I can’t make a decision: it isn’t information you’re missing

Because deciding requires accepting a risk, and the mind looks instead for an option that carries none. As long as that option is awaited, no new piece of information unlocks anything: what is missing is not one more fact, it is permission to be wrong.

The psychology resources published by the Université de Sherbrooke describe three grounds where this gets stuck. Perfectionism, where an error is experienced as a failing. Fragile self-esteem, where a bad choice seems to call the whole person into question. And poor tolerance of uncertainty, which pushes you to imagine the worst of every branch before picking one.

Doubt itself is not the problem. Hesitating in front of a choice that matters means you have understood what is at stake, and that hesitation even helps confirm what you end up keeping. The trouble starts later, at the point where the review loops without producing anything new. The mind circles instead of thinking (in French), and the three beliefs below are what keep it there.

A team led by Barry Schwartz separated two ways of choosing in 2002. The first group looks for the best option available and stops only once sure it has been found. The second stops as soon as an option meets their criteria, without asking whether something better exists elsewhere.

The result does not match the effort. People who chase the optimal option report less satisfaction, less optimism and more regret than those who stop at good enough. They compare themselves to others more often, and keep thinking about the options they did not take for longer.

The mechanism needs no statistics. Anyone hunting for the best choice has to inspect the options they are setting aside in order to know they found it. They walk away with a precise inventory of everything they did not take, and that inventory is what makes the regret. The other person walks away with an option that works, and nothing else.

One caveat, because it matters: this research measures an association between a way of choosing and a level of satisfaction, not a causal relationship. It does not say that giving up maximising will make anyone happier. It says the extended review does not buy the peace of mind you expect from it.

In 2013, the economist Steven Levitt put a website online where anyone could submit a decision they were stuck on, then flip a virtual coin. Heads, you change. Tails, you leave things as they are. More than twenty thousand people took part, on questions that were anything but trivial: quitting, breaking up, going back to study.

Two months later, then six months later, Levitt contacted them again. The people whose coin had told them to change did change more often, and six months later reported being more satisfied with their choice and happier than those whose coin had told them to keep things as they were. The gap showed up on the big decisions, the life-altering ones, and not on the small ones. His conclusion fits in one line: faced with choices that commit them, people are on average too cautious.

This work has its limits, and they are worth stating. Participants signed up on their own, so they were already leaning towards change. Happiness was self-reported. And nobody was bound to follow the coin. What the experiment establishes is therefore not that you should change, but something more useful: staying put is not the neutral option you think you are choosing. It carries its own cost, it simply never presents itself as a decision.

Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert tested that intuition the same year. Participants chose a photograph to take home; some were told the choice was final, the others that they could swap it later.

The ones who could still change their minds ended up liking the photo they had taken less. And the detail that makes the study worth reading comes next: asked in advance, participants predicted the opposite, and overwhelmingly preferred to keep the option of swapping.

The reason is the same as for the optimal option. For as long as reversal stays possible, the comparison with what you did not take stays alive, and the mind keeps building a case that is already closed. Deciding, in the full sense, means closing that case. It is also part of what letting go actually means: not giving up on what matters, but ending a deliberation that nothing will move any further.

Three moves shift more than lengthening the list.

The first is writing your criteria before you look at the options, not the other way round. A list of pros and cons drawn up afterwards lets itself be rewritten by the option you already prefer; criteria set in advance do cut. Two or three are enough, phrased as what you are not willing to give up.

The second is setting a deadline, with a date and a time. It serves less to speed things up than to make visible the moment when the review stops adding anything. After that, you are not thinking any more. The following rounds replay the same arguments at the same cost in attention.

The third is lowering the noise before deciding, not during. A decision made inside a saturated mind mostly reflects the saturation. This is where practice earns its place, and the benefit is documented: four studies by Hafenbrack, Kinias and Barsade, three of them experiments, measured that a meditation induction reduced the weight of already-sunk costs in a choice. The authors identify two mechanisms, attention less caught up in past and future, and less negative affect in the moment. The arguments stay the same; what changes is that they stop shouting. The lake visualisation (in French) suits that moment well, and learning to watch a thought without arguing with it is what makes the drop last beyond the session.

Meditating does not make the right option appear. A regular practice does not make the consequences of a choice any less real either, and no session will stand in for actually deciding. What it reduces is the share of the deliberation taken up by worry and by the need to control everything before moving. The rest of the work takes information, time, and sometimes someone to talk to.

There are also cases where this reading does not apply. When indecision generalises and ends up touching every kind of decision, from the simplest to the most complex, the Université de Sherbrooke calls it chronic indecision, and it is no longer a question of method. The same goes if the choice comes with anxiety that gets in the way of working, studying or sleeping, or if someone else ends up deciding for you because you never did. A psychologist or a careers adviser is the useful person to talk to then, and the rest can wait.