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The ADHD Skills Lab· Staffel 1· Folge 221

Why ADHD Makes You Overthink Every Decision

Dienstag, 27. Oktober 2026 · 1 h 01

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With ADHD, you can spend three days researching a $50 purchase, finally make the decision, and still wonder if you chose wrong. Meanwhile, the important stuff isn't getting done.
Skye and Robbie Waterson unpack a 2012 study from the Journal of Attention Disorders on ADHD, decision making, and regret. The research found that higher ADHD symptom scores were linked to more maximizing, the drive to find the best possible option, and more regret afterward. They explore why trying to avoid the wrong decision can leave you feeling worse even when you make a good one, and how that same pattern can quietly stall progress in your business.
What We Cover:
• Why ADHD can turn a simple purchase into days of research and second-guessing
• How maximizers can get better outcomes but feel less satisfied with their decisions
• Why trying to avoid regret can actually create more of it
• How overthinking small decisions steals time from the work that moves your business forward
• Why setting limits on time, money, and acceptable mistakes can make decisions easier
• What the research can and cannot tell us about ADHD and decision making
Want to grow your business with ADHD?

You can use my free focus filter to manage overwhelm and organize yourself and your team: tinyurl.com/focus-filter

Looking for an ADHD business mentor who's also an operator who'll turn your business into a finely-tuned profit and peace machine designed for your brain?

Book a call and let's assess you're business to see if you're a fit: tinyurl.com/book-a-call-uo

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Members of modern society face a multitude of decisions on a daily basis. Although there can be benefits to that, you know, these days we have so many options to choose from. They found that actually having a lot of choices can lead to pros and cons, basically.

List satisfaction and list motivation.

Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Today we're gonna be talking about decision making. We have a really interesting paper for you. And as always, I am joined by my husband and co-founder Robert Waterson. For that paper, we have a lot of research to get into today.

But before we get started, I wanted to introduce a little section. We'll see if we like it. I want to see what you guys think of or whether you think of your own. But just a sense of some things that we've been encountering that we would like to see improved for ADHD. So you had one related to coffee, Robbie.

Do you want to start with that?

Yeah, I don't think I can blame anyone else for this, but I it's not about blaming.

It's about improving. It's about more ADHD support.

I think I'm gonna have to start bringing my French press to the desk with me so that it doesn't just sit going cold on the counter in the morning and I potentially end up around lunchtime arguing with you and realizing that I haven't had coffee today. That's what's going on.

It's happened more than once. And I think uh but I do think that's kind of a that is one. It would be really nice if, you know, we have these really cool kettles now and they heat up and it would be nice if there was like a coffee pot that once it hit a certain temperature or a certain amount of minutes brewed or whatever it needs, it sent a message to your phone that was like, coffee's ready, come and get it.

Don't forget. Because they always want you to brew. Like it's the same with tea. When I have tea, they're like, leave it for a couple of minutes. But I and I never do it.

It's supposed to be two minutes. I I'm pretty sure I leave it about 20. Yeah. Trying to get trying to get two right.

For myself, I have been working with Claude to try and improve certain systems that I have. So I've got a lot of scheduled, you know, events that are happening, and then I also have it connected to my email. But it would be really nice if when you opened up an interface like Claude, it wasn't just the chat box, it had more of a dashboard style.

So it had kind of like, what's on read? What needs to be done, what's of the scheduled runs that I have are still need to happen. And I know that I'm gonna be able to create an artifact to do that, but it would be really nice if the interface had an option to start like that. Because right now, at this point, opening with a what, you know, let's coffee and conversation sky, what question do you have isn't really how I'm using my AI as much.

It's more like, well, I don't know, Claude, what do you have for me? Because I'm running these scheduled events and things like that.

Yeah, and obviously you can create the dashboard with an artifact now. And I will.

And I will. And I'll probably share it when I've scheduled it, when I've created it. But I think it would be nice as we move closer to a world where Claude is kind of operating as an assistant for it to look like an assistant rather than a chat box. That one's mine. Let us know what you have. Do you have any things in your life that you think could be improved?

Um, you can always email me, Sky Unconventional Organization, if you have any. So the relationship between ADHD symptomology and decision making is what we're going to be talking about today. What does it mean to you to struggle with ADHD and struggle with decision making? And the real reason that we are talking about this paper is actually because decision making came up a lot over the years when I've worked with clients who have ADHD as a big struggle that doesn't really get discussed as much.

Like it's not really heavily in the DSM. There's a few questions you might think are associated with it, but it is surprisingly difficult for people. Executive functioning struggles are related to decision making. And this paper describes one version of this, but you know, and there's other papers that will describe another version that we'll talk about.

But it's a really, really, really good paper. So the objective of this paper was to dis explore the relationship between the symptoms of ADHD. So they were looking at the extent to which college students seek to maximize their decisions and the degree to which they feel regret for their decisions. And what they were theorizing was that if you had ADHD, this was gonna was gonna shift it.

Yeah, I think they uh they had four hypotheses going in. So ADHD symptoms and also internal restlessness, which we'll cover they're very correlated. They were predicting that they would be Yeah. They were predicting that they would people with those symptoms would report more maximizing behavior, more regrets, and that also men would report more ADHD symptoms and internal restlessness and that men would maximize more.

So that's what they were looking that's what they thought was gonna happen in this paper. Okay, cool. So yeah, so why did they want to study decision making in the first place? I mean, I know why I wanted to look up decision making because it's something that I found a lot of clients struggled with, but you know, for them, it was really about this idea of a modern society.

So they were saying that members of modern society face a multitude of decisions on a daily basis. And although there can be benefits to that, you know, these days we have so many options to choose from, especially those of those countries that have Amazon. And we are not one of those countries.

So I always feel like a bit like really so many options. We could be back on Australia.

Yeah, we have we have some. We have some options less than other countries. They found that actually having a lot of choices can lead to pros and cons, basically.

Less satisfaction and less motivation, even.

Yeah.

Like the overwhelm of all those options can be demotivating.

Yeah, yeah. Having, you know, having a lot of options can lead to, you know, internal motivation. You can choose what you want, it can fit you, but it can also decrease, you know, some of the research found that when there's a lot of options, it's gonna reduce the satisfaction and motivation of the people who were making that decision.

