It is easy to see why we of the industrialized world love return policies and money-back guarantees. We are a culture of cautious, risk-averse, thoroughly insured thinkers. We pride ourselves on our ability to deliberate ourselves to the absolute best possible choice. We are paralyzed with fear lest the fifty dollar automatic apple slicer we bought on Thursday might turn out to be a bad color, leaving us with piercing regret that we didn’t opt for the sixty dollar silver one. What we need is a new form of insurance: decision insurance, which allows us to file claims when it turns out we could have done better with a different choice.

Actually, we already have decision insurance.

The cost of processing returns, restocking returned items, and lost profit from returned merchandise has to come from somewhere. Eventually it gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. We pay extra for the right to undo our decisions.

What’s worse, though, is that we pay an emotional cost. According to The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, psychology research has shown that people who make reversible choices are generally less happy with their choices after some time passes. At the same time, they are less likely to return an item they chose, because of what’s called the endowment effect: we care more about not losing what we have than we do about gaining what we don’t have, so once we buy something we’d rather keep it most of the time than get back the option of buying something else with the money.

So when your choice is reversible, you are unlikely to reverse it but you will probably be less happy with it.

Having many choices to begin with is also emotionally dangerous, according to Schwartz. It’s because of that same mental quirk: we give more emotional weight to losses than to gains.

When you compare twenty choices instead of three, there are many more pros and cons to consider. Each choice has advantages that you will miss out on if you choose something else—lost opportunities, if you will. We weight those losses more heavily than gains, and the more options we have, the more lost opportunities regardless of what we pick.

Think of it this way: if I give you three choices, whichever one you pick you miss out on the advantages of the other two. If I give you twenty choices, you miss out on the advantages of the nineteen you didn’t pick.

We can’t handle missing all of those hypothetical gains. The decision becomes psychologically impossible, and we put it off or delegate it.

The solution: make irreversible decisions. You will be happy with the decision anyway, because of the endowment effect, and your unchangeable decision will help reduce choice overload further down the road, leaving you free to focus on the few options that matter the most.