فصل چهاردهم

chapter-14

indecision

After I left Cosmo, and just as I launched head-long into my protracted Mid-thirties Meltdown, I suddenly had time to do what I’d seen other people doing in cafés at 11am when I was darting across town to client meetings, stressed and pre­­occupied. So in that suspended period where I was in denial about my disease and avoiding doctors, I set about spending each morning sitting in a café at inappropriate times doing the tabloid cryptic crossword and reading back issues of The New Yorker. This was the grand idea.

I’d set off at the languid hour of 10.30am from my flat in Bondi. But something would grip me as I approached the beachside café strip. Which café should I go to? I couldn’t decide. There were too many choices. How should I decide? What was the best choice? The familiar momentum of thoughts would build. I’d do pros and cons lists for every option, then backtrack to try to work out what my gut felt. Then enter an adjacent dialogue as to the appropriate interplay between gut and head in making a decision. Then I’d become suddenly very anxious that I should be able to make such a simple decision with no fuss. Everyone else can. Then all of it would be overlaid with a hyper-awareness of how First World-y all this was. Yeah, yeah, the starving kids in Africa again. This would all cluster and fester in my head and fast become a throbbing panic. I’d stop dead in my tracks, unable to move.

I tried to make it to a café on about a dozen occasions. But I’d wind up sinking to the gutter in a truly awful state of analy­sis paralysis.

On two or three occasions I managed to get myself seated at a café. It took playing fate games to achieve this. If it’s an even-numbered time on the clock as I walk past the café on the corner, that’s where I’ll sit down. If not I move on down the strip. But I’d stall again. Long black or cappuccino? How do you decide such things? How do you have a preference? How do people know they like chocolate over vanilla? I just didn’t know. I write this truly hoping you know what I mean and that you’ve had a similarly ludicrous decision-making experience.

My publisher contributes this in her comments in the first draft: ‘I remember a woman telling me about when she came back from being an aid worker in Africa. Emotionally, she’d held it together while away, but broke down in the undies section of David Jones deciding between boy cut and bikini.’ I’ve done the same in toothpaste aisles in supermarkets. Spearmint or teeth whitening? I read that Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, does exactly the same, despite being an expert on how to make decisions. So I phoned him immedi­ately to find out why such banal decisions stall the anxious. He tells me it’s because we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking they’re important decisions. ‘Call it the drug store heuristic: We automatically think if there are lots of options presented that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t.’ The guy landed in trouble for fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan (of all people!) and misquoting others in his books, but on this matter his thinking is backed by a number of reputable studies. The most famous was conducted by Sheena Iyengar, a blind researcher whose Art of Choosing left me obsessed with the topic. She conducted studies in supermarkets with jam sampling displays and found that consumers presented with too many options (twenty-four jam varieties) became paralysed by the choice and failed to purchase; consumers faced with just six were ten times as likely to buy one.

Of course modern life is one big cluttered drug store shelf. Choice is sold to us as providing freedom. It empowers us, says the consumerist model, to define who we are. Which we know is just the most absurd thing ever.

88.

When you’re anxious decisions can be your undoing.

Anxious people are shocking decision makers.

Plus, the process of making decisions heightens anxiety.

Plus, any kind of indecision or pfaffing or vagueness around us tends to trigger anxiety. I’ve already touched on the difficulty of easy-going types. A flaky arrangement with someone not predisposed to everyday commitment (‘Oh, I’ll see what my Saturday looks like and get back to you’) or making a team decision with someone who, all laid-back and cruisey, defers to me, proffering not a skerrick of input as to what movie we should see or which direction to head in upon arriving at the Piazza del Duomo, can send me over the edge. Yeah, we could put it down to my being a control freak and needing to have everything in place. But it’s more that considering another’s needs literally doubles the amount of swirling options.