It's funny because I thought about our our ice cream example again. I still feel like there's no way to have too many ice cream options. Like it's always I'm always gonna feel good about that one.

I think the reason ice cream gets a pass is because it is low level enough that it's not triggering that desire to maximize.

Yeah, which is actually funny because we're gonna talk about that in another episode in terms of how I work with clients who have this struggle.

I think some people do though. I think there I think there will be a subset of people who get to the front of the line and they still haven't picked a flavor and they're asking to try way too many different testers and they're holding everybody up. And then they get their ice cream and they move away and they're like, I probably should have gone with the other flavor.

This isn't probably what I wanted after all.

Yeah, well, it's it's uh, you know, I I don't know what you guys have, uh, you know, how ice cream works in your country, but in our country, if you go to a nice ice cream store, you can choose to taste test a bunch of different ice cream options. And there's usually like, I don't know, 12, 15 different flavors.

More depending on where you are. Yeah, we have a lot of sort of I think New Zealand is most ice cream consumed per capita.

Yeah, yeah. It's because we eat it in summer and winter. We are we are just every every day is an ice cream day if you live in New Zealand.

We're laughing at the line. We we're coming back in the rain.

Yeah.

Late at night on I spend a Saturday night, and people coming from the drinking like the bars, crossing the road to line up in the rain for ice cream.

It's gotta be done. So they said it's it's funny you mentioned the regret for the ice cream decision because they did say there is an increased opportunity for regret with an increased range of choices. And I mean, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Like I want to stay on the ice cream example. We'll talk about more serious examples in uh in in a minute, but I think it's a fun one to start.

If there was like 35 different ice cream options, I would probably feel regret because I'd be like, I didn't even get a chance to look at them all.

Yeah, they didn't mention it in this paper, but this is very this reminded me of the Paradox of Choice book, which sort of hits on a lot of these same beats, I think. So like decision like decision paralysis, so more options, fewer decisions, fewer sales.

Yes.

The quote from Dan.

It's I think it's just a general business quote. Yeah.

Confused mind never buys.

Yeah, yeah. It's why when you're in a business context, you'll often be offered three options, kind of like the Goldilocks idea. It's like there's the one that's too small, the one that's too big, and the one that's just right, and they're kind of trying to provide you with that idea of choice.

Yeah, and it's important to keep it simple.

Yeah, really, really simple.

And then also sort of opportunity costs. So every option you're passing lowers your satisfaction on the one you pick. And I think kind of related to raised expectations. So lots of choices implies there's there must be a perfect option out there. I think those two tie in together. And then also self-blame.

So with plenty of options, a bad result feels like it's your fault. I think those ID ideas are very much present in this paper.

Yeah, and we were talking about that in relation to dating, because we were saying with the dating apps, there's this idea of like there's so many people and you're never quite going through all of the options. You know, I hear the jokes about people being like, I've reached, you've reached the end of the dating app.

People are like, no more options, that's it, you're done. But I think in in bigger cities you probably don't. And I can imagine that that would make it difficult for you to feel like to feel like you're you're getting you know what you need.

Yeah. But maximizers, the simple definition is they're searching for the very best option, they're spending a lot of time trying to make sure they got the best option. Whereas satisficers are stopping, they're searching until they find the first option that's good enough, and then they're stopping there.

And they're, yeah, something we're going to cover later is how much the maximizers, generally speaking, I think this idea came up because there's this sort of economic idea that people are these very logical agents that will find the best option.

Not without a lot of personal grief if it's too many options.

Yeah, well, this is based on the idea that that's not actually possible. There's too much information. You're never going to get the best option. And so when you try to use this maximizing strategy, you just end up it's a fool's errand and you end up with a lot of regrets. Yeah. Whereas the satisficers are much more satisfied.

Because they only they only searched until they found a good enough option and then they were happy with it.

And they were sort of saying, like, yeah, with this increased range of choices, there is an increased opportunity for regret. And so people are, as a result, developing these decision-making strategies to minimize that regret. And one of the strategies is this maximization. And so that's why this paper is talking about maximization, is because they want to really go ahead and and make that best decision.

So I guess they're sort of describing this as like a modern thing being a maximizer. I wouldn't necessarily I would instinctively disagree with that. I feel like this probably maximizes throughout history, but maybe it's easier to do now or there's more data.

Yeah, I think I think obviously with with more and more options for like different I think the like the paradox of choice sort of talked about the supermarket, like the modern supermarket versus much fewer options in the past. I think overall we have much more options, much more career paths, much, much more everything.

So I think it is a modern problem to a large degree, although I'm sure I'm sure there were instances of it. I mean even dating would have been less overwhelming if you're just in a small town.

I was about to say to go back to our dating example, because that has been happening throughout history. Back in the day, you might have like a village and they were the people in your village and you knew them pretty well. And you sort of had like 10 years to maximize, you know, you got to know everyone really well.

You're like, oh, there's Sally, and Sally fell in the fell in the off the bridge when she was 12, and I remember that. Like you have that level of detail, it's probably easier versus now when you've got dating apps and you're swiping and there's a sense that you just you just don't have enough data, but you have access to enough data, you're like, I could if I just kept looking, I could figure it out, but there's so many options I'm never gonna kind of get there.

But I mean, and I guess to kind of bring it back to ADHD, we'll talk about this in a minute. But if you are somebody who struggles with executive functioning, which is working memory and dopamine and impulsivity and time blindness and all of those things, you are in a position where you might struggle to be somebody who's able to make decisions.

And this is really what we're going to talk about. But you can see it here. I mean, you might forget half the things you know about. If you're the kind of person that forgets people's names and forgets about people, I definitely think that working memory issues probably do feed into this.

This desire to spend longer on a decision and really give yourself a chance to remember the reason. Because I I think we definitely have this. I've definitely had regret for a decision that I made, and I forgot I'd already decided to do something else, or I already had a solution for that thing, and I've resolved it in a different way.

And then I'm just like, what a waste of time. That's so annoying. And I can imagine that feeds back into let's just take a little bit longer, let's really make sure that we haven't forgotten anything, that we're not missing anything.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not as helpful. They were looking at this idea of maximizers versus satisfizers. So they found that, you know, people who are maximizers, they want to maximize their search for the best options. People who are satisfizers will stop when they encounter something that hits their acceptable threshold or good enough.

