Inertia, procrastination, and decisional paralysis

Yesterday we were meeting with a colleague who is also a life insurance consultant and our conversation turned to the difficulty his clients seem to have in making changes to their life insurance portfolios. Even when a person comes to grips intellectually with the many good reasons to make changes they often find it hard to take action.

In his transforming work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) Sir Isaac Newton postulated three laws that form the basis of mechanics. The first of his three laws stated that “an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by another force.” Inertia is the word we use to describe this property. Inertia can also be used to describe a person’s propensity to let a situation or condition remain as is rather than taking action to effect changes.

Sometimes actions that might bring about change are avoided due to a lack of confidence. You fear that the action contemplated may not be the best action to take. Maybe you will be worse off after taking action due to unforeseen or unexpected consequences. Perhaps the problem will solve itself. Is it better to put up with “the devil you know” rather than the “devil you don’t know?” Are you jumping from the frying pan into the fire?

There are so many colloquialisms around this issue that it must be a pervasive and long standing aspect of the human condition. Our brains seem hardwired to immediately come up with all of the ways something can go wrong. This can be a source for inertia, procrastination, or even complete decisional paralysis or you can use this hardwired danger avoidance mechanism as the raw material for solutions. If you were to catalog all of the “dangers”, real or perceived, that stand in the way of achieving a goal you could then devise a strategy around each one so that in the end you have a confident course of action that will achieve the desired change.