Analysis Paralysis in ADHD: When You Cannot Decide

The other day I was going to buy a T-shirt. Forty minutes later I was still wandering between tabs, I had three of them open side by side, I was reading the reviews of one. In the end I bought none of them, and when I closed the computer I felt as tired as if I had worked a full day.

This is one of my most familiar loops, and for a long time I took it for laziness. Yet in those forty minutes I had worked without stopping. It was just that nothing came out of it.

This is called analysis paralysis, and there is a fairly concrete explanation of why it shows up so often in ADHD.

Why deciding is expensive

Making a choice involves much more work than it seems. You have to hold the options in mind at the same time and compare them, and this is an operation that leans directly on working memory. In ADHD this area works with more limits (Kofler et al., 2010).

With three options the comparison is manageable. With fifteen options it cannot be held in mind, and the comparison starts from the beginning every time. The source of the tiredness is this repetition: you do the same job twenty times and make progress in none of them.

On top of this comes the abundance of options itself. The classic study by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) shows that the more options there are, the lower the rate of deciding. This is so for everyone; in ADHD it is experienced more sharply.

The third layer is the past. Someone who has lived through "I chose wrong again" for years puts an extra load on every choice. In me it works like this: when I decide, what I am really weighing is not the T-shirt but whether I can trust my own judgment.

Being unable to decide looks like a matter of indecision. In fact it is loading an unlimited list into a limited memory.

Where it shows up

Analysis paralysis shows up most in small decisions, and that is the strange part. Sometimes I can make big decisions within minutes; the small ones hold me for hours.

• Shopping. Anywhere the comparable options are endless.
• The next job on the to-do list. All of them look at you at once, and when you cannot decide which comes first, none of them starts.
• Choosing tools and apps. Which note app, which calendar, which method. This is also the engine of the loop I described in the article on app hunting.
• Writing a message. Looking for the best form of a short reply ends up with the reply never being sent.
• What to cook. A problem asked once a day and solved from scratch every time.

Steel's (2007) meta-analysis on procrastination shows that procrastination is related to how aversive and how ambiguous a task is. That is exactly why jobs that require decisions are among the most put off: their ambiguity starts before the job itself.

Procrastination or analysis paralysis

From the outside the two look the same but inside they work differently, and telling them apart helps.

In procrastination the job is clear and starting is hard. In analysis paralysis even the job is not clear; you cannot decide which job to do. In the first, lowering the threshold works; in the second there is not yet a "job" whose threshold could be lowered.

The distinguishing question I ask myself is this: if I knew what to do right now, would I do it? If the answer is yes, the matter is the decision. If the answer is no, the matter is starting. I separated all the types of procrastination in the article on types of procrastination.

Rules that speed up choosing

Cut it to three. Whatever happens, limit the comparison to three options. Going from fifteen to three does not lower the quality of the choice; it raises the chance of being able to choose.

Determine the type of decision. There are two types of decision: reversible and irreversible. A T-shirt is reversible, a house is not. The time given to reversible decisions should not exceed five minutes. This distinction alone removed most of my daily decisions.

Tie it to time. Time the decision like the job itself: "I will look for ten minutes, then I will choose." A timer takes the decision out of being an endless field.

Choose the good enough one. Looking for the best means the comparison never ends. Choosing what is sufficient is a defensible strategy. In the glossary under good enough.

Write the criteria in advance. Before you start looking, set two criteria: a price limit and a must-have. When criteria are set afterwards, every new option produces its own criterion and the list never closes.

A coin toss is a method too. If you are stuck between two options, toss. What matters is not the result but noticing which one you wanted to come up as you toss. Most of the time you already know the answer.

Make recurring decisions once. You do not need to decide again every day what you will wear, what you will eat, when you will walk. A decision made once and fixed leaves capacity for the rest of the day.

The part that comes after the decision

After you decide there is a second trap: reviewing the decision again and again. Checking whether there is something better than what you took means going on paying the price of the decision after it has been made.

The rule that works is this: once the decision is made, the research is closed. Setting this rule in advance makes it easier to apply, because the decision you have to make at that moment is no longer "I will not look" but "I was not going to look anyway."

Why deciding for someone else is easy

There is a strange thing I noticed: when a friend asks me about the same T-shirt, I answer in three seconds. On my own decision I freeze for forty minutes.

The difference is not information. When deciding for someone else the criteria narrow, the options shrink, and the cost of being wrong does not rest on me. In my own decision every option turns into a test of identity: if I choose right I am a sensible person, if I choose wrong I have made the same mistake again.

Knowing this helps, because it becomes a usable trick. Where I cannot decide I ask myself: if someone asked me this, what would I say? The answer that comes out is often ready and often good enough.

A common mistake

The mistake I made most often was trying to solve analysis paralysis by building a better system. Making a comparison table, scoring the criteria, preparing a spreadsheet. This sounds reasonable and does the opposite: it enlarges the decision itself, and even creates a new job that postpones making the decision.

The second mistake is wanting every decision to be the best decision. Underneath this there is often perfectionism, and perfectionism disguises itself here as productivity.

When it points to something else

Not being able to decide is also closely related to anxiety. If there are days of regret after a decision, constant seeking of reassurance or catastrophic scenarios, the picture may not be explained by ADHD alone. The same goes for periods when no option feels good and everything looks meaningless.

The article on ADHD and anxiety covers this overlap separately. The decision to assess is a specialist's job, and this distinction is not something that can be made on your own.

Back to the forty-minute T-shirt

That day, when I closed the computer, I was angry with myself. Now I am not, because I know what happened: for forty minutes I had been trying to fit fifteen options into a three-digit memory.

The only thing I changed was making the moment of deciding smaller. Now before I start shopping I write down my price limit, and after three options I stop looking. I know that the things I choose are not the best. In exchange I got those forty minutes back, and as far as I am concerned the trade is not bad.