It's worth mentioning here that satisficers are not people who are just like settling, settling or or picking a suboptimal option. Like they are generally picking an option that they're like, if you go back to the ice cream example, they're going like, Oh, I love I love chocolate ice cream. I'll go with chocolate.

And people are like, but what about all of the other options that you haven't tried or thought about? And they're like, Yeah, I love chocolate. And then they're just getting chocolate and they're happy, you know? So that's it's worth mentioning it because I think sometimes when you think about the word satisfiser, it feels at least when I on first reading to me, it felt like settling.

The satisfacing is not settling. It's not, it's not, yeah.

Distinguish it because we're gonna look at another couple papers next week, probably, uh, which is are more around the sort of an impulsive snap decision, which would be sort of under evaluating. And that's not what satisfies are doing. They are they're searching kind of the optimal amount to find an option that's good enough.

They're accepting a reasonable level of risk that this is not the best option. But when they see that next, that better option, they'll be like, oh yeah, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Like, oh, that would have been better. But I don't have a huge amount of regret about it because I accepted that was quite likely to be true X percentage of the time, but I didn't spend all this time trying to avoid that.

And so I'm I don't have all the regret of having really tried to avoid that outcome and then still have failed.

Mm-hmm. 100%. 100%.

I think a better example is something that's actually mutually exclusive. So introvert and extrovert, you can't find if you're trying to find someone, there's this paradox of choice makes you think, yeah, this is back to like the raised expectations idea that the perfect option exists, and you start trying to get perfection on multiple things that are actually trade-offs against each other.

And so, introvert and extrovert, for instance, um, someone who's really outgoing and spontaneous and is going to handle all the extroverted size side of your social life, and then you also want someone to be at the same time introverted and maybe good at handling all of your taxes or scheduling or whatever.

These things are they're somewhat mutually exclusive. There's lots of personality traits like that, where just because these different options exist doesn't mean you can find them all in one person, which is another, I guess, trap that maximizers will fall into.

So let's talk a little bit more about maximizers then. They talk a little bit about maximizers having the goal of appraising each option as making the best choice, which is kind of what we talked about. But also, they talked a little bit about the idea that maximizers really struggle with regret. So the idea of maximizing is to avoid regret, right?

You want to pick the ice cream that tastes the best so you don't regret wasting money and buying the wrong one and not enjoying it as much. You want to pick the person that's gonna be the best person for you because you don't want to regret it. You want to pick the best technology, we'll talk about technology probably later, career path.

And they talk about, I thought it was interesting here that they mentioned cars, yeah. But they're saying that, you know, when all of the alternatives can't be examined, which is which is a really common thing in modern society, maximizers are forced to give up the sour the search and simply choose. I don't think they've really met maximizers.

They say that I know a lot of maximizers who will never give up the search and will never choose.

And so there are There is a point at which you get so overwhelmed trying to sort of swallow the ocean of all the little nuanced differences. Like I think TV is a probably a good example of this, but there's so many different, different little variables that you could maximize on. And at some point you get kind of overwhelmed with it all, and you just go, like, okay, I'm pretty sure like I'm just gonna have to commit to one of these.

I disagree. I've seen a lot of people, because obviously with my job, like I see a lot of people go years without really making a decision. Uh because they're like, Well, you know, I could make this decision, but I I just I don't know if it's the right one. And then that that'll be their thought process and they'll stop there.

So I I just want to flag that when they talk about this.

So just the decision paralysis.

Yeah. Unless somebody's really forcing them to choose. I've seen people go years without making a decision.

I don't want to keep bringing it back to dating. But I suppose that is the like you aged out, still waiting for Mr. Perfect.

Yeah, yeah. It could mean that you you spend a lot more years figuring it out than you want. But it could even be something as simple as picking picking where to live. Like I've seen people, you know, spend years in a suboptimal situation because they can't figure out the best perfect one for them.

I and I imagine this is one of those situations where the decision either ends up getting made for you or it um you almost age out of the decision even being relevant. Um and so that'd be like I think with where to live or what career path to choose, you can imagine they eventually get to the point where they just regret that they never went and restudied and they just but they feel like it's too late now.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I see a lot of that. So yeah, they're sort of saying like being a maximizer, being forced to give up the search and simply choose, or I would argue sometimes never choosing and having that be the answer. That they never if it if it's some situation we have to make a new decision, never having made that decision.

This can actually cause it can be a choice too.

Yeah. Not this can cause them to feel the regret that they initially sought to avoid. So that there's this idea of how do you know if there isn't a better alternative? And they sort of saying that, you know, in contrast, this concept, which is from Schwartz and colleagues in 2002, if satisficers have met the criteria for choice, increased options might just be ignored.

So they might say, so let's say it's the ice cream idea, and you are with a satisficer, and they go, Yeah, chocolate sounds great. I love chocolate ice cream, popular ice cream choice, let's go for it. And then they you're like, oh, we didn't see this, but there's actually like 10 different ice cream, more ice cream flavors than we even saw.

They're like around the corner. Do you want to check those? A satisficer is gonna go, like, no, I'm happy with the with the chocolate. And a maximizer is gonna be like, Are you crazy? You didn't check all the other ones, but then they're the ones who are now more stressed and potentially feeling more regret.

According to this theory, I would totally check the new ice cream.

Well, I'm trying to reduce the amount of maximizing decisions I'm making.

You're a recovering maximizer.

The ice cream example is a trivial example because obviously the vast majority of people who even the vast majority of people who struggle with maximizing aren't going to get hung up on every little thing. So there's an example later on about something in the in the paper about there's not a lot of people maximizing which ice tray they buy for their fridge kind of thing.

But when it gets to the appliance level, that's when you start to see it come out in people where they're like, oh, well, I could get this coffee machine, but this one might be better, yada yada.

I often think it's a price thing, and we'll get in into it a little bit about age and things like that. I do think, you know, one of the reasons people will max maximize is the opportunity cost of the max of the decision. So yeah, so they talked about this idea of uh satisficing versus maximizing, growing out of the traditional economic theories belief in humans as rational beings.

