How decisions are made and why are they needed

What are decisions?

Do you know how often you make decisions? On what basis do you decide on your outfit for the day?

Decision-making is not a job for specialists per se. All of us make decisions, tens of thousands of them every day. Decisions are choices between different options, either conscious or unconscious. Most of our decisions are automatic, meaning that we don't think much when making a choice.

Conscious decisions require more energy from us, depending on their complexity. The more variables, the more difficult the decision. Living beings, especially humans, often incorporate emotions into the process. It is sometimes said that emotions take over, this can indeed happen.

Many decisions are reactive, i.e. made in response to something. In this case, the decision is not really weighed or considered, it is just made. Such situations include emergencies, where action must be taken to preserve one's life and health.

As we have evolved, we have developed the ability to think and reflect from many angles. This has not always been the case, and humans are an exception to this rule. In everyday situations, we have time to calmly consider the consequences of our decisions and what we want. If we want to make decisions that take proper account of our own situation, we should take them without pressure or haste.

To make better decisions, you need to know yourself - what I want. Everyone makes decisions in different ways, and for different reasons. The human being is a complex package, including the conscious and the unconscious.

From birth, our living environment has influenced the way we have become. It has influenced our values and our way of thinking, and you can break away from it, but what we learn as young people is an important basis for our future choices.

Everything we have plays a role in the whole, which we have to take into account in our choices, maybe not in every choice, but in many. Our own world-view and outlook on life strongly influence what we want and why.

The bigger the issue to be resolved, the more difficult the decision becomes. The problem is not the decision making itself, every organism is created to make decisions, conscious choice situations are often a struggle.

How we want our lives to be depends on many factors. We live in time and space, some say in a bubble. Bubble or not, we are not disconnected from the rest of the world around us. What we become and where we direct our resources is connected to the universe around us.

The environment shapes us and our thoughts and choices. Do you think you just drank a glass of water of your own free will? Maybe water tastes better than coffee, but a drink is what our body needs. Most of the time, in situations like this, a conscious decision is not needed, our awesome autonomic system takes care of the job.

Our friend autonomous system does most things for us, so we can save energy for other, more important things. If you had to make 30,000 separate decisions every day, one by one, you wouldn't have enough time in 24 hours.

How are choices made?

Have you ever thought about the following when making choices?

If decisions are choices, what is the mechanism by which decisions are made?

Decision making is not an exact science, we don't know exactly how it happens. If you think about the word decision, it means some kind of end to something or cessation. That is, when we make a decision, we end or put a stop to, say, a sentence. After the full stop, we start a new sentence or we don't continue the text, we close the lid.

So making a decision means stopping an activity, such as thinking or reflecting, and starting a new activity. For example, from looking for a new hobby to starting the hobby itself, i.e. from theory to practise.

Making a decision could be compared to stopping and starting again a car. There is a pause between each decision, though often so small and short that you don't notice it.

Where does the need to make decisions come from? You might think about it in terms of what if no decisions were taken at all, what would happen? Nothing, really. If no being made decisions and choices, nothing would move or live at all. From this we can conclude that decisions are a prerequisite for life, even for the most primitive and smallest of creatures.

The need for decisions was mentioned above, but what makes decisions necessary? The short answer is: stimuli, i.e. signals to and from the brain to the rest of the body. As reactions happen to be the most common way of making decisions, signals from outside the body are very important to the brain.

There is no doubt about the necessity of making decisions, but the needs for which they are needed are a complex set, i.e. there are many reasons and needs for decisions. But the mechanism by which decisions themselves are made depends on the way in which the decision is made, i.e. conscious or unconscious. The brain is of course behind everything, but the brain needs assistants, such as a perceptual system that collects information, i.e. stimuli.

The human being is a bit like an electric rabbit, because the human being moves its parts with electrical impulses. Stimuli are converted into electrical form so that the brain can process them. The brain has certain templates or bases that it uses to process information, and of course these vary from person to person.

All in all, the mechanism by which a decision is taken is a complex and opaque process. There are many factors that influence decisions, and what makes this issue and this phenomenon particularly challenging is that we ourselves do not know nearly everything when we make decisions. It is not easy to study the phenomenon either, because a laboratory setting cannot fully simulate real-life situations.