Have you ever found yourself “channel surfing” – looking for a show to watch but struggling to find something interesting even with the vast array of media at your fingertips? Or maybe you have stood in a store aisle, surveying the 10 options of laundry detergent and feeling uncertain which is the best choice? Or perhaps you have felt overwhelmed by the menu at a coffee shop, what to wear to work, whether to “like” a post on social media, or deciding what to cook for dinner?

Daily life is filled with weighing options and making decisions – it is one of the most common things we do! Intertwined with nearly every action of a day, we continually intake information, sort it into something that makes sense, and then choose (or sometimes not choose) the next step forward. And while not always difficult or complex, just the act of sifting through choices can be a taxing process that challenges us daily.

This is true with wellness, too. Each day we face choices and decisions to make about wellness. The world continually throws out fixes and solutions for addressing health and wellness; however, all the input, information, and advice can be difficult to decipher let alone help us decide. We must untangle truth from advertising and science from hopeful thinking; we must consider what is practical and weed out what might be impossible in daily practice. We must also sort through possible consequences, our emotions, and the dreaded fear of missing out.

That’s a lot, and we haven’t even decided what to do!

In fact, while human nature may be to weigh the pros and cons, list all the positive and negatives, examine the rewards and consequences – all to ultimately make the perfect decision – research demonstrates that this most often results in not deciding at all. This phenomenon, known as choice overload, drains the mental energy we have in limited supply and leaves our brains so overwhelmed that we often end up choosing… well, nothing.

To confront the complexity of decision making, then, requires a different approach. When it comes to wellness specifically, one method to tackle decisions is to simplify the process into two steps:

1. Pick one.

2. Press play.

First, while common to want to tackle many areas of wellness or lifestyle changes all at once, it is when we pick one that we have the best opportunity for success. By narrowing focus to one strategy, one habit, or one area of wellness, space is freed up in our brains to attend to the strategy and execute to the best of our ability. Shifting away from finding the best or the most expensive option promising results, picking one area we are compelled to address and pairing it with a strategy we are inspired to try allows us to calm our overactive brains to take meaningful action forward.

That, then, brings us to step two – press play.

Simply put, this means that once the pick is made, we get going. We press play to tackle that strategy, habit, or area of wellness chosen. Rather than agonizing over the possible solutions or being distracted by the “what if’s”, we consciously choose our direction, commit to the choice, and take action. In doing so, we bypass the systems in our brains that want to fixate on all the shortcomings, and we concentrate on making the best of the moment right here and now. In pressing play, we turn energy overinvested in analysis into permission to frame decisions as experiments for exploration.

In all honesty, there is no sense denying that decision making can be hard. When faced with numerous choices, it often seems that our brains short circuit, leaving us feeling fatigued or uncertain. These feelings, however, are not the result of a personal failing or flaw but rather symptoms that it may be time to step back and pause. It is then that we can pick one and press play to make decisions more manageable (and more successful!) as we continue to build the wellness we envision into our everyday.

In what area of wellness are you ready to pick one and press play?