And Simon actually disagreed that human beings have well-ordered preferences and that one compares options on a single scale of preference and argued that, you know, it's the goal of maximizing is virtually impossible due to the limitations of human information processing. And I will say, have you ever met AI?

No, I'm kidding. It's actually making it worse, but it is funny that this paper is obviously written pre-AI, and so there's this sense of like it's impossible because how would we ever process this much information? And we now live in an age where theoretically we could process this much information, but I don't think I don't think that I don't think it helps.

I think it gives us more stuff to search and double check.

Which by the way, Simon is uh a couple of papers from 1955 and 1956. Yeah, AI is an interesting one. I I think one of those first years of AI, ChatGPT offered a one-year recap of what you'd done that year, and it gave me most likely to turn a purchase into a project, which is like very indicative that I uh struggled with this issue.

Yeah, I would say it's definitely a tool that can let you go even harder into maximizing and looking at all the different options. I think you I I don't think the tool itself is a problem though, because you could also start as a satisficer, delegate to AI, and just say, find me the best option, you know, within reason, maybe set up a skill to help you do it a little bit better.

But you could get to the point where you just went like, oh well, I put zero effort into that decision. It was under a threshold of money that I'm not worried about if it's not optimal. I just delegate that decision to. AI now, it does a whole lot more research than I would ever bother to do.

So what you're saying is there is hope for maximizers. We're going to use technology to fight technological advancements.

I think the technology just lets you be more of whatever you are, potentially.

Yeah, no, that's very true. That's very true. And he they did say, you know, there are people who will continue to seek the goal of maximization. They want the best possible result. They tend to be they said they tend to be concerned with their position relative to others and have higher levels of what is considered acceptable.

Um, as a recovering maximizer, how do you feel about this idea of being more concerned with your position relative to others, like status comparison?

I think it makes sense because you're talking about something that's correlated with regret. And like comparison is the thief of joy, I think is the saying that matches with that. Is if someone's struggling with regret, they're almost certainly struggling with comparison as well. It I did think that was interesting.

It felt like a bit of a throwaway comment.

I I was thinking about it a little bit more because I've heard the expression that expression before, and I know like I can put guardrails on my on my thinking. I can catch myself when I'm thinking, uh when I'm engaging in comparison and just go, oh, I shouldn't do that. I know that that's a dumb thing to do, it just makes you unhappy.

But I think what maximizing is is you're comparing with alternate timeline versions of yourself. So you still there's still a comparison as the people.

You're having status, status games with yourself.

Yeah, you're comparing with other theoretical versions of your choices. So it is the it's the same kind of thing. And even if you know doing it with other people is toxic, you're not catching necessarily that you're doing it with yourself.

You're sort of like, oh, future me would have such a cooler experience if they had this thing, it would be so much better.

Yeah, you're sort of looking back and being like, if I'd done this decision instead. I mean, there's a lot of that, like hindsight is 2020. You know, it's very easy to look back and kind of go, this is the this would have been the perfect life path. Yeah. And I'm in this shitty timeline that wasn't perfect.

Yeah, no, I I think that's interesting. It also talks here about the freezer ice tray versus appliance option.

We did want to separate maximizing from having standards. So one of the reasons we didn't we one of the reasons we've gone with a French press is just because we didn't want to have our everyday drink having boiling water going through like plastic piping.

That is true. Yeah, yeah. We we worry about plastics and things.

So like the idea of those little pods and things. Yeah, yeah. But having different flavors every day and getting you know, talk about adding unnecessary choice into your life. But from what I could tell, all the models that we could see were sort of violating this putting hot water through plastic and putting hot water through soft plastic in particular.

Yeah. So we never found an example. So yeah, I would say that that's probably probably true. I think the things you put in your microwave these days, uh, you know, we have different standards about like it has to be not like melty plastic and like things like that, obviously. So there's different, there's different levels at which people will make a decision about something even as simple as an ice tray.

But most of all, most for most people, there is a a limit at which they're like, right, okay, this is where I'm gonna become a maximizer if I am.

There's a spectrum of where this is kicking in. There'll be a threshold. I think they actually mentioned later on that they that's something to investigate is what what is the threshold for when this starts to kick in. And like you were saying earlier, I think it is tied probably to your means.

Yeah. Like I think so.

How much I think it might be one of those things where you'd be surprised how low that threshold can get if someone is sort of engaging in this and it becomes more and more of a habitual sort of rumination where you really can get these very visceral feelings of regret over over quite trivial things.

Yeah, probably. I think there it is worth saying that maximizers report more regret and depression and less optimism, happiness, and life satisfaction. So when they looked at the research, you know, being a maximizer, it didn't necessarily lead to negative outcomes with the things that they focused on.

Like it's not like you're spending times on decisions and and ending up with a worst decision.

Yeah. In fact, they were actually making they're probably making better decisions. That's that's is the goal of what they're trying to do. And they're putting more effort into the decision and they probably are getting a better outcome.

I think um 20%.

Yeah. I think this is a previous study of theirs. Found that, yeah, maximizers had sort of a 20% higher starting salary, but they were also less satisfied, more pessimistic, more anxious and worried, more overwhelmed and more depressed. Yeah.

I mean, I would take the 20% less.

I think that trade-off is worth it.

Yes. Yeah, and so what they're finding is that, yeah, if we talk about the decisions that you make in life, you can make the perfect decision, but it sometimes comes at a cost. And it mostly hurts the person who's doing it. So I was talking about this in terms of when we think about ADHD, often we think about impulsivity, and impulsivity, impulsive decisions can obviously have a negative effect on the person.

It can also have a negative effect on the people around the person if they make a an ill-considered decision that sort of hurts other people or doesn't consider them. But actually making the perfect decision could end up hurting the person, the individual who's making the decision more because it comes with this this regret and other negative outcomes.

Yeah, you were saying that you think that might be why it's a less obvious um I mean, not that this is again, without spoiling the results, it's not hugely correlated with ADHD, but it is significantly correlated with ADHD. And you're saying like the reason this wouldn't be picked up as easily is because it's less it's less impactful on other people.

Sort of the idea of it's the it's the extroverted ADHD boy in school who's just disrupting the class that's getting picked up much earlier, even in in the history of the DSM, than the inattentive.

Yes. I historically I it's you know the idea is how much it's affecting other people in a way that can be seen, and usually that's the thing that gets picked up the most.