To my mind, decision-making is a key trigger of anxiety. I posed this idea to the Black Dog and SANE Australia focus groups, and to my own network. The responses support my sweeping claim: I get so flustered by being asked certain types of questions that my brain just seems to disappear and everything is just blank and frozen. Like whether to take time off of work because I’m really struggling at the moment just exhausts me to even think about and I end up so frozen that it’s easier to keep going (even past breaking point) than it is to make a decision to change something. — Lisa Jane Not being able to make firm decisions makes you feel less manly and capable, which then makes you more anxious. — Tim

Yes, totally for my husband. Anxiety grows with the amount of decisions he has to make, he cant plan anything. I try to get my hubby to make decisions, oh no, he just can’t. He says it’s because he hates to disappoint anyone. He’s relieved when his wife (me) makes the decision for him. — Shaz Dearest Tim, Lisa Jane, Shaz and Shaz’s husband, may I provide some comfort here? There’s a reason decisions bring us undone. First: biology. When faced with options, our two decision-making-centres – the prehistoric limbic system (which makes impulsive choices) and the neo-cortex (which can look ahead to the future consequences of such choices) – are having a go-nowhere tug-of-war. If you’re anxious, your neo-cortex tends to be particularly fired up, so the tug-of-war is much more aggressive.

Further, a relatively recent study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the anxious tend to have decreased ‘neural inhibition’, a process that sees one nerve cell suppress activity in another, which is critical in our ability to sift through choices and make decisions. The worse the anxiety, the less neural inhibition we have. Indeed, drugs that increase this cell suppression (thus helping with decision-making) are being used to treat some cases of anxiety. See, there’s a scientific connect that can explain our challenge! What sweet relief!

It’s also worth knowing that choice has historically been shown to present many an anxious soul with some of the gnarli­est existential angst going around. Let’s turn to old misery guts Kierkegaard again who famously wrote, ‘There would be no anxiety without possibility.’ By which he steadfastly meant that even the smallest decisions open us up to the realisation that the possibilities are limitless. When we see this limitlessness, we must also face, well, that it all ends soon enough in death, and that everything is pointless. The very real risk and probability of abandonment, aloneness, and being rejected and unloved are all wrapped up in this awareness. The everythingness and nothingness all at once. It certainly hurts the head.

Anxiety is the dizzying effect of freedom, of boundless possibility, he reckons. As humans we want all options. But we have to choose one thing over another from the boundless, or unlimited, options to create our identity. This is angst-filled by virtue of the enormity of the task and the perceived risk of failure – what if we get it wrong?! I studied German philosopher Martin Heidegger for six months during my bipolar period in my twenties. He saw anxiety as the awareness of the ‘impossibility of our possibilities’. I was living it out as I read his riddle-ish work. Of course the Germans have a word for this torture: Zerrissenheit: (noun) disunity, separateness, inner conflict; an internal fragmenting or ‘torn-to-pieces-hood’ from toggling so many choices.

So you see, my friends, your pain is actually very understandable. We must now be emboldened by this knowledge and find entirely cheeky ways to sidestep the gnarliness of choice. There are ways and means … 89.

Apparently, Victor Hugo wrote nude. Which is not a pretty visual. The writer also used to instruct his butler to hide his clothes so he couldn’t head outside for a wander when he was meant to be writing. This limited his options so that he could focus on what mattered. Which makes me think, if only I had a butler.

Actually, I’ve had my assistant Jo’s support for six years. She works tirelessly to strip me of options, bossily telling me where to be, what to prioritise. She knows this calms the waters.

It’s the paradox of choice, a phrase coined by American psychologist Barry Schwartz in 2004, drawing on Sheena Iyengar’s work with jams and the like. More choice is meant to bring us more freedom (so says capitalism). And yet we’re happier when we’re bound. In fact, to be rendered choiceless is the ultimate freedom. Iyengar’s studies looked at marriage in her parents’ Indian culture, comparing couples who married for love and those in arranged marriages. At the start of the study, the former are happier, but when the same couples are revisited ten and twenty years later the arranged marriage couples are close to twice as happy.

During that period when I finally gave up running off to New York to write about porn stars and to Peru to scale mountains and came home to my Hashimoto’s diagnosis, I had my mobile phone, my old but much-loved Toyota Hilux Surf (along with my surfboard, signed by Layne Beachley, which I stored in the back) and my equally loved mountain bike stolen.

