Have you ever stayed up late night overthinking about any random decision you have taken and ending up in a state of regret? Do you ever find it hard to just do a simple task like decided which restaurant you are going to eat at?
Do you find it discomforting to determine if you should continue or quit your current job? Does it seem complicated for you while choosing any outfit out of many? Have you ever been confused about making the right career choice out of billions of niches?
My point in this is living in today’s world full of options is making us exhausted and unhappy and I truly believe that it’s just not me, we are all going through the same struggle of indecisiveness at some point in our lives.
Every new day brings more choices
With the sun shining and rising, we all wake up and welcome a new day that is brimming with countless choices and opportunities to make our lives just a little bit better than yesterday. Each day we eagerly work so hard to take and have control of everything which brings with it several options and decisions for us to make that happen. But It’s up to us to choose the right ones. We are privileged enough to live in the part of the world where we get to be the boss of our own lives.
But most times whenever we are about to make a big decision regarding anything that impacts us or our family and career, we take a considerable amount of time to make the final choice to make sure it’s right for us! We decide after comparing and analyzing out all the possible outcomes of that one choice or decision.
But doesn’t make it ten times harder if we are given countless opportunities? Would, we still be able to make the decision or would we instead find ourselves we comparing the pros and cons and end up wasting time doing research or investigate all of them… & by the end, we simply can’t choose what we want which exchange makes us feel like we have failed.?
So My Questions Comes: Are too many choices good or bad for us?
It seems right to think about the countless chances we can take to change our life by simply doing one thing: DECIDING.
You would think having too many career options to opt for seems like quite an amazing thing or having a variety of outfits to choose from like all the actress and stars we see on TV sounds nice right?
But What If Having All Those Things Offered To You Then You Find Yourself Unable To Decided?
Every day we encounter these different number of choices that would enable us to build up our life as we envision it. But we all know excess of anything is not good for us and I believe the same goes for us having too many options isn’t good for us. On the one hand, these choices bring us a sense of freedom, but on the other, they actually end up ruining our mental health and make us feel like the pressure to decide is suffocating us & exchange it turns us completely off making a choice at all at the end.
The discomfort that comes from poor decision making in the presence of too many choices makes us anxious to make any type of decisions that could affect us or our future in any way.
The Negative effects of having more options than we need
With more choices or options, we often become more miserable. The relationship between freedom of choice and our happiness is never linear. More choices don’t mean or guarantee more happiness.
With too many options offered to us, comes more uncertainty. So, do we feel satisfied at heart with all the options we have today? The answer could be Yes for some and “No.” for others but I truly believe from my experience there can be many reasons behind this discontentment we feel. But heaving excess of options is one key factor causing frustration in today’s world.
Excess of choice always leads to indecisiveness
I was reading a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, and from my understand basically shows that as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become so overloaded that we push our self towards mental pressure and feeling of losing control. We are so happy with the thought of freedom in making decisions that we are unable to understand its negative side, which sometimes leads us into making a decision that actually ends up being against our own best interest.
With too many choices comes overthinking and uncertainty
In a world full of choices, the possible results and outcomes of a certain choice can never be thoroughly evaluated or investigated. This is because the noise around us makes it impossible for our inner self to listen to our own inner voice. We encounter many people with different opinions and suggestions every day, and each one of them introduces to you yet another set of unlimited choices or decisions to make, your brain becomes paralyzed and — cannot cope with The Paradox of Choice
We no longer are be able to invision the future to deal with the uncertainty, which is the hardest part of decision making.
Decrease in Satisfaction
One of the most harmful effects of having too many choices is overthinking. When we are given several options, it becomes impossible for our minds to figure out the outcomes that each choice would or could bring. This feeling of not being able to comprehend gives rise to discomfort and anxiety. With discomfort, we start overthinking about the choices we are going to make. It is worth noticing here that the choices that were supposed to make us happy and satisfied exchange make us depressed and overthinkers.
It becomes very natural to overthink when making any kind of choice or decision that end up not bringing in the desired outcomes. This leads to disappointment and increases the level of dissatisfaction
Excessive choices affect our relationships business or personal
Too much choice is arguably a horrible thing anyway. While dating, people may fall into the trap of the ” paradox of choice,” which basically means that while we consider having multiple options as a good thing, but at the same time, it makes our decisions more challenging and mentally exhausting.
“We choose not to choose even when it goes against our best self-interests,” Dr. Iyengar says.
So How Do We Deal with The Paradox of Choice?
Sometimes it just starts with cantering yourself because no one has ever made a good decision when not in a state of mental clarity.
Then we need to start limiting our choices by staying true to yourself and your values, even if that meaning removing all the things or people that are unnecessary, life is a journey which at the end of the day is about us working towards creating a life that we love and feel fulfilled in, and the only to do that is by the daily choices and decisions we make every day to pave and build that path that leads us towards our destiny.
So disconnect, take a breath and try to listen to your inner voice and make decisions accordingly to what your gut tells you.
One of the lessons I learned this year is as an entrepreneur decision-making can at one point start to feel a bit overwhelming, especially with the limited resources and information we start out within the beginning, or the very lack of knowledge of whether what we are doing is going to work or not and exchange we find ourselves doing several different things that the same time and hoping to God one of them works but is that really working ? or is it exchange driving us to mental exhaustion and indecisiveness ?
This year I learned to remove the excess and limiting my options when trying to make a simple choice or a life-changing decision like for me deciding to switch to cybersecurity and sign up to cyberway finder for their three years training and in-company training program, which in exchange means that I have to limit my involvement with at She Leads Digital, for now, my point is letting yourself have fewer options to choose from even for a little while can help you make a better well-thought decision an reach your goal with your mental health intact!
Are you overwhelmed with the excess of choices we must make? Do you wish there were fewer choices or you happy with having multiple options available to you? And do you believe the Paradox of Choice is real? I would love to hear your thoughts on this!
