Problems with making decisions?

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Practically all my life I've had a really hard time making decisions. Even when I was a little kid, I'd throw temper tantrums when I couldn't change my mind on something. Even now, it'll take me a long time going through the grocery store and choose one brand of something over another. It's gotten so bad that I'll take hours deciding what I want to eat and what restaurant I want to go to, what food I want to order off the menu, and even sometimes, I'll change my mind up until the moment the waitress/waiter brings the food to my table.

And when I make a 'bad' decision, I just can't accept it.

i have nightmares about it,

in one that i had repeatedly, i was standing in the aisle of a department store and chosing a lipstick, i just could not make my mind up.
my friends, who were with me in my dream started to mock me and walked off. i was like glued to the shelves and could not avert my eyes from the rainbow of lipsticks in front of me.

the very same thing happens to me in real life, i can only spend a limited time in a supermarket, if i do not have my shopping list and stick to it, i start comparing prices per unit and ingredients, and after a while i just "space" out and get lost between the aisles, .

im terrible at making a decision! even if its a really small one that will have virtually no impact whatsoever. like the other day i was in this shop that sells quirky little things and there were these cool squidgy rubber things that had different colour gels inside. i spent ages trying to decide what size and colour i wanted to buy, and even when back to recheck a few times after 'deciding'. in the end i didnt get one lol. which was probably the right decision because i waste too much money and have too much stuff. but still- pain in the ass

Yeah, choice overload sucks. I've been pretty successful solving the problem by mentally creating a procedure for choosing one thing over the other. The important thing to keep in mind is that, beyond a certain point, making a choice at all matters more than which choice you make; so some degree of inaccuracy is acceptable.

If, for example, I am choosing a breakfast cereal at the store, I may make a mental list of attributes I want the cereal to have (for example, not ridiculously sweet; comes in a normal size rather than family size box; not granola), and then exclude all the ones that don't fit the criteria. If I'm lucky, there's only one left, or only a few. It's easy for me to choose between two or three things; so I really only need the strategies when there are thirty things to pick from. It can get sticky when nothing fits my criteria, though. Then I have to pick which one of the criteria I should drop, and that can be tough.

Choosing between thirty roughly equivalent things is something you encounter on restaurant menus all the time. My standard procedure is to choose between getting a salad, preferably with chicken in it, or else a sandwich of some sort, or else picking whatever the person I am with is eating. If there are no salads or sandwiches, I gravitate toward vegetable-filled things. And if it's a familiar restaurant, I might have experimented enough to know what I like on the menu. So far only McDonald's, Wendy's, and Arby's have that distinction, and I have "standard menus" at all three (chicken ceasar salad; chili and baked potato; and Reuben sandwich, respectively).

I'm getting a lot more flexible as time goes on. Sometimes I don't even have to consciously narrow down the choices to the manageable two to four.

yeah... choice overload....
somehow, when ever i am in, say, a bright, colourful clothes shop, when i pause to make a choice, it suddenly opens up all my senses (suddenly, i can hear and see EVERYTHING, and i get very anxious) and can trigger a meltdown or sensory overload... its really hard to explain. no one understands me when that happens- they just think i am worried because i am trying to decide something! (which is only part of the problem)!