How do I get better at / get over anxiety making small decisions?

An old English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, had this to say about making decisions. I paraphrase, from memory: If analyzing the choice between A and B tells you that one is remarkably better than the other, the decision is easy. If analyzing the choice between A and B tells you that one is not remarkably better than the other, the decision doesn’t much matter.

I do this too, but for both large and small decisions. For me, this is about anxiety and perfectionism. I went to therapy for it, and what has helped the most is forcing myself to make a decision and then reflecting on it. Where I got stuck before was in not learning from my experiences. So, for example, say I got stuck on buying the "perfect" pair of shoes, and was doing all kinds of research and agonizing over making the "right" choice and whether spending $60 on shoes was the right thing to do. In this case, my therapist had me order the pair of shoes I'd been agonizing over, which I'd been feeling terribly anxious about and was unable to do for like months, seriously. It turned out, in this case, that I hated the shoes. So, in my old model of thinking I'd made the "wrong" choice and was therefore a terrible human being. My fear of being "wrong" is what caused the analysis paralysis in the first place, since if you pair making the "wrong" choice with being a terrible human being at core then of course you'll never make a single choice ever. What my therapist has me do now is reflect back on my choices, and essentially desensitize me to the feelings I have when I make "wrong" choices. So, in the case of the shoes, I felt like shit about them, but it's not like the world ended, right? No one outside of myself thought me buying those shoes made me a horrible person, and after time, neither did I. By making a series of choices when I wasn't 100% sure they were right and reflecting back on the non-catastrophic consequences of those small choices, I was able to desensitize myself to the anxiety I felt when making decisions. I was able to harness a skill that seems fairly obvious, but I didn't have, which was to say "well, in the past when I've tried to decide what kind of shoes to buy/lunch to have/movie to watch, I've made a choice I've been happy with 80% of the time and 20% of the time it wasn't so great." So this kind of thinking helps me realize that the odds are that I'll made a choice I'm mostly happy with, and if I don't, nothing catastrophic has resulted from that "wrong" choice in the past and so likely won't in the future either. In the new model of thinking I'm trying to cultivate, 80% satisfaction is what I'm after, not 100% perfection. I think coping with anxiety is all about building up the confidence that, whatever happens, you can deal with it. So just choose, and then reflect back on the results of that choice and use that information to inform future decisions. You might also benefit from reading about the http://www.gretchenrubin.com/happiness_project/2006/06/are_you_a_satis/ difference.

Someone told me that the root "-cide" in "decide" means "to kill" - like "homicide," etc. That's why decisions are so hard - you have to "kill off" your other options. Somehow it makes me feel better understanding why making decisions is so hard - it feels like decisions are murder!

The big decisions in life are: who to marry, where to live, what job to do. Those are the ones that deeply and noticeably impact your life. This is true, although you often learn a lot about what you do and don't want from having had experience of jobs, relationships etc that are not necessarily ideal for you in the long term, so even these are not the be-all and end-all. I have the same problem to varying degrees, depending on how much my anxiety and OCD are flaring up, and would definitely agree with the value of increasing your anxiety management skills, whether that is via therapy, meditation, exercise or even medication (I have had success with all of these). However, to answer your question a bit more specificially, something that really helped me with this was reading the decision-making chapter of Susan Jeffers' book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345487427/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. I'd recommend the whole book actually, but that specific chapter seems to be summarised quite well in http://www.judahbuddha.com/2009/03/decision-making-no-win-or-no-lose.html. Basically, it's a movement away from the 'right or wrong' mindset that often leads to paralysis, and towards the idea that whichever way you go with a decision, you will be walking down a route that will undoubtedly have both positives and negatives, but will always have new things for you to discover, and new opportunities to learn and grow. For me, that reframing really helped to take the pressure off a bit and lower the stakes of decision making. Hope it helps in some way for you too!

I was going to say it sounds like anxiety. Have you discussed it with a doctor? Therapy and drugs can help. Tell your doctor, "this anxiety is getting worse and adversely impacting my life. It makes me unhappy."

This is definitely anxiety/analysis-paralysis. I get it so badly! One thing that's helped me is to be super proud of myself for making decisions. Sometimes I write it down, or telling someone I'm close to who knows that it's hard for me. Recently I had to buy a new pillow and was totally overwhelmed at Bed Bath and Beyond. When I was done I called my friend and told her about it and she congratulated me! I have this thing where I get weirdly self-judgy about what decision I make. Like "it's unadventurous to eat lunch at the same place all the time so I shouldn't go to the place downstairs" - even though I like that place and they're nice and the service is good. So finally I was just like "fuck it, I'm going there if I feel like it" and stopped worrying about it. Hell, I often get the same damn sandwich there, but who cares? mudpuppie is right about acknowledging your anxiety. It feels instantly better to recognize that something is your anxiety talking.

I was also going to suggest that this might be a form of OCD or anxiety. Out of curiosity, what would happen if you released responsibility for these decisions with, say, a couple of sets of dice or a quarter and flipped or rolled to make minor decisions like where to eat lunch or which grocery store to go to, etc?

Another thing you could try is making a bunch of your small decisions ahead of time. You probably have 7 lunches every week, 5 at work and 2 at home. If you pre-plan even 4 of your work lunches (maybe even by making a big batch of chili or burritos on the weekend and sticking stuff in the freezer), that's 4 decisions you won't have to make later. I don't have a lot of analysis paralysis, thank goodness, but still, there are SO MANY decisions to make every day. Especially in areas where I'm trying to be healthier (eat better, exercise more), I find that making my decisions ahead of time saves me aggravation and makes it easier to act in accord with my intentions.

I ask myself Will this matter in 5 minutes? 5 hours? 5 days? 5 months? 5 years? 5 lifetimes? Then I spend as much time deciding as how far-reaching this decision is. The big decisions in life are: who to marry, where to live, what job to do. Those are the ones that deeply and noticeably impact your life.