The other day I opened my fridge door and stared blankly at my food for about two minutes. Nothing caught my eye. I thought about the recipes I could make with what I had, but was irked by the idea of going through the hassle and ending up with something unsatisfying. So, as one does, I shut my fridge door dramatically, exclaimed, “I have no food!” and stormed off to bed on an empty stomach. And while laying in my bed singing along to the sounds of my stomach growling, I realized that, as I approach graduation, I’ve found myself staring into the refrigerator of life decisions. I’m uninterested by what’s sitting there and also too afraid to pick up something new and try it.

So what happens when we are crippled with the burden of decision making? Personally, I choose to run from all big life decisions, which is easy for the first 20 or so years of our lives. When I was younger, I would simply not make a decision and go along begrudgingly with whatever my mom chose for me. But now at the ripe age of 22, I find myself backed into a corner. I’m graduating, leaving my home for the past four years, fighting the inevitability of moving into my parents’ basement, and still deciding what I want to do with my life. My parents and other adults constantly ask, “What are your plans next year?”, unknowingly sending me into a mental spiral of judgment and sadness. Some of my friends have already surged past this minefield of questions, looking for new apartments in their new cities that they’ll pay for with their new salaries. There is so much comparison and self-deprecation that boils to the surface upon graduation, and with this much going on in my head, I’ve been paralyzed by the pressure of deciding, leaving me with no plan at all.

When humans find ourselves in prolonged periods of intense decision making, we can experience a phenomenon known as decision fatigue. This is basically when the stress of having to constantly come to definitive conclusions leaves us drained of our willpower and energy. That’s why, if you’re graduating like me, you may realize that you and your friends are unusually tired lately. It’s why making little decisions, like what to eat for dinner or choosing a time to meet up with friends, can seem so overbearing and impossible right now. We’re being bombarded with the heavy responsibility of making decisions that seem to impact every aspect of our lives. How can we have the capacity for the other 35,000 decisions that the average adult makes in a day? That’s a lot for our minds to carry. When we face decision fatigue, we have a harder time saying yes or no, leaving us in no man’s land.

While I sit uncomfortably in my mental standstill, everyone else seems to be moving forward. They’re getting ready to up and leave for New York or Chicago or Europe while I decide if I should ever even leave the comfort of the Midwest. How do you compare something as big as a city? Or weigh the difference between job opportunities that you may not know exist? How are we supposed to know we’re making the right choice when our decisions could impact the rest of our lives?

There’s a famous study where a grocery store set up two jam sampling tables, one with only six jams, another with 24. Although the 24 jam table attracted more people, those customers were six times less likely to actually buy jam compared to the other table. This is because of choice overload, where we can’t compare such a large quantity of options so we don’t choose any. Just like moving to a new city; We can’t say no to decisions because we don’t want to pass up opportunities, and we can’t say yes because we’re too afraid to break out of the status quo, so instead we decide to leave empty handed. It’s an incapacitating paradox that a lot of us may be dealing with, whether its weighing job offers or college applications or even deciding what outfit to wear for the day. This kind of decision making is maddening and has no glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

So in my distraught state, I turn to the wisest tool at my disposal: Google. When I type in “How do I make big life decisions?”, the first thing that comes up is “question your choice.” Great. More doubt and uncertainty to plague my mind with. So I dug a little deeper and found an interview with Ruth Chang, an Oxford University professor who specializes in researching decision making. She said that when we look at big life choices, we need to distinguish between a big decision and a hard decision. Choosing what to eat for lunch may be a hard decision, but it certainly isn’t a big one. Getting a life-saving emergency operation is a big decision but isn’t a hard one. Hard decisions, Chang said, are that way because the two options are on par with one another. We can’t see the distinguishing factors between the two because they’re theoretical, not yet tangible.

Pros and cons lists may help, but Chang said the key to approaching this predicament is making a commitment that best aligns with your character. We have to think about who we want to make ourselves into–are you a doctor working in LA? Or a farmer in New Mexico? Do you find your values in teaching in a small town or traveling the world with nothing but the backpack on your back? We have to look forward to ourselves rather than to the situation we’ll find ourselves in.

Decisions, although difficult, can be a beautiful example of finding our own agency. We are given the opportunity to go anywhere, do anything, and that’s why it feels so big. It’s a wonderful mixture of sadness for leaving where we are, but excitement for building our future selves. Of course there will be indecisiveness and confusion and self-doubt, but that’s all a part of the process. So rather than continuing lamenting about the difficulty of deciding my future, I’m going to shift my mindset. I’m looking at the vast array of possibilities in front of me, some I can’t even begin to imagine are out there, and trusting myself to make the best of whatever path I choose.