I don’t know about you, but I’ve found there are two main character types. When presented with a box of chocolates do you just dive in or must you head to the entire choc box menu and give thoughtful consideration to your options. Ellen Langer has been teaching her decision-making course for more than 40 years. “Almost all the decisions we make are on the trivial side and we can change our minds down the road,” says Ellen Langer.
Her new book is worth the read: The Mindful Body by Ellen Langer.
In a world that presents us with endless possibilities, perhaps it’s not surprising that we find it ever harder to make decisions. A survey last year found that people made 122 informed choices a day, which takes about three hours. That’s an awful lot of agonising, googling and making of lists.
However, virtually everything we think we know about how to make a good decision is wrong — especially those lists, according to the legendary Harvard professor of psychology Ellen Langer, who has been teaching her decision-making course for more than 40 years. And given that making decisions can be highly stressful — and that stress is at the root of most illness, or so she argues in her new book — it pays to learn to do it better.
Langer, 76, is famous for her trailblazing laboratory studies in mind-body connection (she proved that nursing home residents given houseplants to look after lived longer, and that men in their seventies who spent a week living as their fiftysomething selves ended up more supple, stronger and with better sight). She is credited in academic circles as the “mother of mindfulness” for her pioneering research in the 1970s and 1980s, so it’s not surprising that she advocates decision-making with a lighter touch.
So where do we go wrong? “Where do I start?” Langer says in her husky New York drawl. “For one thing, there’s a belief now that the more information you gather the better the resulting decision will be, but when do you stop? There’s no natural end point — you say I’ll read just one more article, ask one more friend. That’s what drives you crazy with stress. But there’s no data that I know that shows more information is better.”
This eternal quest for information comes from the 1990s model of decision-making, she explains, which assumed successful decisions were made by weighing up the costs and benefits of each alternative. There are several problems with this approach, she argues in her book The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Lasting Health — not least that it assumes there’s a “right” decision to be made and all the lists of pros and cons will somehow lead you there.
Instead, it can result in “analysis paralysis” and crippling anxiety because it uses up working memory, which isn’t limitless. Experiments in the 1980s and 1990s found that taking in more information and considering more options resulted in a decrease in happiness, life satisfaction and optimism, and correlated with an increase in depression and regret.
“Imagine receiving a tax refund of £3,000,” Langer says. “What do you do with the money? Put it all in the bank? Buy stocks and if so, which ones? Put some of it in the bank and invest the rest? And if so, how much for each? Spend some of the money and put the rest in the bank, but spend it on what, and set aside how much? And so on and so on. Not only is the list of options virtually endless, the pros and cons of any of the alternatives are also endless.”
And those pros and cons we dutifully write down? They’re useless, she argues, because “prediction is an illusion”. Not only are we unable to tell the future, but any pro could equally be seen as a con, depending on your viewpoint. We often rig the whole thing anyway — as she did when trying to decide between universities in New York and Pittsburgh for her first teaching job in 1974. “I listed the advantages and disadvantages of each and New York kept coming up short. But it really appealed to me in a personal way so I kept recalibrating my lists to make it come out top.”
To test her theory that there had to be less stressful ways to make decisions, she asked her students to spend a week saying yes to all requests, apart from dangerous ones, to remove the need for decision-making. “The majority reported that the week had gone well — they didn’t struggle with any decision and there was no stress.” Another year, she told students to make all their decisions in a completely arbitrary way. “It could be the first alternative to come to mind or the third — it didn’t matter, as long as they applied it the same way each time. They also reported their week went well, essentially because I gave them permission not to be stressed.”
You have to feel sorry for the next year’s students, who were instructed to turn every tiny task into a decision to be made — not just “Which shoes should I wear?” but “Should I put on shoes?” and “When should I put my shoes on?”. Were they driven to distraction? Not a bit of it — even they reported less stress and thought their week was kind of fun. Why? “When you’re making lots of decisions, you feel more comfortable because it frees you to make some ‘wrong’ ones,” she explains. “If there are only ten questions in a multiple-choice exam you’re under more pressure to get each one right than when there are 100.”
None of those experiments represents a practical way to make better decisions, she admits. Instead, her big idea is to put your effort into making your choice work out well rather than agonising about the decision itself. “My research suggests taking a limited amount of information and choosing an option. Then, rather than worry about whether the decision was right, try to make it work. In other words, don’t try to make the right decision, make the decision right. You’re looking at any advantages that accrue from whatever happens, and then playing it as the ‘right decision’.”
As an illustration she cites moving house. Which neighbourhoods should you consider? Should you go for a smaller house in a “better” area or a bigger one where the schools aren’t so good or it will take you longer to get to work? In which area will house prices rise most? You’ve always wanted to be near the river, but does climate change make that a bad option?
“The questions are almost endless, and the things that go together to produce success or the absence thereof are indeterminate. There are so many of them, and things change in a split second — think about the film Sliding Doors. Everything you consider an advantage or disadvantage cuts both ways: you want to live near a school but will you still want that when the kids have left home?”
She suggests taking in a limited amount of information, plumping for a choice then making the decision “right” by building investments in your new neighbourhood: knocking on neighbours’ doors, making friends and signing your children up for activities.
Given how much time Langer has spent considering decisions, she must make pretty good ones? “Actually, I will spend for ever choosing between a Milky Way and a Snickers bar,” she admits. “I often solve the problem by just buying both. Although of course you then have to decide which to eat first.
“Interestingly, if I’m buying a car or a house it will take me less time to decide. Why? Because then I really know that agonising makes no difference — that I can’t know everything, that there is no right decision, that I can make my decision the right one.”
There’s a “lightness” to her approach, and this is influenced by her work on mindfulness, which she has been exploring in research for more than 50 years. By mindfulness she doesn’t mean meditation, but actively noticing “new things about the things you thought you knew”, which makes you more open to possibilities and alternative viewpoints.
So can you make a mindful decision? Yes, but the real mindfulness is in realising that options aren’t inherently good or bad, and there are multiple perspectives, she maintains.
“If you and I go out to lunch and it’s wonderful — yay, we have a great time. If we go out to lunch and it’s terrible, I won’t eat as much and that will be better for my waistline — yay. My whole life is ‘yay’, and everyone’s can be too. The more mindful you are, the more choices you have over how to interpret things.
“The way I live my life is that I ‘fall up’. If you hit my car with yours, I’ll get that dent fixed along with something else on the car so in the end it was a good thing it happened because now my car is in better shape.”
If your decision doesn’t quite turn out the way you’d thought, find the advantage in it, she advises. “We’ve all had the experience of making a decision yet [not being] able to get the thing we wanted, but discovering that the thing we didn’t think we wanted we loved and everything worked out really well.
“Almost all the decisions we make are on the trivial side, and we can change our minds down the road. Take a step back — is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?”
Regrets are pointless — and mindless, she maintains. “A big mistake people make is to think they should have chosen an alternative, but that might have been worse. There’s no way of knowing because we only live one life.”
Does she really never have regrets? This is someone who decided to run away and get married in secret at the age of 16. “No, why should I regret it? It has made a great story for my book, and my life turned out just fine.
“Everything you’ve done in the course of your life has led you to be who you are at the moment. It’s hard to say that wasn’t an important part. And because I was married and divorced early it gave me freedom from those constant questions in your twenties: ‘When are you getting married?’ ”
That’s “falling up”, right there.