Then my computer died. Stopped. Dead. In the middle of the night. This all happened in the space of three days. Oh, and the phone service in my street – and only my street – went down. For two weeks. Which made it nigh impossible to sort out my stolen goods situation. I was also, if you recall, too weak to even walk. It took me three weeks to find out my car insurance had lapsed two weeks before the theft. And on and on went the ludicrous misfortunes.

I’d started seeing my meditation teacher, Tim, by this stage. He laughed when I rang him from a pay phone at the end of the street and told him my predicament. ‘You’ve been rendered choiceless. How good is that!’ ‘Not very,’ I said, somewhat indignantly.

It’s just occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve mentioned that during this same nebulous period in my life during which I frantically tried to fight my exhaustion and illness and dwindling career relevance, while going steadily downhill (a period that lasted a good twelve months), I also took to adrenaline-­based experimenting. I tried out sky-­diving, Formula One racing, wake-boarding and took off to the Solomon Islands to write a feature about diving with sharks. All of which was clearly about grasping outwards, away from myself and everything I was truly looking for. I mention such experimenting because it also concluded in disaster. While I was on the islands, all three planes – all three! – that service the archipelago broke down. I was stranded for five days on an island that was in the middle of tribal infighting and had no internet. I can see now why Tim found it all pretty funny.

Actually, I soon grasped what he meant by being rendered choiceless and why this is such a glorious thing when it happens. I only had one choice available. To stay put. To give up fixing and meddling and grasping outwards. I’d missed the previous memos that tried to tell me this. They were subtle at first. But now the message was comically clear: You cannot move. You cannot communicate. All that’s left now is to stop, rest … and come in close. You have no choice.

When I saw things in this very obvious light, well, I stopped. At least for a while. It was incredibly freeing at the time. When choicelessness strikes me now, which is to say, when it hits me over the head with its obviousness, I remind myself, ‘How good is that!’ and give in with palpable relief to being told what to do by the funny circumstances.

You’ll be glad to know, though, there are other less dramatic ways to render yourself choiceless.

90.

When I was writing the Sunday newspaper magazine column where I spoke to famous and/or highly successful folk about how they make their lives better, I noticed that many of them ate boring breakfasts. Richard Branson eats fruit salad and muesli. Every. Day. Leo Babauta, the guy behind the very popular Zen Habits blog, eats Ezekiel flourless cereal with soy milk. Which just makes my eyes glaze over.

Many of them also wear the same clothes every day. President Obama wore the same style of suit every single day during his time in office. He once told Vanity Fair, ‘You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg owns twenty versions of the same grey T-shirt and has said that what he wears each day, along with what he eats for breakfast, is a ‘silly’ decision he doesn’t want to spend too long making. Einstein reportedly bought several variations of the same grey suit for the same reason. Ditto Steve Jobs who stuck to a black turtleneck with jeans and sneakers get-up. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote: ‘Our life is frittered away by detail … Simplify, simplify.’ In his book Uncertainty, Jonathan Fields reports on studies he conducted with hundreds of successful creatives to discover what they did differently. He was looking for ‘the thing’ that distinguished them from the rest of us. ‘Happy, successful entrepreneurs ritualise everything in their lives but their crea­tive work,’ he wrote.

After reading this, I figured I should ring him to ask if he’d noticed the boring breakfast thing, too. He had. He explained that at every turn, successful creatives tend to streamline the minutiae of their lives so as to take out as much unpredictability as possible. ‘Breakfast choice, and where you should have your coffee in the morning is minutiae, it gets in the way and saps decision-making energy,’ he tells me.

I’m someone who struggles with ritual and banality. I gravitate to novelty and can’t bear to walk the same route to work twice in a week. But given my unimpressive history with choosing a café for my morning coffee, I started to settle into the idea of having a ‘regular haunt’. At my regular haunts around the world (as I shift from city to city, unable to stay put), I noticed that they were filled with other nomadic ­regulars. The wait staff all know our orders (mine: long black, in a glass, not a cup, with a side of hot water, for some ‘special’ neurotic kick) and we are free to get on with our work. We look up from our laptops and notebooks and nod to each other every now and then. This is the second book I’ve written from my regular haunt in inner city Sydney. Other regular haunts included public libraries in New York, London, the Northern Beaches and Kings Cross, and bookshops around the world (the books provide a lovely, comforting ‘insulation’). I’ve become part of a worldwide community of minutiae-­simplifying folk who are saving their amygdala muscle for better things.

