84 COSMOPOLITAN APRIL 2018 FOR MORE GREAT STORIES, VISIT COSMO.INLatte? Mocha? Regular manicure?
Gel manicure? If it feels like you’ve
got decision fatigue, Robyn Wilder
has a (definitive) solution.you, you, you
open to us than any generation
before. Do we want a latte or a
mocha? A family, a career—or both?
But here’s the thing: science
suggests that the process of selecting
options from too-wide a pool can
overload us, causing our decision-
making mechanisms to misfire.
Psychologists say we can then
become fixated on what we could
have had and, in some cases, lose
self-confidence and even tip over into
clinical depression.
And they don’t even have to be big,
life-altering decisions, they can be
about something as simple as jam.
“When I go grocery shopping,
I want to ultimately return home
with some groceries,” Sheena
Iyengar, a professor at Columbia
University, tells me. “I don’t
want to have to choose between
raspberry, cherry and cherry-
raspberry flavoured jams and end
up paralysed to such an extent thatN
ear my old office is a smal
café that serves delicious
sandwiches. Everyone I work
with raves about it. Each lunchtime,
they’d bustle back to the office
bearing heavy plastic containers
that filled the air with the aromas
of chicken and hummus. Then
they’d take a bite of whatever it was
and give huge quasi-erotic swoons.
Meanwhile, I’d be cradling my
daily Veggie Delight from Subway,
proclaiming them all pretentious.
Eventually, my curiosity got the
better of me, so one lunchtime I
ducked into the café to see what all
the fuss was about.
Immediately wished I hadn’t. The
wall behind the counter was a floor-
to-ceiling blackboard. Filling it, in the
world’s tiniest chalky handwriting,
was the menu, with 15 types of bread,
twice that number of sauces and
cheeses, and a multiple-choice salad-
vegetable-picking matrix. The coffeelist was, quite probably, written in
Klingon. Worse still, I was at the back
of a fast-moving queue full of people
who knew exactly what they wanted.
Time to make a decision.
But the more options I considered,
the more my brain curdled. By
the time I got to the counter, I’d
actually broken a sweat. I felt the
full weight of the menu before me
and the queue behind me, and still I
had no idea what to eat. In the end,
out of panic, I ordered a (ta dah!)
veggie club sandwich and slunk away
wishing I’d chosen anything else.
After that, I never went back to
the café.WHEN LESS IS MORE^
It seems rather churlish to complain
about too much choice—especially as
freedom and the right to choose are
liberties women have been striving
for since time immemorial. But the
fact is, we now have more optionsThe
Problem
With
Having
Too Many
Choices
Photograph:SHUTTERSTOCK.COM