The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Choice Overload

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

We all make thousands of choices each day - and think it means we're in charge of our lives. But making even trivial decisions - about salad dressings, for example - can sap our energy and cause anxiety. Dr Laurie Santos examines why our society wrongly prioritises choice over happiness, and meets a woman who junked her wardrobe in a bid to improve her life.For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. You made it! Hello. I made it. Happy birthday. Thank you. It's my mom's 70th birthday, and so she's come to visit me at Yale. Tomorrow morning, we're heading off somewhere sunny for a short vacation together.

But tonight, we just want to relax a bit. My mom had been on the road for a while, and so I really wanted her to get some food. What do you want to eat? Where can we go? Well, it's New Haven, so we didn't go anywhere. Asian noodles? Foodies love New Haven. It's a town filled with gourmet restaurants, funky hipster bars, world-famous pizza joints, and even food trucks.

Whatever you're in the mood for, it's usually just a few blocks away. Pizza? Too cheesy. Too cheesy. Mexican food. Too spicy. Too spicy. My mom's a picky eater, and we don't always have the same preferences.

But in New Haven, we're usually okay. Sushi? No, you don't like sushi. Korean fried chicken? No, I don't really like Asian food. Regular chicken would be good. 15 minutes and about 100 options later, we finally find a place that works. A restaurant that does great salads made to order. Feta, tofu, olives, bacon, artichoke hearts, gorgonzola, avocado, walnuts, craisins. Craisins. Dressing on the side. avocado, walnuts, craisins.

Craisins. Craisins. Dressing on the side. Yep. I usually feel really blessed to have such a variety of tasty cuisine on my doorstep. And having the ability to customize all the ingredients in our order usually feels empowering. Like we're in control. But as I scrolled through restaurant after restaurant,

menu after menu with my mom, I started to feel a bit drained. A bit depleted, maybe even a bit defeated. All right, that's what you want? Mm-hmm. Okay, great. Ordered. Yay! You know what, my sonny? It's your birthday. You get to get what you need. So what if our obsession with choice isn't all that it's cracked up to be?

So what if our obsession with choice isn't all that it's cracked up to be? What if all this choice is making us less satisfied and more unhappy than we think? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Louise? Louis? Who's this?

I'm sitting in Louis' lunch, which is said to be the birthplace of an American classic. It's just down the street from my house. Around 1900, Louis Lassen, Danish immigrant and lunch wagon proprietor, was dealing with a difficult customer. According to family legend, a regular named Gary Widmore hurried in and shouted, slap a meat puck between two planks and step on it.

But Louis was out of whole steaks. Trying to placate the man, Louis quickly grilled up some ground beef trimmings, stuck it between two slices of toast, and handed it off. With that hurried act, it's said that the first American hamburger was invented. There's still some controversy about this origin story. But what makes Louis' lunch different from the other alleged hamburger creators is the fact that they've doubled down on the very sandwich that people loved 100 years ago. doubled down on the very sandwich that people loved 100 years ago. When you walk into Louie's lunch today, you can order the same burger that Widmore enjoyed, but pretty much nothing else. You can add cheese, tomato, and onion, but that's it. No bacon, no lettuce, just a straight-up burger.

And never, ever ask the staff for ketchup. If somebody came in and asked you guys for ketchup, what would you say? We politely decline them most of the time. That's Jeff Lassen, Louie's great-grandson and the current owner. One of the cooks gave us a slightly more nuanced reply. What we really do is get the hell out of here and don't come back. Louie's unique selling point is the fact that you don't have to choose. In fact, you can't.

Which makes walking into Louie's Lunch a very different experience than entering any other New Haven restaurant. Their menus feel like a small book. A lot of people in restaurants do have a lot of options and they try to cater to everybody. But we stick to what we do best and what we've been doing for 124 years. And that's keeping it simple and making it easy for not only ourselves but everybody else and when you do that and do what you do best I think you have a better product. But is Jeff right? Do you really have a better product when you limit your customers choices? Wouldn't having more options actually make our experience better? That's what psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set out to test in a famous study.

They headed to one of Iyengar's favorite shops, the famous Drager's Market, a high-end store in Menlo Park, California. For two Saturday afternoons in a row, Iyengar and Lepper had research assistants dress up like store employees near a table at the entrance. Customers who stopped by were promised a dollar off their purchase of high-end Wilkin & Sons jam if they tried some free samples. What the researchers varied was how many jams people had a chance to taste. Some customers could sample six different kinds of jam. Kiwi, peach, black cherry, three fruits marmalade, lemon curd, red currant.