Again, I don’t think I’m making too drastic a leap when I say I think anxious folk are not unlike creatives (if they’re not already both) in needing to reduce the number of choices they have to make so that they can fly free.

91.

Behavioural psychologists refer to this technique as ‘dropping certainty anchors’. Drop as many as you can to hold you firmly so that you can flap about as creatively – or anxiously – as required, like one of those inflatable, fan-operated men propped outside used car yards that jerk about moronically. The flapping about is manageable – and creatively productive – if we know we’re not going to fly away.

We must drop certainty anchors. And I’m putting this in the imperative tense so that it’s one less decision you have to make. You’re doing it. No ifs or buts. And, apart from anything else, the world needs more certainty. Much of how we’re living feels untethered and wobbly. What a wonderful thing to be a bit of solid ground amid the flapping.

92.

Behavioural psychologists also like to refer to decision fatigue. They liken our decision-making abilities to flexing a muscle. With each decision we make, regardless of whether it’s big or small, we fatigue the muscle.

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences looked at the decisions of parole board judges and found that judges were significantly more likely to grant parole earlier when making a judgement in the morning. Cases that came before judges at the end of long sessions were much more likely to be denied. The rationale was that their muscle bottomed out from so much choice deciphering. Decisions become harder, more stressful and more confused the more decisions we make. The antidote is to automate as much as we can.

2_bit.psd

HAVE A MORNING ROUTINE

When I was interviewing all those successful life-bettering folk I would always ask, at the end of the interview, for their favourite hack, the one they personally live by. In all but a few cases they’d reply, ‘I have a morning routine.’ Having a morning routine is a certainty anchor with really sturdy stakes.

Louise Hay told me when we met, ‘The first hour of your day is crucial.’ She starts by thanking her bed for the sleep (!), stretches, has tea, then goes back to bed to read. Because she likes it. She even made a great bed-head so she can be at the best angle to read.

Leo Babauta’s is to drink water, reflect on a cushion briefly, read something inspiring for half an hour, then write. ‘Before I check email or Twitter or read my feeds, I sit down and write. It doesn’t matter what – a chapter for my new book, a blog post, answers to an interview someone emailed me, anything. I just write, without distractions.’ Similarly, Timothy Ferriss (US author of the mega-selling The 4-Hour Work Week) starts every day by journaling – he free-associates for a few pages in a notebook, ‘to trap my anxi­eties on paper so I can be more productive with less stress throughout the day’.

Benjamin Franklin always woke at 5am to ‘rise, wash and address “powerful goodness”, contrive the day’s business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast’. Each morning he’d ask himself: ‘What good shall I do this day?’ Which is an adage I’ve adopted at the end of my meditation practice.

Stephen King keeps to a strict routine each day, starting the morning with a cup of tea or water and his vitamins. King sits down to work between 8 and 8.30 in the same seat with his papers arranged on his desk in the same way.

If you’re anxious, you have to have a morning routine. Again, no ifs or buts.

Start off by letting go of the idea that you don’t have time. Get up half an hour earlier and commit, in the first instance, to thirty minutes only. Show up! Do the work!

I rise at 6am. Non-negotiable. And drink hot water and lemon. I attend to ablutions. Then I slide straight into sneakers and move. I keep a bucket by my door with one pair of running shoes, one sports bra, one pair of green shorts. Every day (non-negotiable) I put on my one outfit (no room for faffing over what I’ll wear) and get out the door. I’ll decide what form of exercise I’ll do the night before, so that I don’t have to decide in the morning – a simple thirty-minute walk is perfect, a yoga class, an ocean swim, a surf – based on the weather forecast and class timetables.

I keep it low-fi, do-able. None of this driving to the gym or running park business. None of this multiple bits of equipment and drink bottles palaver. It only invites procrastination or piking. And more, not fewer, decisions.

