Believing you only have one option is dangerous

Believing you have only one option is dangerous. For instance:

• If you think there's only one job for you, you might tolerate awful working conditions.

• If you believe there’s only one path to success, you might ignore opportunities that better suit your strengths or values, or stick with a path that is almost certain to fail.

• If you think one person is your only chance at love, you might endure abuse.

• If you think there is only one promising candidate for you to hire after a round of recruitment, you may overlook concerning new information that comes to light about the candidate.

The fear of losing that sole option can drive highly irrational behavior. Your brain may equate its loss with a loss of hope, leaving you to grasp desperately onto that option.

What's more, if you start to feel like you're losing the only option you believe you have, it can create intense distress. For instance, if love is very important to you, and  you believe there is only one person who would ever love you, but you start to lose that person, it can feel like your whole world is ending. You can't imagine a life without them loving you, so it may feel to you like losing life itself. Believing you only have one option (when it's not actually true) can increase the chance of depression and anxiety if that option becomes less secure.

This week, we’re exploring the psychology of believing you have only one option. This article has two parts:

1. We’ll start by giving you tips for how you can expand your options. This can help you in the short-term, to move past the belief that you have only one available to you.

2. Then we’ll dig into the root causes of believing you have only one option and give you techniques for mitigating these. This section can help you in the long-term, to reduce the frequency and magnitude of feeling like you have only one option.

But first, a caveat…

Sometimes you do have only one option

Let’s start with an important caveat: sometimes your options really are very limited. Perhaps to only one thing. This could be because no other course of action is possible or maybe because the risks involved in taking another option are too great for you to bear.

For example, if you’re working in an economy with a severe job shortage and you have no savings, no support from friends or family, and a very limited social safety net, it may well be the case that you have no reasonable option except to continue in your job (at least in the short term) - whether or not you want to. This is the case for many people around the world. Many economists and philosophers have criticized the simplistic notion that workers can simply leave jobs they don’t like and find ones they do. Economic necessity and lack of viable alternatives may mean that the appearance of this choice is an illusion.

That being said, it is an unfortunate feature of human psychology that we are quite prone to another illusion: the illusion of thinking that our options are far more limited than they really are. Often when we only see one option, there really are others that we're not considering. So, read on to find out some of the things that might cause you to encounter this illusion, and learn steps you can take to dispel it when you do.

How to discover more options

Suppose you feel stuck, because you only have one option and it doesn't feel like a good one. What do you do next?

Sometimes, all it takes to overcome this is to dedicate some time for brainstorming. If you just sit down with a timer for five or ten minutes, and spend that time focused on trying to come up with more options, you probably will generate a few. But there are ways to increase your chances of a successful brainstorming session. We’ve written before about the process of using divergent and convergent thinking for idea generation (an idea from the work of Alex Osborn and Sidney Parnes), and we suggest you start with that process.

In short, it goes like this: 

Step 1: Go Deep (research / define)

• Determine the scope of your situation - what aspects of your life are involved? What are the variables that matter?

• Deepen your knowledge of the relevant areas if there is more to understand. For instance, if you feel stuck in one job, you could begin to research other opportunities you may be qualified for.

Step 2: Go Wide (creative / divergent)

• Brainstorm without judgment. Give yourself permission to come up with bad ideas!

• To help generate more ideas during the brainstorming process, it may be helpful to temporarily remove constraints. If you had no constraints on time, money, or resources what might you do? 

Step 3: Go Narrow (analytic / convergent)

• Evaluate your ideas and hone in on the best ones

• Reintroduce real-world constraints to further eliminate options

Step 4: Go Up (synthesize / iterate)

• Try to look past your first good idea, and try to improve on the ideas you already have

For a deeper dive into this process, you can read our article here.

There are other things you can do too, besides brainstorming. The first is simply to talk to someone else about your situation. There are two kinds of people we recommend seeking out for this:

1. People who have relevant experience. Try to find someone who has been in a similar situation and ask them what they did do or would do.

2. People you think are especially wise. People you think have particularly good judgment and are good at making decisions. Even if they've never been in a similar situation before, they may have suggestions for options you haven't thought of.

If you’re comfortable using them, you can even ask a large language model (AI chatbot) for help. You can give it the important details of your situation and ask it to generate 20 other ideas for things you could do. It’s likely that many of the results will not apply to your situation perfectly, but there’s a good chance that you’ll get some that trigger more ideas in you or are good starting points.

The last thing to note here is that, even once you’ve brainstormed other options, you may still feel like you have only one viable option. You might feel that the others you’ve brainstormed don’t feel like real paths. This may be especially prone to happen if the one option you're used to is one you've counted on for a long time. In that case, taking some time to imagine those new options vividly may help. Try to picture what your life would actually look like if you chose one of them. The more real and concrete an option feels, the more seriously your mind is likely to take it and the more possible it may start to seem.

How to fight the causes of believing you have only one option

Academic research does not appear to have directly and explicitly addressed the specific question, “Why do people sometimes feel like they have fewer options than they really do?” as a standalone research topic. However, there is a substantial body of related work across psychology, behavioral economics, and decision science that indirectly informs this question. In the rest of this article, we’re going to go over some factors that may lie among the root causes of feeling like you have fewer options than you really do. There are undoubtedly many more than the ones we discuss here, but we’ve picked out some that are potentially both (1) important and (2) mitigatable. For each one, we’re going to point out some research-based strategies for combating them.