Which you might think already sounds like a lot. But at other times, the researchers increased that jam selection fourfold. People had a chance to sample a whopping 24 different kinds of jam. Did the difference in the number of jams available affect people's behaviors? Well, 20% more people stopped at the table when 24 jams were on offer. Which makes sense, right? More jams to sample, more people show up to check them out. But did the number of people who bought something increase? After all, those customers had a chance to sample nearly all the available Wilkins & Sons jams in existence, so they surely found one they liked. But surprisingly, that's not what happened.

With six jams to taste, about 30% of people ended up using their coupon. But when shoppers were faced with 24 jams, only 3% made a purchase. Ten times more customers bought something when they were given fewer options. Paradoxically, giving people more choice made people buy less stuff. Everyone has had the experience of walking into a store and just wanting to turn around and walk out. This is Barry Schwartz, a professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He has written an entire book drawing on experiments like that jam study. They pretty much all show the same thing. When we're faced with lots of options, we become paralyzed by them. So he called his book The Paradox of Choice.

There's a set of beliefs that are so deeply embedded in us that I don't even think we realize we hold them. And that is that if you want to enhance people's well-being, you want to enhance their freedom. And if you want to enhance their freedom, you have to enhance their choice. And that seems so obviously true that it didn't occur to anyone to investigate it. It occurred to Barry, though. He spent decades figuring out how this explosion of choice is affecting our well-being. He started simply. He just walked the aisles of his local supermarket and began counting. There were 275 different kinds of cookies and 150 salad dressings, 30 different kinds of aspirin. The only way we get through a trip to the supermarket is that 95% of what we buy is

the same stuff we bought last week, and everything else is invisible to us. And if we actually started paying attention to everything, we'd starve to death before we finished our weekly shopping trip. Barry got me thinking about the seemingly minor choices I face on a daily basis. It's dizzying. Take plopping down to watch something on Netflix. It's dizzying. Take plopping down to watch something on Netflix. Even if I just look at what Netflix recommends for me personally,

it's overwhelming. It can feel like hundreds of options. There's a little bit of evidence that what happens when you do that is people end up just throwing up their hands and watching a movie they've already seen. They go for the familiar because they can't figure out how to choose among the unfamiliar. I started to do the math on just how overwhelming some of these choices are. Take a visit to one well-known coffee shop. It's Starbucks. How many different drink options does that company offer? It turns out over 80,000. 80,000! To put that in perspective, 80,000!

To put that in perspective, if I went to that coffee shop, Starbucks, three times a day, every single day, for the rest of my life, I'd need to live to 115 years old just to try all those permutations. And that's not even including the seasonal pumpkin spice drinks. Do we seriously need that many choices? And say you do discover that perfect coffee and that huge haystack of choice. The tragic thing is, you won't actually enjoy it all that much. Our minds might tell us that finding the best of 80,000 options will feel like an achievement,

but that's simply not the case. One study had people imagine trying to find a greeting card for a co-worker, either picking from shelf after shelf of cards or just a limited selection. Who turned out to be the least satisfied with their purchase? You guessed it, the shoppers with a gazillion choices. It's so easy to imagine that one of the options they rejected would have been better than the one they chose. The more you compare, the more the thing you've chosen suffers. So you end up making a good decision and feeling bad about it.

And that is the cruel irony of all these choices. When lots of options are present, even if we do well, we still feel worse. But lack of satisfaction isn't the only issue with all these choices. There's a bigger problem. Our poor minds just can't handle comparing 100 greeting cards or 80,000 coffee drinks all at once. Human brains simply don't have the capacity to accurately decide whether a venti soy latte with caramel is tastier than 79,999 other options. At least, not in real time.

So we just filter most of the other options out. But all that filtering still comes at a serious cost to our well-being. Just seeing all those choices above the counter is cognitively draining. So draining that it leads to worse decisions later on, a phenomenon that behavioral scientists call decision fatigue. We all suffer from this phenomenon to a certain degree, but only some of us realize it. Take Barack Obama, for example.

