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Overcoming Decision Anxiety
I get pretty anxious about open-ended decisions. I often spend an unacceptable amount of time agonizing over things like what design options to get on a custom suit, or what kind of job I want to pursue, or what apartment I want to live in. Some of these decisions are obviously important ones, with implications for my future happiness. However, in general my sense of anxiety is poorly calibrated with the importance of the decision. This makes life harder than it has to be, and lowers my productivity.
I moved apartments recently, and I decided that this would be a good time to address my anxiety about open-ended decisions. My hope is to present some ideas that will be helpful for others with similar anxieties, or to stimulate helpful discussion.
Solutions
Exposure therapy
One promising way of dealing with decision anxiety is to practice making decisions without worrying about them quite so much. Match your clothes together in a new way, even if you're not 100% sure that you like the resulting outfit. Buy a new set of headphones, even if it isn't the “perfect choice.” Aim for good enough. Remind yourself that life will be okay if your clothes are slightly mismatched for one day.
This is basically exposure therapy – exposing oneself to a slightly aversive stimulus while remaining calm about it. Doing something you're (mildly) afraid to do can have a tremendously positive impact when you try it and realize that it wasn't all that bad. Of course, you can always start small and build up to bolder activities as your anxieties diminish.
For the past several months, I had been practicing this with small decisions. With the move approaching in July, I needed some more tricks for dealing with a bigger, more important decision.
Reasoning with yourself
It helps to think up reasons why your anxieties aren't justified. As in actual, honest-to-goodness reasons that you think are true. Check out this conversation between my System 1 and System 2 that happened just after my roommates and I made a decision on an apartment:
System 1: Oh man, this neighborhood [the old neighborhood] is such a great place to go for walks. It's so scenic and calm. I'm going to miss that. The new neighborhood isn't as pretty.
System 2: Well that's true, but how many walks did we actually take in five years living in the old neighborhood? If I recall correctly, we didn't even take two per year.
System 1: Well, yeah... but...
System 2: So maybe “how good the neighborhood is for taking walks” isn't actually that important to us. At least not to the extent that you're feeling. There were things that we really liked about our old living situation, but taking walks really wasn't one of them.
System 1: Yeah, you may be right...
Of course, this “conversation” took place after the decision had already been made. But making a difficult decision often entails second-guessing oneself, and this too can be a source of great anxiety. As in the above, I find that poking holes in my own anxieties really makes me feel better. I do this by being a good skeptic and turning on my critical thinking skills – only instead of, say, debunking an article on pseudoscience, I'm debunking my own worries about how bad things are going to be. This helps me remain calm.
Re-calibration
The last piece of this process is something that should help when making future decisions. I reasoned that if my System 1 feels anxiety about things that aren't very important – if it is, as I said, poorly calibrated – then I perhaps I can re-calibrate it.
Before moving apartments, I decided to make predictions about what aspects of the new living situation would affect my happiness. “How good the neighborhood is for walks” may not be important to me, but surely there are some factors that are important. So I wrote down things that I thought would be good and bad about the new place. I also rated them on how good or bad I thought they would be.
In several months, I plan to go back over that list and compare my predicted feelings to my actual feelings. What was I right about? This will hopefully give my System 1 a strong impetus to re-calibrate, and only feel anxious about aspects of a decision that are strongly correlated with my future happiness.
Future Benefits
I think we each carry in our heads a model of what is possible for us to achieve, and anxiety about the choices we make limits how bold we can be in trying new things. As a result, I think that my attempts to feel less anxiety about decisions will be very valuable to me, and allow me to do things that I couldn't do before. At the same time, I expect that making decisions of all kinds will be a quicker and more pleasant process, which is a great outcome in and of itself.
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Does cognitive therapy encourage bias?
"Cognitive behavioral therapy" (CBT) is a catch-all term for a variety of therapeutic practices and theories. Among other things, it aims to teach patients to modify their own beliefs. The rationale seems to be this:
(1) Affect, behavior, and cognition are interrelated such that changes in one of the three will lead to changes in the other two.
(2) Affective problems, such as depression, can thus be addressed in a roundabout fashion: modifying the beliefs from which the undesired feelings stem.
So far, so good. And how does one modify destructive beliefs? CBT offers many techniques.
Alas, included among them seems to be motivated skepticism. For example, consider a depressed college student. She and her therapist decide that one of her bad beliefs is "I'm inadequate." They want to replace that bad one with a more positive one, namely, "I'm adequate in most ways (but I'm only human, too)." Their method is to do a worksheet comparing evidence for and against the old, negative belief. Listen to their dialog:
[Therapist]: What evidence do you have that you're inadequate?
[Patient]: Well, I didn't understand a concept my economics professor presented in class today.
T: Okay, write that down on the right side, then put a big "BUT" next to it...Now, let's see if there could be another explanation for why you might not have understood the concept other than that you're inadequate.
P: Well, it was the first time she talked about it. And it wasn't in the readings.
Thus the bad belief is treated with suspicion. What's wrong with that? Well, see what they do about evidence against her inadequacy:
T: Okay, let's try the left side now. What evidence do you have from today that you are adequate at many things? I'll warn you, this can be hard if your screen is operating.
P: Well, I worked on my literature paper.
T: Good. Write that down. What else?
(pp. 179-180; ellipsis and emphasis both in the original)
When they encounter evidence for the patient's bad belief, they investigate further, looking for ways to avoid inferring that she is inadequate. However, when they find evidence against the bad belief, they just chalk it up.
This is not how one should approach evidence...assuming one wants correct beliefs.
So why does Beck advocate this approach? Here are some possible reasons.
A. If beliefs are keeping you depressed, maybe you should fight them even at the cost of a little correctness (and of the increased habituation to motivated cognition).
B. Depressed patients are already predisposed to find the downside of any given event. They don't need help doubting themselves. Therefore, therapists' encouraging them to seek alternative explanations for negative events doesn't skew their beliefs. On the contrary, it helps to bring the depressed patients' beliefs back into correspondence with reality.
C. Strictly speaking, this motivated cognition does not lead to false beliefs because beliefs of the form "I'm inadequate," along with its more helpful replacement, are not truth-apt. They can't be true or false. After all, what experiences do they induce believers to anticipate? (If this were the rationale, then what would the sense of the term "evidence" be in this context?)
What do you guys think? Is this common to other CBT authors as well? I've only read two other books in this vein (Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper's A Guide to Rational Living and Jacqueline Persons' Cognitive Therapy in Practice: A Case Formulation Approach) and I can't recall either one explicitly doing this, but I may have missed it. I do remember that Ellis and Harper seemed to conflate instrumental and epistemic rationality.
Edit: Thanks a lot to Vaniver for the help on link formatting.
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