Has it ever happened to you that you spend long periods of the day deciding what to see or what to do thinking about which will be the best option for fear of not choosing correctly? If this is your case, you probably have Phobo .

Making decisions may seem simple , however, many of them can bring us totally different things for our future , perhaps if you had not taken that subway you would not have met your future husband or if you had not decided to go to that city you would not have found that one. wonderful job. We know that our decisions have consequences and therefore it is understandable that we do not take them lightly .

The day is full of small decisions that we must make: what to eat, what time to go shopping, take the car or public transport, start one series or another. However, as simple as these decisions may seem, there are people who get totally stuck and do not know how to continue. This phobia of making decisions and making mistakes has been classified as Fobo, (fear of better options) or what is the same, the fear of not making the right decision . This term was created by the economist Patrick McGinnis. This man was previously recognized for baptizing another phobia, the Fomo, that is, the fear of missing something and obsessing over living more experiences.

About Phobo, the psychologist Xavier Savín said that this kind of phobia is more of a “type of social anxiety” despite the fact that this is a fear for people.

There are more and more cases of FOBO

The main characteristic of this disorder is that it develops only in first-world people : “Both Fobo and Fomo are modern concepts typical of people with a determined life , which allows them to worry about decisions and situations that in more demanding environments they would not do it “, describes Savín.

Likewise, it could also be said that it is a generational problem , this is because with the advancement of technology and society the options we have at our disposal are much greater , in the past if someone wanted to go to a greengrocer to buy apples, I only had one variety, nowadays you can find more than 5. With the advancement of technology and especially shopping on the internet, young people can spend days reading reviews of the same product from different brands, unable to opt for one . What this shows is that we have more to choose from, but we also have less capacity to do so.

According to coach Mónica García ” decision-making becomes more complicated as the number of options increases . Having possibilities makes us feel free , but when the number of options is very large, it can lead to paralysis if we are not very clear about what it is. we want, our preferences or tastes “.

Some studies have indicated that maturity is completely related to the cases of Fobo and that we are not always taught to make decisions but we learn this with experience, this is why if we tend to be negative our experience we it will remember all the times that we made mistakes causing us to block ourselves in the simplest and most stupid decisions. This leads us to awaken the Phobo and we run the risk of not making a decision, always hoping that a better one appears. This situation has also been described as ‘paralysis by analysis’ which has been observed by relying exclusively on data to make decisions leaving aside or not giving importance to intuition “, explains García.

Make a decision

Sometimes it is surprising to realize that people who tend to have complications when making a simple decision, resolve a much more important and serious matter easily, this is due to several factors that determine intelligence, personality and the importance of it. we give to different situations.

A factor to take into account when it is more or less difficult for a person to make a decision is the false myth that the more we think about an idea, the better our decision will be: ” There are people who give a lot of value to thinking and they have to go round and round the subject in question, because they have learned to function that way , out of education, out of fear of error, perfectionism, or high self-demand, among other issues, “says García.

However, this is not true, thinking too much causes us to find ourselves in a state of nervousness and tension which will lead us to not make really good options. The brain works best when it is completely relaxed as the unconscious mind processes information even when your conscious mind is busy.

Avoid anxiety

Once a point has been reached where the Phobo has taken control, the anxiety comes from his hand, which causes it to be difficult for us to get out of it. In this sense, what we must do is rationalize it , for example, those apples may be richer, but these are also good, so I should not worry about this.

In the same way, we have to be aware that when making a decision there is not always a correct option and a bad option, but there are many ways to obtain the same result. It may be that having gone to another country would have brought us better job results , but it may have made us lose a lot of money and not obtain anything, so if we are well in this country we do not have to think that the other option would have been better . Likewise, many of the decisions we make are not immovable , we can always go buy other apples or go to live in another country at another time, what we should not think is that everything in life is black or white since life it is full of nuances.

Finally, we must bear in mind that, if you have Phobo, this implies that there is a large part of personal harassment in which we always throw everything we do to the ground and we tend to think that our decisions are worthless or are never correct. leads us to make others decide for us. This is why apart from relaxing and trying to change the chip, we must learn not to torture ourselves no matter what happens after making a decision.