He clearly got it. I don't know if you've noticed that he always wore a white shirt, and he kind of cycled through his suits. When asked about his repetitive wardrobe, the president summed up decision fatigue perfectly. And Obama said, have you got any idea how many decisions I have to make in a day? Do you think I want to spend time deciding what to wear? Forget the important stuff like whether to wear a blue suit or a gray suit and worry

about the trivial things like making sure everyone has health care. Obama is right about this. We only have a certain amount of mental effort to put towards the hard decisions. If we waste that effort on, say, ordering coffee or picking out a tie, we won't have the mental wherewithal needed for the important choices. There's a study that shows that when you have people make a hundred hypothetical decisions, all trivial, and then you give them a task that challenges their self-control, they give up easily. So choosing is exhausting. Even when it's about trivial stuff, it just wears you out. But it gets worse. Because it turns out all those decidedly

non-trivial choices in life, they're also set up in ways that overload us. We're given too many options there as well. To raise the stakes, the same thing happens with 401k retirement participation. And they found that the more options you offered, the less likely people were to choose any. You lost about 2% for every 10 options. And in many cases, workers were passing up matching money from the employer by not signing up. So the single worst thing they could do was choose none of the above. When people are faced with too many retirement plans, they don't know how to make the decision. And so they put it off.

There had to be a right decision about which fund. I don't know how to make that decision. I'll decide tomorrow. But tomorrow isn't any different from today. So it just keeps getting postponed and postponed. And I'm sure that everyone thought they were doing employees a favor by offering all these options. We'll just lay them all out there and you can get exactly the set of investments that you want. What a gift. Well, no, a curse, actually. So why do companies keep cursing us like this, especially when people would buy more things if there were fewer choices? There's a reason for this, I think. Somebody walks into your store and says, do you have Royal Crown Cola? You just have Coke and

Pepsi. And so this person walks out empty handed. Well, that's a smack in your face. That's a sale you would have made if only you'd had Royal Crown Cola. Someone else comes into a store and buys $5 worth of stuff instead of $15 because you've tortured them with so many options. That's invisible to you. You don't know the price you're paying by making it more complicated than it needs to be. So the crazy thing with the choice overload is that I know this work like I've seen your TED talk, read your book, but even I, you know, would I rather have a Netflix with 10 films or

10 million films? I still have the intuition that I want more choice. I know, everybody does. When Barry lectures about this work, he gets a lot of pushback, especially from his students. I can see they're kind of smirking. And I think that what they think is he's old. He doesn't know how to take advantage of what the modern world offers. And sometimes one of them will actually have the nerve to say that. And when they do, I'm delighted because I say, you know, I think that's really what it is. That must explain why it is that 85%

of you are clinically depressed and 90% of you are going to see a shrink because you handle this all so well. Choosing between jams is a pain and picking a good 401k plan can have big financial consequences. When I first started thinking about this episode, I was focused on these kinds of decisions, ones that are having a huge impact on our well-being, but are largely run-of-the-mill. Personal preferences stuff. Cases where there's no real right decision to be made. But as I read more and more of the work on choice overload, I realized that we're now being asked to make decisions in domains that go way beyond shopping.

The buck also stops with us for decisions that can have critical moral consequences, ones that literally involve life and death. Maybe you got admitted to the hospital because you felt like you felt terrible for a while and then they told you you had leukemia, and that you could have a really aggressive chemotherapy that might kill you and might save your life, or a gentler chemotherapy that's going to slow down this leukemia but never cure you of it, and you have to figure out that night which type of chemotherapy to start. Hard to think of a harder decision to make. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you.

Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. It was spring and 21-year-old Karen Ann Quinlan had just moved away from home. For the last few days, she'd been on a crash diet, hoping to fit into a new dress for an upcoming party. After a couple of drinks and some Valium, Karen felt dizzy, so her friends took her home and put her to bed. But then, Karen stopped breathing. In the few minutes it took her housemates to notice, her brain suffered huge and irreparable damage. Karen wasn't dead, there were tiny signs of brain activity, but her doctors were gloomy about the prospect that she would ever recover. Karen's plight dramatically pitted her parents, Joseph and Julia Quinlan,

against the medical profession in a way never seen before. Karen's parents were devout Catholics. They thought the machine that was helping her to breathe should be shut off. The family, the parents, decided it was morally acceptable. In fact, the best thing to do would be to take the ventilator away, let their daughter die so she could be with God. This is Peter Ubel, a physician and behavioral scientist at Duke University. And the doctors refused.

