Why too much choice can lead us to slam on the brakes.
Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we will. Why is this? Does it boil down to having too many options to choose from that we suffer from an inability to get on and choose? What happens when those options become limited?
Let’s take the example of exercise. During the first UK coronavirus lockdown measures earlier this year, we were only allowed to exercise outside of the house once a day. Our options were walking, running, and cycling mainly. No more Zumba classes, no more free weights in the gym, no more tennis, no more football, the list goes on. Our choices were instantly and radically scaled back, something that we are not generally accustomed to in today’s society.
Too much choice can often paralyse our ability to actually choose. If you type in ‘butter’ into the Tesco’s online shop, you are presented with 134 buttery options. Or if cereal is more your bag, there are 266 to choose from. Not quite enough for a different one every day this year, but you know, close enough. We make hundreds of choices every day with varying impact from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, and all those cumulative decisions can become draining with a real risk of decision fatigue.
When faced with a drastically reduced list of reasons to leave our homes as part of the UK lockdown measures, it seemed like many of us decided to take up outside exercise. Overwhelming, I found the people I spoke to embracing this one freedom they had (if they could). Some who had never run a 5k in their life were now donning their trainers and running. Others were discovering parks, fields, canals, and the like, nearby for their walks or bike rides, often surprised at what was on their doorstep. People started buying more bikes, with one Australian bicycle company comparing themselves to being the new toilet roll… (bike booms are not without their warnings). The removal of a variety of exercise options, with the addition that this was one of the few reasons you could leave your home, somehow made it easier to choose to do so. Because the real decision was you either went out for an hour or so a day or you didn’t. Instead of being faced with a multitude of decisions, you had two: 1) Run, walk, or cycle? 2) When?
The ability to appreciate this freedom may also have stemmed from looking across to countries like Spain or Italy, where you were not allowed out for exercise at all, so being able to go out and run/walk/cycle, feeling that sun or wind on your face, felt like a real privilege. In the beginning, there was also the fear that our once a day allowance could be taken away, following suit of other European countries, so there was this collective feeling that we should make the most of being able to exercise outside, if we could.
Our options then increased in mid-May with UK residents now allowed unlimited outside exercise, as part of the marginal easing of the UK lockdown measures. We were given much more choice on the type of exercise we could do and we could perform it whenever took our fancy. But did this translate into us exercising outside more? If anything, I would say the opposite is true, it seemed like many of us were exercising outside less than before.
The ability to exercise outside as much as I can, doesn’t mean that I will. Is part of this because we have more choice that we actually don’t do it? Of course, when the sun is shining and it is pure picnic weather, people will be in the parks, but exercising more than once a day? Not usually. By having unlimited exercise as an option, there felt like less of an need to make the most of that once coveted outside time we had (at least for the everyday, non pro athletes among us). Yes, this is a time of global health crisis, which would have no doubt served in making those decisions in some shape or form. But even so, our actions during the earlier stages of lockdown do feel quite different to now, and I wonder if removing some of our choices did serve to help our decision making process.
It will be interesting to see what happens post lockdown. Will the reopening of gyms, fitness studios, swimming pools etc. lead us to a nation that embraces exercise more so? With other non-exercise options soon poised to combat for our attention, will the vast array of options tire us out making us choose not to do any? Or will we fall somewhere in between?
Does this mean that having less choice (and obviously under better circumstances) can be more motivating for us to actually choose? Perhaps we need to take an element of this into the new normal that will be and scale back to be able to achieve more.
Comments