decisions, decisions
The average Brit spends 18 hours and 53 minutes deciding what colour to paint a room; Stylist’s Meena Alexander took a year and a half. Here, she seeks a cure to her chronic indecision
“Calamine or Cinder Rose? A more neutral pink will go with everything, but then the brighter one is more cheerful. No, neutral is better, I don’t want it to be too much. Although this is my bedroom, I should probably choose a colour that sparks joy, right? What do you think?” The shop assistant’s patient smile is starting to stiffen. “It’s up to you!” she says, through gritted teeth. These words make my blood run cold, because I’ve lost count of how many trips I’ve made to Farrow & Ball, resolved to finally choose a paint colour. These days even the most pleasant (and let’s be honest, trivial) decision feels like it’s landing on top of a mental pile that’s close to spilling over. I have reached Peak Decision. No further questions please. It’s not just me, the indecision epidemic is everywhere I turn. In my WhatsApp group chats, where a simple question like, ‘Where shall we meet up?’ spawns an endless thread of deliberations. In my local coffee shop, where I witnessed a woman fly off the handle because the barista asked her which “blend” she wanted. In conversations with my friends, where we nurse negronis and circle around the big stuffquantum physics, macro questions like those are beyond the realm of comprehension. It’s clearly a symptom of living in uncertain times, kicked off by the pandemic when we were forced to make high-stakes choices every day: mask or no mask, visit family or stay put, head into the office or work from home. “It was a very tough time, and in some ways our brains are still stuck there,” says Dr Lucy Maddox, a clinical psychologist and the author of . “We became hypervigilant, our brains constantly scanning for dangers that seemed to come out of nowhere, and it takes time to come down from that. It’s very hard to make decisions when you’re in a state of threat.” Months later, and I feel like the metaphorical deer in the headlights, frozen in fear by even the smallest decisions and completely overwhelmed by the big ones. It’s this feeling of stuckness (and my glaring white walls) that made me want to dig deeper, to find out how we can reclaim our decision-making powers. From the tough love of therapists to the methods of heart surgeons, here’s what I learnt.
