Not the best state of mind to make long-term decisions in. It seems that you are asking wrong questions. Why are you “confused and depressed” instead of excited about having several great opportunities to choose from and eager to enjoy the world? What are you afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen? How hard would it be to change direction if you find that your chosen path is not working out? What skills do you need to recognize it and be able to correct it? This last question is what this forum is best equipped to answer. You might find that, once you are confident in being able to steer your career in the right direction, instead of flying ballistic after the initial push, your anxiety about making a wrong choice and ruining your life forever will ease and let you think clearly.
I felt a certain wrongness about my answer to this post and this addresses it way better. I think addressing the emotional issues here is probably far more important. Especially the apparent ambivalence between two totally different fields.
Not the best state of mind to make long-term decisions in.
What other state should you be in for answering difficult questions? Regarding confusion, a tough decision that can go either way should feel like confusion until you have a convincing answer. Picking a college is a literal once (maybe twice) in a lifetime question that is fully out of context for him.
As for depression, there’s a school of thought that (certain types of) depression* is nature’s way to make you focus on thinking and adopt a risk averse strategy in the meanwhile (re food/social stance). Here’s a well linked to article from Time. In SAT analogy form, Anger : Precommitment :: Sadness : Thinking. This is not to say that depression is good per se, but that it is not automatically dangerous to make hard decisions while in a depressed state of mind.
*This theory defines depression as the expected short-term depression one feels after a loss (eg losing a loved one), and the theory considers clinical depression as a malignant variant of adaptive depression.
Not the best state of mind to make long-term decisions in.
What other state should you be in for answering difficult questions?
Confused and happy. Confused with neutral affect. Maybe not-confused and proud of yourself for acquiring the information needed to make the decision a no brainer.
(I do agree that it can depend on the situation and that various moods bias us in ways that can be more useful in certain situations.)
Not the best state of mind to make long-term decisions in. It seems that you are asking wrong questions. Why are you “confused and depressed” instead of excited about having several great opportunities to choose from and eager to enjoy the world? What are you afraid of? What’s the worst that could happen? How hard would it be to change direction if you find that your chosen path is not working out? What skills do you need to recognize it and be able to correct it? This last question is what this forum is best equipped to answer. You might find that, once you are confident in being able to steer your career in the right direction, instead of flying ballistic after the initial push, your anxiety about making a wrong choice and ruining your life forever will ease and let you think clearly.
I felt a certain wrongness about my answer to this post and this addresses it way better. I think addressing the emotional issues here is probably far more important. Especially the apparent ambivalence between two totally different fields.
What other state should you be in for answering difficult questions? Regarding confusion, a tough decision that can go either way should feel like confusion until you have a convincing answer. Picking a college is a literal once (maybe twice) in a lifetime question that is fully out of context for him.
As for depression, there’s a school of thought that (certain types of) depression* is nature’s way to make you focus on thinking and adopt a risk averse strategy in the meanwhile (re food/social stance). Here’s a well linked to article from Time. In SAT analogy form, Anger : Precommitment :: Sadness : Thinking. This is not to say that depression is good per se, but that it is not automatically dangerous to make hard decisions while in a depressed state of mind.
*This theory defines depression as the expected short-term depression one feels after a loss (eg losing a loved one), and the theory considers clinical depression as a malignant variant of adaptive depression.
Confused and happy. Confused with neutral affect. Maybe not-confused and proud of yourself for acquiring the information needed to make the decision a no brainer.
(I do agree that it can depend on the situation and that various moods bias us in ways that can be more useful in certain situations.)
Is there any research about how whether one makes better decisions when one is happy then when one is depressed?