Then I meditate. By exercising first, I find my mind is settled, ready for meditation. I meditate in the sun. A vitamin D hit to boost the package. If it’s raining, I meditate inside. Decision made.

This, all up, takes about an hour, longer if I go to a yoga class. Then I shower and start my day, mostly with creative work in a regular haunt. As William Blake wrote, ‘Think in the morning, act in the noon.’ If you eat breakfast, you might want to try eating a boring breakfast. Prepare it the night before so you know what you’re eating. Bam, another decision eliminated.

I’ve been doing my routine for six years now. Every. Single. Day. When I travel, I adapt it. I meditate in the cab on the way to the airport. I run the fire escape stairs in the hotel. I establish a regular haunt for my coffee stop-off upon landing in a foreign country. I Google ‘best cafés near me’ or I look out for fellow nomadic types looking over the top of their laptops for connection with like-minded strangers.

Once the certainty anchors are in place, the day starts and all kinds of chaotic decision-making can then ensue.

93.

A few more certainty anchors that ritualise all that minutiae deciphering:

At the supermarket I buy the same brand of toilet paper, frozen peas and tinned tuna. Ditto toothpaste. Heck, I buy in bulk.

I ‘shop like a man’. I find a style, a brand, a size that works and I buy the same thing over and over, only replacing things when they’re threadbare. I’ve worn the same make of Target seamless undies for eight years now. I own seven pairs. I own minimal clothing – enough to fit in two suitcases. Narrowed choices means fewer ‘fash attacks’ in the morning. Grey drawstring pants, t-back bra and white singlet it is again, then!

I say yes. I play this game ‘I say yes’ to anyone who comes to me with a solid, certain, already decided preference. Sarah, I’d really like you to join me for steak and a wine at the pub tonight at 7pm. Yes, see you there. I really want to watch a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston playing a florist tonight. Yes, suits me. This creates certainty. It means I gravitate towards certain, anchored people. My friend Ali is a great anchor. She extends deliberate invites on defined days. And emails a calendar request. I can’t tell you how much I love a calendar request. I’m compelled to say yes.

I get recommendations. I learned this from someone at some point. I don’t think it matters who. When making a decision about, say, the best TV to buy or the best hotel in Albury Wodonga, ask someone who’s already made the same decision – and has sifted through options – to tell you. Obviously someone whose research skills you trust is best. To this end, don’t shy from online forums. The kind of people who go online to answer stranger’s questions as to ‘the best cough mixture for insomniacs’ are generally the kind of people who care a damn about most things. In a TED talk titled ‘Why we make bad decisions’, psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains that cognitive biases mean we are actually really bad at making decisions for ourselves and that even a complete stranger will increase the likelihood of making the ‘happiest’ decision for you by a factor of two.

94.

You can also work around the decision-making palaver by playing games to render yourself choiceless. If we’re hell-bent on minimising decisions, why not give in to the natural flow of things as indicated by the persistence of a particular ‘sign’ or another’s enthusiasm? As I’ve mentioned, I sometimes take to simply saying ‘yes’ when someone issues a deliberate, decisive invite, and I will allow myself to be steered by ‘three strikes’. In most circumstances it delivers me a great outcome and always saves me from decision anxiety.

Dad used to do this thing in the lead-up to the summer holidays that would decide our camping destination. He’d get The Youngest to close his/her eyes and stab at a map of the surrounding region.

‘Right kids, it’s decided, we’re off to … Dubbo!’ Oh, yes, the thrill! (No disrespect, mind, to Dubbo.)

Of course, the chances of stabbing directly at El Caballo Blanco Fun Park were slim. And so our annual camping trips were to places few families ventured for fun. Like Cowra. And Warrnambool. Although Miriam my editor does inform me there is now an amazing adventure playground in the former port town. My memories from twenty-five years ago aren’t so dazzling. One year we wound up at a goat farm outside Jindabyne during a crippling drought. The winds and dust forced us to dine each night with the recently divorced father who owned the farm and he served us microwaved meals. This was the only thing I remember from the trip. I’d never seen a microwave before.