They said that would be killing her, and they didn't do that, and it wasn't the parents' decision to make. The argument soon made it to court, where the judge ruled that the treating physician had to make the call. Legally speaking, the Quinlans were not allowed to govern what treatment their daughter received. But the couple didn't give up. They soon appealed.

The New Jersey State Supreme Court said, yeah, no, the parents do have the right here. It is their daughter, and it's not a medical decision here. It's a moral decision, and the doctors aren't the ones to decide what's right or wrong in that case. Peter thinks this was a pivotal moment in a wider generational movement demanding more choice in our lives. Around the same time, this is around the 70s, you're seeing a lot of people in the United States in particular who are kind of standing up to the power, the power that's got people in a war they don't want to be in,

that's trying to keep people from voting, that want to vote. And I think the patient empowerment movement kind of fit into that narrative. And you saw people, not only lawyers, but theologians and philosophers and enlightened physicians saying we need to give patients a bigger role in their decisions. It's their bodies after all. They have a right to know what we're doing to them and why. But this level of patient choice in medicine was totally new. For all of human history before this, it was doctor knows best. You as a patient just trusted this person to tell you what to do.

Going back to the time of Hippocrates, physicians were told not to burden people with knowledge that wouldn't help them. And he, typically he, might or might not tell you what's even wrong with you. Maybe you just were told you had a shadow on your x-ray, but it was really a cancer. The doctor knew it, but didn't want to worry you. In his work, Peter records real interactions between physicians and patients. Playing them back, it's clear to Peter that things have changed a lot. Oh, now it's a mess. It's pretty common to run into a patient who says, well, okay, doctor, what should I do? And then the doctor says, well, it's for you to decide. I can't tell you what to do. It's your choice. That can drive patients crazy.

I don't think doctors know what we're supposed to do anymore. It's gone from doctor knows best to patient knows best. But do patients really know best? After all, they don't have decades of medical training, constant refresher courses, and new medical journals dropping on their doorstep every month. The modern revolution of patient choice has given the decision power to people constant refresher courses, and new medical journals dropping on their doorstep every month. The modern revolution of patient choice has given the decision power to people who don't often have the information they need. And Peter's research shows that doctors try to help, but they often do it badly.

Doctors, they know one thing. We need to inform the hell out of this patient. That's the one thing that doctors have pretty universally taken as the lesson from this patient empowerment revolution of the 70s and 80s. Patients deserve information. Rarely do they know the best way to give them that information, how much to give them, and even more rarely do they assess patient understanding in a really good way before they then work to make a decision with the patient. So we have more information, maybe even more options on the table, but it's not clear that patients know how to make the best choice. That's right. Or that doctors know how to partner with them to make those choices. Peter is no stranger to these kinds of awful situations. In fact, he's faced them in his

own family. My wife had early stage breast cancer diagnosed about seven years ago. She was in her forties still. That's a bad age. Well, there's no good age to be diagnosed with breast cancer, but it's especially serious when you're younger like that. Peter's wife was offered many choices about her treatment, the first being whether she wanted her whole breast removed or just the tumor. Being a physician, Peter dug into the data on all of these options. To his horror, he found out the way the choices were being framed didn't accurately reflect the risks or rewards of all of these options. To his horror, he found out the way the choices were being framed didn't accurately reflect the risks or rewards of each of the options. Studying the figures, Peter found that extending his wife's treatment by a week

only slightly decreased the chance of her tumor returning, but massively increased the chances of his wife suffering painful and disfiguring side effects. And that to me feels like a choice that a patient ought to be able to make. And yet, almost any woman would have walked into that situation and just be told that she had a sixth week of treatment coming and not told what the pros and cons of that choice are. So while the doctors were placing the weight of the decision-making onto the couple's shoulders, they seemed to have no system in place to give Peter and his wife the information they needed to make an informed choice. That either means they over-inform you often about things irrelevant to the decision to

where you're so confused you don't know what to do, or they selectively inform you thinking they're telling you what you need to know and maybe they're making the wrong assumption. It's a really tough place to make a decision. But it got worse. Having made a series of choices, Peter's wife finally had an operation, a lumpectomy, to remove the cancer. As part of the procedure, the team inspected nearby tissue to see if her disease had spread. And they found one lymph node that was a centimeter large that was basically tumor.