1. Low Self-Efficacy

Do you believe you have the abilities needed to achieve what you want? That’s ‘self-efficacy’. The less you believe in your abilities, the lower your self-efficacy. Low self-efficacy can make you think you have fewer options than you really do by leading you to dismiss paths that seem too challenging, risky, or unfamiliar - not because they're impossible, but because you don’t believe you could succeed at them. For example, you might avoid applying for a job, starting a conversation, or learning a new skill simply because you assume in advance that you’ll fail. This belief shrinks your perceived range of options, even when real opportunities exist.

You probably know of someone who got a job they thought they weren’t qualified for. People in such positions will often say that they thought they probably wouldn’t get the job, but they put in an application anyway. Because, hey, why not? Yet many people refrain from taking such chances, feeling limited by low self-efficacy. If this sounds like you, you might benefit from trying our tool for assessing and combating imposter syndrome.

What you can do about it

Psychologist Albert Bandura (a pioneer of self-efficacy research) has identified four main ways people build self-efficacy. Each has support from academic research and generates practical applications:

1. Encouragement and positive feedback from credible sources. Seek out someone whose opinion you trust (like a mentor, colleague, or friend) and ask them to reflect on what they think you're good at or what potential they see in you. If nobody seems like quite the right fit, consider writing down things others have praised you for in the past.

2. The experience of successfully completing a task (even a small one) is called a ‘mastery experience’ and they can build your confidence in your competence. Start with tasks adjacent to the domain where you feel stuck and aim for small wins. As you succeed in small ways, you can set progressively harder challenges.

3. Witnessing someone similar to you succeeding can increase your confidence that you can succeed too. If you have friends, family, or colleagues whom you think are roughly as capable as you are, it could help to ask them to tell you about how they succeeded at some relevant tasks. If it’s possible to watch them doing so, even better!

4. Positive moods can enhance self-efficacy, while stress and fatigue can undermine it. You might find that your view of how many options you have changes with stress management, emotional regulation, and proper rest. Of course, that can be easier said than done.

2. Scarcity Mindset

Scarcity mindset happens when you perceive a resource (like money or time) to be in short supply. The idea is that, when that happens, your brain focuses intensely on the immediate shortfall, narrowing your attention and decision-making to focus on short-term survival. It’s a fancy way of saying that it’s hard to focus on other things when you’re anxious about making it through the short-term.

This narrowed focus is called ‘tunneling’ (think ‘tunnel vision’), and it can make your world feel artificially small. Scarcity pulls mental bandwidth away from things like long-term planning and creative thinking, which are things you need in order to see and act on your full set of options. This means that, unfortunately, it might be hardest to think of more options precisely when you most desperately want to. Of course, the scarcity you perceive may well be realistic. But a mindset of scarcity may be making things worse, by preventing you from seeing viable options.

What you can do about it

Unfortunately, there is a lack of randomized controlled trials or longitudinal intervention studies specifically designed to reduce scarcity mindset. So, we don’t have great evidence on how to tackle it. Nevertheless, it’s common for popular and clinical literature to recommend things like:

1. Practicing gratitude

2. Mindfulness

3. Reframing techniques that help you think about your circumstances in more solution-oriented ways

For help with the last of these, why not try our free Flexible Thinking tool that walks you through a technique used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help reframe your circumstances. 

3. Identity foreclosure

Maybe you’ve been thinking about your life in a certain way for so long that you’ve never taken the time to imagine a life beyond it. For example, perhaps you’ve just always assumed you’d work in your parents’ business, or you’ve never considered life outside the academic pipeline. If this is you, then you might have settled into a way of thinking where other options simply won’t occur to you. This is a form of a psychological phenomenon called ‘identity foreclosure’. It describes a situation in which a person is committed to an identity or life path without exploring alternatives.

Identity foreclosure isn’t necessarily a bad thing - it’s correlated with higher adaptive general functioning, self-esteem, and well-being. But you can be in foreclosure for different reasons. Sometimes it’s because you’ve done lots of exploring in your past and arrived at (and settled into) a life you enjoy and don’t feel the need to explore anymore. But for some people in foreclosure, they’re there because they have unthinkingly adopted roles, goals, or values imposed by the expectations of others (such as culture or family).

And even if you formed this identity in a healthy way, if that identity is now insecure - for instance, your parent's business is at risk of bankruptcy - that identity may make it feel like the world is ending because you can't imagine another path.

If you’re feeling like you have only one option but that option has significant problems, it may be worth considering whether you’re limited by identity foreclosure and it’s time to start exploring your identity en route to exploring more options.

What you can do about it

We have a number of tools that can help you to reflect on your identity and build a more-informed view of yourself that can point you in new directions. 

The Intrinsic Values test - Uncover your intrinsic values so that you can understand what you care about most. You might find that orientating your life towards those things can bring you more meaning and fulfilment than other ways of living.

Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure - This tool will help you understand what brings you the most joy. For many people, this is a key intrinsic value. This tool also gives suggestions for how you might experience more of what brings you the most joy.