‘Really, what difference does it make?’ Dad philosophised, folding up the map. He was right. Wherever my little brother stabbed, we always wound up in a campground with an above-ground kidney-shaped pool and ate goulash that Mum made in advance and carried in the stinking hot car in a big cast-iron pot and that we’d eat sitting on milk crates around the kero lamp.

3_bit.psd

FLIP A COIN. GO ON.

Like me, you might find the kind of caution-to-wind approach my dad used to take intimidating. You might also find the idea of ‘going with your gut’ out of your league. An anxious person’s gut is a fluttery mess; we don’t know what we want. We are all head, little gut instinct. That said, I do have one trick that I play with a bit. It accesses a sneaky portal to the gut.

I flip a coin. But before I uncover it, I monitor my emotions to see what I’m hoping the result will be. There it is, my gut decision, peeking through my head clutter. This technique tricks you into thinking some divine intervention is going to make the decision and you switch to responding to the possible outcome. This switches off the decision-making muscle.

The challenge is to not then check to see if the coin flipped head or tails. Oh, and to use this moment to absorb the fact that it doesn’t matter anyway.

95.

Or you can Just. Decide. Sounds frightening, but read on.

Back in my Cosmopolitan days I went to my publisher with two cover options for the following month’s issue: Angelina in a green dress or Angelina in a black dress. Pat was a good decision maker. Or at least she made fast decisions that didn’t get her worked up. On this particular visit I asked her how she did it. ‘If we’re actually debating the two covers, going back and forth, then it means both are good options. Right? If one was really bad, you’d know about it.’ Yes, I can vouch for this.

‘So I just choose one. It doesn’t matter which.’

Pat didn’t break her rationale down, but I have many times in the retelling of the anecdote. On a two-party preferred basis, the black and green dress are likely to come in at roughly fifty-­fifty. Sure, if we drilled down with a bunch of focus groups, the black dress option, for example, might come out marginally more popular – with, say, 54 per cent preferring it.

But that’s not the point.

What’s important about making a decision is the ‘just deciding’ bit. Because once you choose one – say, the black dress – you make it the best choice.

Pat did, in fact, choose the black dress. I returned to the office and told everyone the decision. ‘We love the black dress.’ The art team, mostly relieved to have the decision made, then created the best design and colour format around this chosen image. The art director had seen a black dress done with an aqua background and a fluoro orange masthead before. She was pumped. The subbing team worked cover lines enthusiastically. The whole office was loving the aqua treatment. Bit by bit the various departments massaged Angelina-in-a-black dress to become a standout cover, the kind that gave me a satisfyingly quenched feeling when I walked past it on a newsstand.

There is never a perfect decision. They become perfect when we make them.

US comedian Louis C.K. also grapples with the descent into despair that decision-making can induce. He has a 70 per cent rule you might rather like. If a decision – about a thing or a person – feels 70 per cent right, he just goes with it; 70 per cent is enough: ‘Cause here’s what happens. The fact that other options go away immediately brings your choice to 80. Because the pain of deciding is over.

And when you get to 80 per cent, you work. You apply your knowledge, and that gets you to 85 per cent! And the thing itself, especially if it’s a human being, will always reveal itself – 100 per cent of the time! – to be more than you thought. And that will get you to 90 per cent. After that, you’re stuck at 90, but who the fuck do you think you are, a god? You got to 90 per cent? It’s incredible!

The funny thing is that behavioural studies show that we think making a decision is more anxiety-riddled than not making a decision. But, in fact, the opposite is true. The studies show that when we decide to do something and it turns out badly, it mostly doesn’t haunt us down the track. We humans are master justifiers. Failing to act on a decision, however, will haunt us. The infinite possibilities of what might have been get us into all kinds of anxious mess.

If you think about this, it becomes apparent that we get anxious having to decide, but we also get anxious when we don’t decide. If we know this, we might as well just decide. Right?

I share all of this, mostly, to lessen the potency of one choice over another. If we’ve investigated the options enough, it doesn’t matter. Moving up, up and away from the chaos of indecision does.