And the surgeon calls me up. My wife is still under anesthesia. They're partway through the operation. And so he poses me, how many of these lymph nodes do you want me to go after? And then I'm just like, okay, so my wife's under anesthesia. I have to decide how many of her lymph nodes to remove. And one possibility is I say, don't remove anymore. And then she wakes up and then decides, boy, I wish we'd had them removed. And do they have to go back and do a second surgery? Or I say, remove them. And then she's going to wake up later and say, you had them remove all those lymph nodes.

I'm going to have all that swelling. That was my choice. The surreal exchange went back and forth. With a heavy heart and fearing the awful side effects, Peter said the lymph nodes should come out. How did the doctor not anticipate that this was a possible branch point? How did that surgeon not talk to both of us beforehand and say, now look, there's a possibility, you know, they always go in and look at lymph nodes. Why didn't he tell us, you know, we're going to have to figure out what to do if any of them show cancer in them. And you face this burden. I mean, it would be awful for

your wife to face this burden because it's a hard choice, but it's not your body, it's her body. That's right. And to her credit, she didn't ever make me feel like I made the wrong choice, but it's never a position I should have been put in. Yeah, very preventable. Working on this episode, I've now started noticing all the decisions I'm faced with on a daily basis. Luckily, I haven't recently faced anything as hard as Peter and his wife had to deal with. But it still feels like there's no escape from all these decisions. And that nagging feeling that I'm making the wrong choices all the time. And so I started to look for some role models. People who had found a way out of the trap of too much choice.

A typical day for me would involve, you know, just so many questions and each answer to those questions was a decision that I was making. This is writer and blogger Courtney Carver. Back in 2006, she received some life-shattering news and she reacted in exactly the way that the science of psychology recommends. She stopped treating lots of choices as a good thing. Let's get rid of these decisions that we make every day that don't have a whole lot of impact on our lives. The Happiness Lab will be We're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes.

More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. This is clearly a very popular session. So once again, while you are welcome to stand along the sides of the room and then back, please know that... I met Courtney Carver last winter when we did a panel discussion together at the Massachusetts Conference for Women.

The main room was completely packed. If you also want to be as Hamilton, the musical would say in the room where it happened. We certainly welcome you to come in and cozy up. The clamor for seats didn't surprise me. The topic we were set to discuss was burnout and how to avoid it. All right. Clearly we have nothing to talk about here, right? Burnout is not a common problem for any of us, as I can see by the packed house we have here. The panel was promoting a really positive goal, but it centered on an idea that all of us have to say no a little bit more for the sake of our happiness.

And Courtney Carver is a bit of a rock star in the saying no movement. Even on a good day, most of us have more decisions than we want to deal with to make, like what we're going to wear in the morning. That for sure always seemed to overwhelm me. As an advertising exec, having lots of fashion choices was important to Courtney, but choosing something cool to wear every morning was exhausting. So she made a radical decision. I had been simplifying other areas of my life for years, but I never considered the closet or shopping

because I just thought that was an essential part of my life. But the simpler the rest of my life got, the more chaotic my closet felt. And I thought, I wonder what it would be like to dress with less. She decided to reduce her wardrobe choices, just like Obama did. And so I created a challenge, a minimalist fashion challenge that I named Project 333, where I would dress with 33 items for three months, including clothes, jewelry, accessories, and shoes, not counting underwear, sleepwear, like at-home loungewear or workout clothes. I didn't get rid of everything right away. I just boxed it up and got it out of sight for

three months. I just thought there might be a lot to learn from that. And so what did you learn? Well, so much. The first thing I learned is that my clothes and my closet was stressful and that it sent me into the day feeling a bit frazzled. And it was just so relieving for me. I felt so good that I didn't have to look at all of my bad purchase decisions, the clothes that didn't fit me, the clothes I didn't enjoy or like, the clothes with tags still hanging. I would buy something thinking it was such a great deal, and then I would never even cut the tags off and wear it. But not everyone takes to Project 333 straight away. Some people are even horrified by the idea.

