The strange relief of making a decision

We had a truly lovely client years ago, I’ll call her Janet, who lived in a classic Brooklyn apartment across from the Brooklyn Museum. Janet’s husband had died about ten years earlier. She had built a full life in Brooklyn. She loved theater and art, and she had a wide circle of friends in the city.

Janet’s daughter lived in Chicago and very much wanted her mother to move closer. But Janet, like most of our clients, loved her home and her independence. She could understand, intellectually, that moving made sense. She was at an age when she felt she needed to be near her family. Still, she was not convinced it was worth giving up everything she had built in Brooklyn.

She visited Chicago several times, touring residences and exploring her options. There were a few she genuinely liked. Beautiful buildings, some with lake views. Still, she kept putting the decision off.

She weighed the pros and cons with friends and family. She spoke with her financial advisor and her lawyer. She met with real estate agents to understand how the sale of her apartment might go. She did everything you are supposed to do when making a thoughtful decision. And yet, she could not decide. She agonized over it for years.

Then one night, everything changed. She told me she woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and knew, with complete clarity, that she was going to move. She described waking up with a jolt and an overwhelming sense of happiness and relief. The decision had been made. The agonizing was over.

She could not wait until morning to tell her children, so she called them right then. Of course, when they saw her name come up in the middle of the night, they assumed the worst. They thought she was calling from the ER, or worse. Instead, she was calling to say she had made a decision.

She was so relieved to be done with the decision-making process. The next day, she called the residence she liked best in Chicago and began the application process. She signed with a broker to sell her apartment, and she hired us to get the move underway.

There is a line of study in psychology called the Paradox of Choice.

In one well-known study, researchers set up two displays in a grocery store. One offered a large assortment of jams for shoppers to sample. The other offered just a few. The larger display attracted more people, and shoppers spent more time there. But it led to far fewer purchases than the smaller display.

The researchers found several reasons for this. One of the key factors was something called decision fatigue, the exhaustion that comes from having to make a choice. Shoppers enjoyed sampling all the varieties, but by the time they needed to decide which one to buy, they were simply tired of deciding.

Another factor was confidence. With so many options, shoppers were less certain they were choosing the best one. Rather than risk making the wrong choice, they often chose nothing at all. Shoppers at the smaller display, by contrast, felt more confident in their selection.

I relate to this completely. I have a particular weakness for buffets. I love the idea of a buffet and always look forward to it. But sometimes I find myself standing there, plate in hand, completely paralyzed. There are too many choices. I feel overwhelmed, and a little bit of FOMO, the fear that I might choose the wrong thing and miss out on something better.

Janet’s story comes back to me often. Not because the decision itself was unusual, but because of the relief that followed it. She did not suddenly discover new information that made the choice obvious. She simply reached the end of her decision-making process. And when she did, what she felt most was not fear or regret, but a sense of calm and forward momentum.

We see this all the time. The period before a move is often filled with weighing, questioning, and second-guessing. It can stretch on for months, even years. But once a decision is made, even a difficult one, things tend to fall into place. There is a shift. Energy returns. The focus moves from “Should I?” to “How do we make this work?”

Sometimes the hardest part is not the move itself but deciding to begin.