When Choice Doesn’t Liberate Us — It Paralyzes Us

You open a food delivery app. 127 restaurants appear on your screen. Then you dive into just one menu — 46 kinds of sushi. You scroll, scroll, scroll… and finally close the app still hungry. Sound familiar? Or consider this scenario: you’re buying jeans. The store has 84 distinct models. By the seventh pair you’ve tried on, you can’t even remember what the first ones looked like, and you leave empty-handed thinking “what if there’s a better pair somewhere else?”

This isn’t because you’re indecisive or lacking in willpower. This is psychology doing its thing, and it has a precise name — the paradox of choice.

The term and the whole concept were thoroughly unpacked in 2004 by American psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. The book became a modern classic, and his TED talk on the subject has been viewed over 20 million times. For good reason.

The Jam Experiment That Blew Everyone’s Mind

In the year 2000, Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar and her colleague Mark Lepper set up a tasting table in an upscale California grocery store to test how people react to variety.

• Day one: They displayed 24 jam flavors. 60% of shoppers stopped to look, but only 3% actually bought a jar.
• Day two: They displayed only 6 flavors. 40% stopped to look, but 30% bought a jar.

That represents ten times more purchases when the choice was limited. The study (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) has been replicated dozens of times — with chocolates, pens, essay topics for students, and even speed-dating events. The result is almost always the same: too many options → we either don’t choose at all, or we do choose and then suffer for it.

Why Choosing Hurts So Much

According to Schwartz, three specific psychological mechanisms kick in when we face an abundance of options:

• Cognitive overload: The human brain has limited working memory and attention span. When you have to compare dozens of options across dozens of variable criteria, it simply freezes. This leads to decision fatigue. By evening, we are often so drained from hundreds of small, trivial choices that we have absolutely nothing left for the big, important ones.
• Anticipated regret: Even before we make a choice, we are already imagining how we might regret it later. “What if that other phone was better? What if someone else would have been the love of my life?” This constant internal narrative of “what if…” poisons the joy of whatever we did actually pick.
• Opportunity costs: Every time we say “yes” to one thing, we automatically say “no” to everything else. The more alternatives there are, the bigger the perceived loss feels. As Schwartz vividly writes: “We mourn not only what we didn’t get, but everything we could have had.”

There Are Two Types of People (and you’re definitely one of them)

Schwartz distinguishes between two primary decision-making styles. Identifying which one you are can be a massive step toward mental peace.

• Maximizers: These are people who must find the absolute best option. They read every single review, compare complex spreadsheets, and will return purchases if they find the exact same item for 2% cheaper somewhere else.
• Satisficers: (A term combined from “satisfy” + “suffice”) These are people who look for something that is “good enough” and stop the search the moment they find it.

Research consistently shows that while maximizers objectively get slightly better outcomes (a bit higher salary, a slightly better car), subjectively they are much less happy, more anxious, and experience regret far more often. In other words, we literally pay with our mental health for the “perfect” choice.

Where We Feel It Most Today

The modern world is deliberately built to give us the illusion of infinite choice. It is not an accident — companies make money precisely from our indecision (think of all those “unlimited” subscription plans). We feel it in:

• Dating apps: Hundreds of profiles lead to the permanent feeling that “someone better is just one swipe away,” leading to chronic dissatisfaction.
• Career paths: The visibility of hundreds of job offers and online courses creates a paralyzing fear of making the “wrong” career move.
• Social Media: On platforms like Instagram, we scroll through other people’s curated, perfect lives and feel like our own choices aren't good enough by comparison.

What Actually Helps

Schwartz and other psychologists offer simple but powerful practices to combat this paralysis:

1. Deliberately limit your options. Artificial restrictions create freedom. Make a shopping list and allow yourself only one impulse buy.
2. Set hard deadlines. Don't let research drag on forever. Tell yourself: “I’m choosing a hotel by 7 p.m. tonight, period.”
3. Practice gratitude for what you chose. After buying something, write down three things you genuinely like about it rather than focusing on flaws.
4. Train yourself to be a satisficer. Ask: “Does this meet my basic criteria?” If the answer is yes — take it and move on with your life.
5. The "No-Choice" Day. Once a week, have a day where you minimize decision-making — order the same coffee, watch the same show, wear your favorite jeans.

People who actively use these strategies show significantly lower anxiety and higher life satisfaction (Schwartz et al., 2002).

I’ll finish not with advice, but with an observation

The happiest people I know (and those whom psychologists have studied) live by one quiet principle: “This is enough for me.”

They don’t chase perfection. They take what works and pour the freed-up energy into what really matters — relationships, creativity, rest, and meaning. Maybe real freedom isn’t having everything. Maybe it’s being able to fully enjoy what you already chose.

Next time you’re stuck choosing between 50 shades of gray T-shirt — just grab the first one that more or less fits. Life will go on. And it will feel a little lighter.

Sources & Further Reading

• Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Harper Perennial.
• Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing Versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.