They do mention in the introduction as well, and they're referencing Janice and Mann, that they have found regret is likely to affect one's decision-making when significant people in your life expect you to delay deciding until all the alternatives have been evaluated. So I I think they're basically saying there that having a maximizer in your life who expects maximizing behavior of you will they can almost transfer that regret onto you.

Well, which I've definitely experienced. I and I suspect I've done to you on a lot of occasions.

I feel like that has been the case. Yeah.

We were just talking about how you will have experienced this from me.

Yeah, a little bit. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but yeah, I would say sometimes I I'm like not ready to share a buying decision with you right off the bat, or I buy something and I don't necessarily share it with you because it's like then we have to go through all of the options and I just want to buy the one that I like.

Yeah. Yeah, it's still a little bit of a point of contention, I think. We had it with the headset purchase recently. I sort of caught myself and I was like, this is a $50 decision. It doesn't even matter that much.

And it was wrong because I thought I was getting wired headphones, and I literally went to a store and asked for wide headphones, and they pointed me to the headphones, and I bought something that had a wire picture and they weren't wired, they were like connected, and it was Bluetooth. Um but they're great.

They work, I'm happy with them, they they look funny in the podcast, but it's fine.

It's a weird example because here's a weird example.

I Well, it's a weird example because both decision-making struggles happened at the same time.

Like your desire, you want to No, yeah, it's it's a weird example because I it was tied into a bunch of other stuff. Uh there were other decisions that I didn't want to shop for that day because I wanted to put some more thought into them. The thing I did want to sit on with this does it affect other people?

Is I yeah, I think they only give a line to this, just saying they've noticed that having a maximizer effectively in your life leads you to experience more regret. I think this is one of those things that can be transmitted. I think that they're sort of saying maximizing is a maladaptive strategy for avoiding regret.

And I think it's if you have a maximizer in your life, especially a parent, they will review your decision, your purchases, your whatever, find them lacking, have wanted to have they'll have wanted to either have gotten involved or to have had you fully explore the option space and have made the perfect decision.

They'll give you all of that regret, and then you'll be sitting there with all this regret, thinking you've done a bad job with the decision. And I think it then can lead to you sort of you're copying it. I think it's one of those things you can pass on. It reminds me of negative self-talk, where you don't have to be criticizing a child, but you can be role modeling negative self-talk, and the kid will watch that, see it, and they'll start, they'll they'll internalize that's how I should treat myself.

Yeah, I definitely think you can you can role model maximizing. So the degree to which, so they talked about here the reason that they wanted to look at this, and the reason that for a lot of you this is probably starting to feel very relevant or like things you've experienced in the past, is they wanted to understand the degree to which cognitive factors are associated with maximizing and regret.

They're saying, okay, we know maximizing and regret are connected, but what are the cognitive factors? And obviously, if you want to talk about cognitive factors, boop boop, ADHD, we are the kings and queens of executive functioning struggles. So they wanted to know if characteristics such as impulsivity or internal restlessness or other things uh associated with ADHD were also associated with maximizing and regret, and whether individuals who had ADHD symptom symptomologies, so they were looking for symptoms here, were at a greater risk for this type of decision making.

But they were wondering about this particular group, and they said they were wondering about this particular group pursuing in pursuing higher education. I would say it's also probably because higher education people are easier to do these assessments on.

Yeah, they're sort of the captive population that you can rope into doing studies.

This was a, I think it was, yeah, undergraduate students at a university, which is like classic psychology class undergrad. I was a psychology class undergrad, and I was I was one of these people who did these kinds of studies. It is worth mentioning though that they did they there has been some research in to ADHD and decision making for children.

So they did, they did have some research on ADHD and decision making in children. So they said children with ADHD have not been found to have significant deficits in decision making. That was interesting. So they had already found that this wasn't the case with children, and now they were gonna look at it with university students.

This is related to, I think they were saying there's not a lot of research on it, but preliminary studies have found that adults with ADHD are often impulsive when making decisions and to typically select more unfavorable options. So that's what that's in relation to.

What we were looking at as part of the method was they had 275 undergraduate students at the university located in the Pacific Northwest. These were undergraduate undergraduated psychology students, and they most of them were from introductory to psychology courses. Like I said, I really, really relate, I have been exactly in that position.

And they they actually recruited people ranging from 18 to 47 years, so it's quite a big range, but the majority were traditional college students m aged between 18 and 22 years. 41% were male and 58% were female, and um, most of them were single. And actually, only 5%, 5.9% of them said that they had an ADHD diagnosis.

And that didn't really matter in this study. They were looking for ADHD symptomology. So, in terms of how they did this, it was a lot of answering questions, questionnaire kind of study. So they were answering the adult rating scale, the internal restlessness scale, the max regret scale, and they were, you know, going through and saying how they felt about different things.

So they had the ADHD measure, which I mentioned, which was the ARS rating scale, which is 25 self-report items built from the DSM and a higher score equals more symptoms. And then they talked about internal restlessness. So that was 24 self-report items. So they were looking for internal distractability, restlessness, impulsivity, and disorganization.

And basically, what they were doing here is they were talking about restlessness and they were gonna, they were gonna link it later to ADHD. I kind of found it I still find it strange that the paper decided to randomly put restlessness in here. I get it because they I guess this isn't an ADHD paper. This is a paper looking at things that are related to decision making in general.

Yeah. I think from memory they've already found an association with internal restlessness and either maximizing or regret or both. And I think also, and they find it in here, but the internal restlessness and the ADHD or the adult rating scale for ADHD are very correlated. So they're sort of similar but not quite identical concepts, and then they're running both to sort of see if the correlation is stronger with one or the other.

So they had the internal restlessness scale, then they had the max regret scale, which was a self-report scale that evaluated people's inclination to maximize, and then the regret scale was a five-item measure that assessed their propensity to feel regret. So they were asked questions such as renting videos is really difficult.

I'm always struggling to pick the best one, which is funny because it sort of ages this study a little bit because renting videos is not really a thing that we do anymore. But we still probably struggle to pick the the best one to watch because there's a lot more options now.

Yeah, I think there'll be people struggling to find something they want to watch on Netflix and scrolling through and then eventually watching something and being dissatisfied at the end of the night.