I definitely get some pushback from people wondering or challenging, you know, isn't that so boring? That's so uncreative. I could never do that. I remember the first day before I opened my closet thinking, I'm not going to have enough. People are going to notice. But I remember when I opened the closet, all I felt was calm and peace. And here are my choices. You know, I don't have to express my creativity by what I wear. It wasn't anything I was ever really excited about. It was something that I felt compelled to do, to fit in. And in reality, I didn't have to work as hard as I did. Courtney's realization that she was a slave to her extensive wardrobe strikes a chord with many other women, and her Project 333 idea is catching on. I don't

know officially how many people have done it, but I suspect it's in the tens of thousands. And it's so wonderful to see people sharing a lot of the same benefits in terms of less stress and anxiety, getting ready on time, more peaceful mornings, saving money, saving energy, being more creative in other areas of their life. It's fascinating. Courtney is a thoughtful and articulate advocate for simplifying our daily routines. It's fascinating. when things started to really go wrong for her. I didn't feel well. I had vertigo and some tingling in my face. I was very tired, extremely fatigued. As a busy professional and mother, Courtney just assumed these unnerving feelings were nothing more than the side effects of stress. I was behind on a lot of work deadlines.

I was volunteering at my daughter's school. I was traveling and just trying to do all the things that most of us try to fit into a normal day, and it was overwhelming. On top of all of this, Courtney was also in training for a charity cycling event, a 150-mile race to support the Multiple Sclerosis Society. My boss at the time had MS, and I was riding for him. But because I wasn't feeling well, I was in between doctor's appointments and tests, and so dizzy that I really couldn't even ride my bike. I couldn't even walk a straight line most of the time. Eventually, she had to give up on the race.

Her doctors had finally figured out what was wrong. MS, the very disease that had struck her boss's nervous system, was also at the root of Courtney's symptoms too. On top of really feeling crappy to get this diagnosis, it was terrible. I had nothing but fear initially. And in my case, I was diagnosed over the phone. While I was at work, I said, what's next? What should I do? It was just the sort of awful phone call that Peter Ubel was telling us about. Courtney was immediately asked to make choices she was totally unprepared for.

She said, why don't you come in and pick up some marketing kits for the drugs that are available and pick one? Oh my gosh. And I just thought, I mean, what's nuts when. Oh my gosh. And I just thought, I mean, what's nuts when I look back on it is I just thought, okay, that's what you do. So that's what I did. The entire situation was overwhelming and it forced Courtney to ask a lot of hard questions. What are you doing with your life? Is this how you want to live? Are these the choices that you want to make make I don't by any means think that I caused this disease but I know that the stress in my life contributed to exacerbations

and relapses and I started to see all of the things that I had built my life around and added to my life over the years that were stressful and so I set out to eliminate as much of that stress as possible. What's most fascinating is that Project 333 hasn't just improved Courtney's mood and her bank account. Courtney also attributes reducing her choices with making her feel better physically. Since reducing her closet choices, Courtney's MS has improved. So now I am symptom-free for the most part. Since reducing her closet choices, Courtney's MS has improved. Courtney's story isn't just about thinning out her wardrobe. Courtney's mind had lied to her for years and years.

But she woke up to it. And it's made her so much happier than she ever expected. I think that we're conditioned to believe that more is always the answer, and that we'll be happier with more, things will be better with more, we'll be more loved if we prove ourselves more. loved if we prove ourselves more. But as it turns out, less, at least for me, is the answer. You know, less choosing, less doing. I'm much happier with doing less. Making this episode has had a real impact on me. Reducing the choice overload in our daily lives is no easy feat, but I'm trying. I recently decided to start my day with the exact same breakfast every morning. It's not much, but it's one less decision to contend with before I get to the real choices that face me in the grind ahead. So look for your own little strategies to reduce choices, and apply them whenever you can. And

steal some hints from the masters, like researcher Barry Schwartz. He shared a great tip that I'll try next time I sit down at a restaurant. I don't even look at the menu. I don't care how many options there are. I wait for everyone else to order. And then I choose whichever of those dishes sounds best to me. So in effect, I'm choosing from three or from five and not from 15. And so I'll leave this episode with a final thought, which is don't get bogged down by all

the big menus in life. Ask yourself, how can I cut down on some of the decisions in my own life? And how can I help my friends get happier doing the same? Here's one easy first step. If a friend is looking for a new podcast among the 700,000 available, you can just tell them, hey, you should try The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Joseph Fridman. And our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg.

The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.