Have you ever experienced a moment where you and your partner or your friends are starving at 8 PM, and you open up a food delivery app with full enthusiasm?

At first it feels like a culinary adventure. You scroll down, passing suspicious promos, opening the nearby restaurants tab, looking at 4.8 star ratings, reading people's reviews. Then you switch to another app to compare delivery fees. Fifteen minutes pass. Half an hour passes. Your stomach is rumbling like an old typewriter, but you still have not found the perfect food. And what happens in the end? You just order the usual fried catfish from the street corner.

If you have experienced this, congratulations, you have just become a victim of a psychological phenomenon often called the paradox of choice, which in our case frequently leads to analysis paralysis.

It is highly ironic. Humans always think that having many options makes life freer and happier. But in reality, our brains have a limit for processing information. Just think of your brain as the RAM of an old phone. Given 3 options (fried rice, chicken noodles, satay), your brain can run the evaluation algorithm quickly and in O(1) time. But when given 300 options from all the restaurants in your city, your RAM instantly gets full and outputs a Not Responding status.

According to psychological theory, the more options provided, the higher our expectations skyrocket. We feel that out of those 300 options, there must be one food that is 100 percent perfect: cheap, delicious, huge portion, and arrives in 10 minutes. As a result, we become afraid of making the wrong choice (FOMO). If we order spicy chicken, we might think about sushi. If we order sushi, we might think about egg martabak.

This is what makes your decision making process completely jammed. Your brain gets trapped in an infinite loop searching for an optimal combination that is actually just a mathematical illusion.

So how do you hack your brain's system so you do not get trapped like this again?

The first way is to use the principle of satisficing, not maximizing. Maximizing people are always looking for the best, which is why they easily get stressed. Meanwhile, satisficing people are just looking for options that are good enough. If you are hungry, your criteria are only: makes you full, tastes decent, reasonable price. Once you find something that meets those conditions, checkout immediately! Do not scroll anymore looking for something better.

The second way is to artificially limit your search space. If you are ordering with someone else, make a rule: I choose the app, you choose the type of food (like chicken). So the options are instantly cut by 90 percent. Or make a silly rule altogether: flip a coin, if heads order padang rice, if tails order a burger. Often times, when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you actually want.

The third way is to automate your decision using a default value. Just like code that needs a fallback value if the user does not provide input. Make a default food for when you are confused. If 10 minutes pass without a decision, the default is a level 1 spicy noodle. Problem solved.

The point is, do not take thinking about dinner so seriously that you sacrifice your mental health and drain your phone battery. Food is just fuel for your body so you can continue working on other more important things.

Khay