For some people, scrolling through and not watching anything is the event. Sort of like the original shorts.

I've definitely found myself spending too long on that and then just being like, I didn't have that long to have a break and I've wasted half of it.

Yeah, yeah. And then their regret scale is when I think about how I'm doing in life, I often assess opportunities I've passed up. Questions like that. So they wanted to see, so they were looking for people who were generally considered satisficers, and then those who were considered um maximizers. So they sort of had a group of people in the middle who were just average, and then on one side you had your maximizers, and then the other side you had your satisficers, and that's what they were doing.

I think the long and short of the findings is one, the ADHD rating and the internal restlessness rating were highly correlated, which is confirmation of another paper from 2020 that that had already found that link.

Um So if you have ADHD, uh unsurprisingly, you're also more likely to have internal restlessness.

Yeah. And then the relationship between ADHD and maximization and regrets.

It was significant.

It they're all significant findings, but the the relationships are sort of small to moderate. So it's not like every ADHD person struggles with maximizing. It's not even like half of them do, but there's a there's a you know, maybe 10% are having this this issue. There, they're there's a correlation between maximizing and regrets and ADHD.

There's a correlation between maximizing and regret and internal restlessness.

So they're kind of saying that if you are the kind of person, if you have ADHD, there is a significant correlation between having ADHD, being more likely to maximize, and also more likely to feel regret. But there is a greater the this um relationship is greater if you are the kind of person who has ADHD, which is linked to internal restlessness, which makes you more likely.

So it's like a particular kind of ADHD symptoms, which is the internal restlessness that that is linked. It's kind of a lot of, I will say this is a lot of correlated linking things. Yeah. It just, it's, it's very this paper is very, I would say the biggest critique I have of this paper is it's very much like playing fast and loose with symptomology in a way that like obviously we wouldn't do if we were diagnosing ADHD.

No, but I think that's just a limitation of all the papers in the space. It's very hard to it's it's hard enough to get 275 students to take the 25 item ADHD scale, let alone to have them all get a formal diagnosis. It's sort of a it's just a it's it's a limitation we have to deal with with research.

Yeah, I guess that is true. That is true. It's just worth mentioning.

And they are that yeah, they're all correlated. I think our values of 0.26 for maximization and ADHD versus 0.35 for internal restlessness with maximization.

So if you're not a mathematician, that just basically means that you're more likely to the correlation is stronger for internal restlessness than it is for ADHD.

Another way you could say it is that if you're ADHD but you don't struggle with the symptoms listed in the internal restlessness as much, then this is probably less likely to be an issue for you.

Whereas if that's if you really if you And for those of you who are wondering if you do struggle, like for those of you who are like, right, go back, what do you say about internal restlessness? Like, is this a thing that I struggle with? Internal restlessness involved things like internal distractability, which is really related to I would say ADD or like inattentive ADHD.

That's the one in particular that I am just Oh, okay, because when they said internal restlessness, I was like, I don't I don't really know what they mean by that. But internal distractability, yeah, okay, 100%.

Yeah, yeah. They also called talked about internal impulsivity and internal disorganization. Internal impulsivity, I I would be I have no idea like what that is. How do you you're internally impulsive? Like, what are you doing? Like your thoughts are impulsive, you're jumping around, maybe.

Okay, fair. No, that actually, yeah, that does make sense. So like rumination would be maybe internal impulsivity. I mean, we should double check and look it up, but this that would make a lot of sense. You thinking on these past decisions, it's not useful thinking, it's sort of this rumination behavior.

And so if you struggle with internal impulsivity, you're sort of accidentally finding yourself back thinking like because I and that that is how I would experience maximizing regret is the decision's already been made. It doesn't make sense to still be thinking about it, but you you are you're still hunting for like the better option because you didn't actually get to finish that maximizing behavior.

You had to cut it short. You had to sort of at 80% or at at the point at which you realized you had spent $200 worth of time trying to make this decision on a $500 purchase, you realize, okay, I have to lock something in. And you did it, but you you're struggling to let go of wishing you could have found the best option.

Yeah, and and it's worth mentioning as well. Like we are gonna talk the next our next episode that that Robbie and I do is gonna be on the strategies to solve this. So if you're listening to this and you're going, okay, that's me. Thanks, guys. We actually are doing what the research doesn't, and we do have a strategy we've been teaching for years that we'll talk about to help with this.

They do briefly speculate it uh in the discussion, I think, that having a heuristic is a good way to get around it. They didn't they didn't mention one in particular, but that is basically what you're doing. Yeah.

We have a heuristic and we will talk about that. Okay, so what did they find then? So overall, uh one of the things that they found that was really interesting.

It was the sample was slightly skewed towards maximizing. And I think they speculated that that could be because it's a student population and they're younger.

Aaron Powell One of the things that they found was um, yeah, like they had a greater percentage reporting more maximizing, and that they also found in this was more in past research, that older adults are less likely to seek information when faced with a decision and to perform less exhaustive analysis.

So they were sort of wondering if maybe the reason they had more maximizers was because of this age thing. And this was just a theory that they had. I think that they might be right, but my guess, and because this is the you know, at this point we're just guessing based on research when you get to a discussion.

So feel free to have your own guesses. Is that it's because the opportunity cost of decisions is lowered when it comes to financial monetary decision making. So if you're asking questions around choosing a video, you're like, well, whatever, we'll just pick three. And you know, that's probably more confident in your tastes.

But I yeah, I think your point about having more resources, I think must play into this.

I feel like we don't talk about having more resources enough when we talk about things like age. I think it makes a big difference when I think about decision making now. Like we talked about those headphones, right? Yeah, I went in and picked those headphones. I would not have done that when I was 20.

I would have spent a lot more time. When I bought my first pair of really nice headphones, that was a long time. I I read a bunch of magazines because that was a thing at the time to figure out which ones were the Best. And I still kind of bought the ones I liked, but you know, at least I tried.

I would suspect you I think resources must be a component of this. I I do think as you get older, I'd like to think you self-reflect a little bit and you realize this maximizing strategy isn't accomplishing its its goal.

I don't know. We know a lot of older maximizers.

Philly people sort of pick up little heuristics and things along the way. They they learn little techniques for becoming more efficient with their time. I think it's also one of those things where you get more time obligations put on you and you start to have to find heuristics for making decisions faster.

