available to us these days is far greater than anyone had in the past (and has only grown further since the creation of the theory in 2004), yet consumer satisfaction has not increased as much as traditional economics theories expected. But this idea extents far beyond consumerism - in a world where we have more life choices than ever, and more options than our parents and grandparents ever had, we like to think that this abundance of choice can make us feel more freedom and autonomy, but psychology shows that it actually has a negative effect.

In some cases we even end up so overwhelmed that we make no decision at all which causes inaction. This is called analysis paralysis, and it happens when we get so scared of making a ‘wrong’ decision that we end up not making a decision at all. And the effects of analysis paralysis effect our day-to-day lives; it has been linked to decrease performance of mental tasks, due to overthinking taking up working memory which is a finite resource, as well as causing decreased creativity.

In 2000, two psychologists conducted a study to investigate this, looking at customers in a supermarket. On the first day of the experiment, they had 24 different types of jam on display, and on the second day they had only 6. They found that the customers were 10x more likely to buy jam when there only 6 types on display. So, the less choice they had, the more sales there were and more decisions were made.

These results ultimately challenged what a lot of people thought they knew about human nature and the determinants of well-being. It has always previously been assumed that the relationship between choice and well-being was straight-forward, and that the more choices we have, the better off we are. Yet in reality, when we have more autonomy and more choices, we actually experience choice overload.

In a real-world context, this obviously extends far beyond consumer choices and jam - like I said earlier we are now in a position where we have far more choices and opportunities in so many aspects life that our ancestors had - whether it be in our career, personal life, relationships, or education. We have so many more opportunities than people had in the past, and more than people in some parts of the world have even now, which is an amazing thing that we should all be grateful for. BUT if you’re anything like me (and a lot of other people) you might have experienced inaction at some point in your life. You’ve had times where you’ve felt so overwhelmed by your choices, that sometimes it has felt easier to just make no choice at all instead.

Thanks to the internet and social media, it is now even easier to see all the different options available to us - there are new jobs that didn’t exist when we were kids (e.g. influencers), we can see what choices everyone else is making with their lives at the click of a button, like who quit their job to go travelling in Thailand and Australia, who’s climbing the cooperate ladder and who’s a six-figure business owner at the age of 23. We have access to apps which gives us the choice between a hundred different restaurant options for dinner, or hundreds of different people to date and swipe right on.

If there’s one thing I love, it is when psychology validates exactly how I feel (and in this case my indecisiveness). But if I’m being honest it’s something I’ve really been trying to work on this year. I’ve found myself having to make a lot of important choices this year, especially within my career. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt that’s really helped me, and that has been realising that there is no such thing as a wrong decision. Seriously, there is never any such thing as making the wrong choice, no matter what your brain and opportunity cost try and tell you. We are always being divinely guided and the universe is always working in our favour, so how could it ever be possible to make a wrong decision?

And as long as you believe this, you will never feel like you’ve made a ‘wrong’ choice. Sure, there will be times where things do not go as you planned, and you might even start to convince yourself that you made the wrong choice somewhere, but when this happens it is because the universe is trying to teach you something. If every always went perfectly according to plan… you would never learn anything. You would never get the opportunity to overcome something and grow form it. Even when you make a ‘wrong’ choice, it is something that needed to happen. The universe was teaching you a lesson that you needed to learn. Therefore making it the right choice :)

When you fully realise and embody this energy, suddenly choices become a lot easier to make no matter how many options you have, because you know that things can never go wrong for you. The universe is literally always on your side and working in your favour no matter how it looks at any given point in time. Suddenly, no choice seems like it might be the wrong one. And the more you start to make choices with confidence, the more in tune you will find your self with your inner-voice and intuition, and you won’t only feel the universe guiding you onto the right path, but also your (higher) self.