Feeling sad, disheartened or having no energy are often considered common symptoms of depression. However, it is also important to note that depression can negatively impact a person’s ability to make good decisions. People who routinely have trouble making the smallest decisions like what to eat or whether or not to respond to a message are likely depressed.
Many people find themselves unable to make even simple decisions due to the stress of not making a decision. As time passes after a decision has not been made, the pressure of waiting on that choice continues to build. Using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) as an intervention helps to stop this cycle.
Depression Makes Hard Decisions
A driver of disruption to the decision-making process is depressive symptoms. Depression can alter individuals’ self-worth, self-efficacy, and thought processes. When people experience sadness, they may often think, “I’m going to make the wrong decision” or “I can’t trust my own judgement” or “What I do won’t matter.” As a result of believing these negative thoughts, people experiencing depression view even simple decisions as risky and uncertain.
If you do not trust your ability to make sound decisions, it is normal to question yourself and your abilities more. Typically, overthinking leads to a lack of clarity rather than clarity. Because you are expending so much energy in “figuring it out,” your final conclusion to come up with an answer will not necessarily provide you with confidence or assurance.
The impact of depression may negatively impact an individual’s motivation and decrease their mental energy. It requires effort to make decisions. Evaluating alternatives, weighing consequences, and then making a decision requires brain function. Because individuals who feel depressed may be emotionally drained, the tasks required to decide can be just as tiring.
People with depression may avoid making decisions altogether. This may seem to relieve the pressure, but in the long run, it may create additional problems for themselves. For example, a handful of emails remain unread from an overburdened email inbox; many additional commitments are made and/or broken; missed opportunities present themselves. Subsequently, as these issues increase, they often lead to feelings of guilt, anxiety, and helplessness.
Depression Makes You Focus On Negatives Thoughts
Another contributing factor to the paralysis of decision making with Depressive Disorder is that individuals who suffer from this illness tend to focus on the worst possible outcomes of any given decision to be made. Therefore, someone who suffers from depression may automatically start to think about what could go wrong when they are faced with a decision. This means the potential for failure becomes magnified, and the potential for success is diminished or ignored altogether.
For example, an individual who is thinking about applying for a new job may only focus on how they might be rejected. Similarly, a person thinking about joining a social group may picture themselves feeling awkward or out of place. These negative images make it seem more difficult to take action than it actually is.
CBT helps to defeat paralysis in decision making through a different approach to the cognitive processes that cause paralysis in decision making. CBT teaches individuals to look for and critically analyse their thoughts rather than blindly believing every thought that comes into their mind.
One common CBT cognitive restructuring technique is to identify automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) that you have when you are unable to make a decision. When you feel stuck and unable to move forward because of paralysis in decision making, take a second and try to remember what thoughts you are having during this time. You may find that you have ANTs such as “I’ll mess this up”, “I should know the answer by now”, or “If I choose wrong, I’ll just have to worry more”.
How CBT Supports You
Once you’ve identified these thoughts, CBT has you assess them objectively. What evidence backs up that thought? What evidence contradicts it? Are you only looking at the worst possible outcome? Often, people find that their fears are a lot more about assumptions than they are about reality.
One of the other major principles of CBT is that there are very few decisions that can be considered perfect. Those with depression often experience “all-or-nothing” style of thinking, where all choices are seen as tests in which there is only a right or a wrong answer. The truth is, most of the time you will have multiple levels of acceptable outcomes for your decision.
Learning to let go of perfection will help you reduce the amount of stress you feel in making decisions. You do not want your goal to be to make perfect decisions, you want your goal to be to make reasonable choices based on the information you have at that point in time. CBT also uses behaviour modification techniques so that people are able to take action regardless of their confidence levels. You aren’t waiting for total confidence before you act; instead you start taking small steps to move forward. Confidence is created through action rather than waiting for it to happen before you do anything.
Leave a Reply