So I I would assume there's a component of that with the older people struggling with maximizing less. But yeah, you're right that resources will just mean a lot more decisions are more trivial.

I think the opportunity costs shift. Like there's less, you know, opportunity costs. I think the older you get, the more opportunity costs are about time. And so I care way more about my time than about my money. So I would spend a lot of time. I would spend I would spend maybe if it was a decision that was going to take my time, I would spend more time on it.

But then I also am aware that just decision making itself takes up a lot of my time.

So I think that's a great way of putting it, is that at 20 you can spend a day.

Yeah. It's fun. I'll spend a whole weekend planning a thing. Yeah.

Becoming an expert in this piece of tech and then making a decision that you're going to be hopefully happy with, although at the research would say no, you're actually going to be less satisfied because you spent longer on it. That was the sort of naive idea behind maximizing. And as an adult, or the older you get, the more I think the the more you are aware you have limited time left and your time is actually more valuable than the optimizing of this of these decisions.

I think you become time poorer and you're also increasingly aware you have less time left.

unknown Yeah.

Yeah. It's not just this long road in front of us of forever time. Yeah.

I'm I'm like 37. I'm like, oh, it's for time comes for us all.

So then and then they talk about the idea that yeah, we're not we're not talking about people who are maximizing every usually it's a threshold. And then yeah, people who t who um tend to be more perfectionistic are likely to feel regret when their unrealistically high expectations did not come to fruition.

It's very hard to make a perfect decision that you feel perfectly satisfied with.

Yeah.

Which is sad, but it is reality.

No, but this whole thing is perfectionism.

It's you're not thank you. I sorry, it's just I agree with you because when I initially started researching decision making, I started researching perfectionism, and then they were like, There's no papers on perfectionism and decision making. And I'm like, there is, this is a they just because they don't talk about it as perfectionism, it's not what it's happening here.

Yeah, yeah. I because you're trying to find the perfect choice. Yeah.

You're maximizing.

You're wanting to perfect the utility of the money you're spending on decisions or or you know, not it won't all be money, but and I will say that is my one uh critique of this paper.

I think it's just the thing about papers is is that there is a sometimes papers I think get siloed into their own language, and the term perfectionism, the terms rumination are really missing from this paper. There's no discussion about it because they're focused on Schwartz's like Schwartz their their theory and what that is and maximizes.

But really, we're talking about perfectionism when we're talking about rumination. Like that is really and there's a lot of there's a lot of research about that that isn't included in this study.

Yeah, they define regrets, but I don't think they and obviously they've linked it to internal impulsivity. I think at some point we're just like, we're just talking about rumination and regrets.

Yeah, yeah. There is a feeling like they're sort of siloed in their own academic space and there's another academic space doing a very similar thing right next to them. Which is some which is really common. That's just what academia is often. You can't read everything about everything.

I had a related thought to the perfectionism idea as well, regarding that experience of getting to the end of the week and feeling that you didn't get enough done and you didn't accomplish the goals that you had for that week. Sort of ADHD time blindness or sort of estimation, time estimation issues combined with that sort of perfectionism idea again.

It's not super relevant to this paper, but I just had a little note about that.

Yeah, I think it was it was interesting. So they kind of bring up a lot of the things we talked about in the introduction here as well. I think what was the most interesting is they the things about why this might be happening. So why is there a relationship between internal restlessness and regret? And they said it might be, you know, a high level of intrusive thoughts and a constant flow of ideas may manifest itself in continually reconsidering your choices, which again is basically saying rumination.

Like it's like it's like they're playing that game where you can define the thing, but you can't say the word. It really is rumination. But it would make sense if you have uh primarily in attentive ADHD. You are probably more like, you know, we talk about distract, getting distracted, having a lot of internal thoughts.

One of the things, one of the reasons that I teach the heuristic that I'll teach in the next episode. So if you guys want to know, like check out for that one. So yeah, I thought it was interesting that they said there was a correlation between internal restlessness and regret. And they basically said individuals who experience a high amount of internal restlessness experience regret.

But one of the potential reasons for this is a high level of intrusive thoughts and constant flow of ideas may manifest itself through continual reconsideration of one's choices, which feels very similar to this idea of rumination. It feels like they're playing that game where you have to say the, you have to describe the word without saying the word.

And the word is is rumination in this context. They're continually rethinking their decisions, they're they're second guessing. And again, that feels very similar to to inattentive ADHD primarily, because there is that idea of like I get distracted by my own thoughts, you know, that kind of stuff. So I thought that was an interesting potential reason for for why this was happening when it came to internal restlessness.

They also considered that it might have to do with stimulation seeking. So maybe people who seek mental stimulation may determine that considering all of their options when making decisions is a productive way to spend their cognitive energy. I didn't really agree with that because I I think it's it might be more of an impulsive decision.

It's not a I guess dopamine is a funny one. I mean, we will fight with people on Twitter for dopamine, so you can't really say what people will will do with dopamine. But I I when I've spoken to clients about decisions, they don't they don't ruminate on decisions for fun. They ruminate on decisions usually because they're not actually coming to a point and writing it down.

And so they'll lose it in their working memory and they'll now find it again. So they'll sort of a decision decisions are often considered, this is kind of what I'll talk about in the next episode. Decisions are kind of thought of as a thing that you do in the background. It's not a thing that you sit down and really focus on.

And that can make it hard with when you have a working memory struggle.

I agree. If I'm working, I will jump into a chat to antagonize my friends because I'm bored and that's more interesting. If I'm stopping work to think about a decision that I know I have to make tomorrow and I want to like research it further, I'm not doing that because it's fun. It's not a source of dopamine.

It's I'm doing that because I'm like anxious or or I'm yeah, it's I don't think it's coming.

And maybe for some other people it is a source of dopamine. I'm not sure. Um it's possible.

Yeah, I mean, sure. It's not my experience of it. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah. So then they talked a little bit about other other reasons.

So you're either anxious that you're going to make the wrong decision or your anxiety feels like it's not quite the right word, but I think it is, it's kind of an anxiety of it's an anticipation of regret. Um, which they actually mentioned in here as well. It's the end you're having anticipatory regret, and then you're also regretting it after the fact as well.

