From NPR, this is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

From the moment you get up in the morning, your brain is making choices.

Do you hit the snooze button?

Do you hit it a second time?

For breakfast, are you going to have cereal or eggs?

Coffee or tea?

Every day, you grapple with hundreds of choices.

To many people, an abundance of options is a good thing.

It signifies freedom and having control.

You get to choose whether to spend your Saturday at a movie or at a baseball game.

You decide whether to try the new restaurant down the block or stay in and cook.

It's your call whether to take the job with a higher pay or the one with better work-life balance.

But in recent months, with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic,

the number of choices in our lives has suddenly shrunk dramatically.

And going to a grocery store has become the equivalent of a special outing.

Imagine looking this good for who?

One art!

One art! Look at this good for who?

The constraints on our choices have been very hard.

Millions of people are out of work and millions more feel their lives are precarious.

If we had a choice to swiftly go back to the old normal, we'd jump in it.

But with all this hardship, many people also report a new relationship

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