The anticipatory regret is not dopamine. You're not seeking it out for that reason.

When we get into the limitations of this paper, a lot of it are just kind of what you would expect. So they said, you know, it's a small sample of college students, it's not a valid representation of the population as a whole, which I think is very fair and a really common um limitation of a lot of research.

Other than that, you know, there was about self-reporting. And the other conversation we have a lot is okay, this is what people think. This is what people feel about themselves when they make decisions about video games and well, sorry, not video games, like getting out of video at the super at the store.

But it might not be accurate to what other people perceive. Maybe it's worse. Maybe maximizers, there's some maximizers who are like, no, I'm doing really fine, actually. And everyone else is like, they're really not, you know. And maybe there are some people who feel like they take too long and they have a lot of regret, and other people are like, yeah, you're just being a bit hard on yourself.

And that's kind of, I would say the limitations that they talk about here are kind of the limitations of of a lot of research. Like they're very, they're very general limitations. It's not specific to these papers. And then they also talked a little bit about, you know, it appears as if the effects of experiencing ADHD are similar to the effects of seeking to maximize when making decisions.

A number of studies have found individuals with ADHD report lower self-esteem and more symptoms of depression than people without ADHD. So there is a bit of a conversation about like, are you more likely to experience regret because you are maximizing, or are you more likely to experience regret because you have the symptoms of ADHD and people with ADHD are more self-critical in general?

And we lower so Yeah, and we know this, and they don't specifically speak it to it here, but you know, we know for other research that people with ADHD are more likely to receive criticism and therefore more likely to become self-critical as they get older. We just do things differently, and so we have more opportunities for regret, basically.

I do think there is just a negative feedback loop in there. I think the answer's yes. Like your ADHD, you're more likely to have faced a lot of criticism, you're more likely to be hard on yourself or the weaknesses of that neurodiversity. You've almost got this like habit of regrets. Yeah. And then maximizing is a maladaptive strategy for reducing regret that ironically leads to more regret.

And then it just feeds back.

In a later episode, we will be talking about a just ADHD decision making and we will be talking about labs studies. So for those of you who are like, oh, you're right, decision making and um and this is just a you know, a couple of questionnaires for people, we will be going through some more experimental studies into decision making in ADHD as well.

Overall, how do you feel about this paper, Robbie? Because you like you said, you're a recovering maximizer. I think this is more relevant to you, and then later paper is more relevant to my style of decision making.

Yeah. No, this is a very good explanation of thing that I've struggled with that I'm trying to stop doing. And yeah, like I said, I think it is a learned behavior.

But I also think, to be fair, to you know, it's a learned behavior, but I also think that like I said we just we just touched on people with ADHD, do do things differently, they are more likely to be told they're doing it wrong. You can kind of see how someone would start to want to maximize all of the they wouldn't want to make the wrong decision if you're in that circumstance.

I'm just thinking about the importance of not passing it on though, because I think you really can project your regret over someone else. You can you can do this for other people as well. And for our own kids, it's really important that I'm not doing this and that I'm teaching them satisfacing behavior and also not just teaching it but but role modeling it and uh practicing it myself.

But I think it's something I've been working on. I think it's something that you helped me with, just sort of recognizing when you're I think I think the I think it's one of those bad like mental health practices you can get into, just this visceral feeling of regret over over waste. It's one of those things it's not helpful.

Like one, like they said, you're you're you're ruining your subjective experience or a small amount of objective optimization. It'll often spill onto, I think, your spouse and probably your kids. And I think just siblings, friends. I think it's an easy thing to if someone comes to you with a decision, they don't want to hear how it wasn't quite optimal in this very like visceral sort of, oh like that, uh, you could have done this, you this could have been done better.

Like, no one wants to hear that. The decision was good enough. We don't need to be perfectionistic about every little decision.

In some ways, you're taking away someone's dissatisfaction. Oh sorry, you're taking away someone's satisfaction.

Yeah, you're stealing their satisfaction by forcing them to compare their current choice with a slightly more optimized choice. It's it's a really unhealthy habit.

And I think that's one of the reasons I really like this paper. This paper really does speak to something that is very real for a lot of people and a lot of people with ADHD that doesn't get discussed a lot. And I think it's one of those papers where if you listen to it, you know, as you guys are listening to it and we're reading it, you can feel really seen and really understood in a way that you weren't before, and you have a piece of knowledge that now will take you into, you know, the future, you'll have a better understanding of why you're doing this and what's going on.

And it's one of the reasons I love doing these kinds of research paper recaps, because yeah, I just think sometimes it feels like we've learned everything. It feels like we're we're like a mile wide in each and an inch deep when it comes to ADHD strategies and systems, right? And so this is an opportunity to go a bit deeper on something like rumination and decision making and really get to the grips of like what's going on.

And and like I said in the next episode, talking about how we can help with that.

You're often really undervaluing your time. I think that's one of the things that goes missing with when maximizing gets too carried away.

Time blindness makes that a lot harder. If you're time blind, you don't always know.

That's probably exacerbating it. It's also just you need to be thinking about the time value of money, like the value of your time. You need to give it a figure and then actually incorporate it into the math that you're maximizing. And at some point, that'll help the equation stop making sense. Like you can't keep valuing your time at zero and spending all this time and all of this mental energy on this.

There's this huge opportunity cost of all the other things you could have been doing with that mental effort, with all with all that remote.

And it's not necessarily just a time is money one, that's easy to, but you can also, you know, if you're if you're planning like a date or a a fun weekend away with your family, you you can maximize that as well. And so there's a sense of like you can spend too much time that you were gonna spend enjoying it planning it.

So there's like there's a loss in in multiple different ways.

Yeah, I think the sort of ADHD person that is dissatisfied with the current activity and wants to sort of take it to the next level. Yeah, yeah. And and it's that's not fun for people in the room who are trying to enjoy the actual social occasion kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And and the other things we'll touch on in the next episode as well is like also obviously getting paralyzed or or having the decision made for you because you took too long on it as well, are also risk factors.

Yeah, we're definitely gonna talk about that. But yeah, great paper. Highly recommend reading it if you're looking for it. It is Shipman and Colleagues 2012, ADHD symptoms maximizing and regret. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review.

It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.

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