In case you hadn’t noticed, a much-hyped single called Choices is released this week. Written by the mildly irritating English-Swedish pop outfit The Hoosiers, it is a record-breaking 43 minutes long. As if one gimmick wasn’t enough, the band invited fans to write some of the verses and appear in the music video. But even though Choices is a pygmy of a tune compared with the iconic songs of previous eras such as All You Need Is Love, Purple Haze and Smells Like Teen Spirit, The Hoosiers’ new single might one day rank among them as the song of this generation.

The reason? It’s the lyrics, stupid. “Stop giving me choices. Stop giving me choices,” whines Irwin Sparkes, the elfin lead singer. “I’m the victim of this day and age, I’ve forgotten how to feel, I’ve forgotten how to change.”

According to Harriet Bradley, professor of sociology at the University of Bristol, this is an apt summary of the way things are. This week she published the results of a ten-month project looking at how people in the UK deal with choice. The report, State of Confusion, presents the results of a study of 6,000 people from across the UK. The conclusion is resounding: Britain is a “nation crippled by too much choice”.

The findings are many and varied. Women are more confused than men. More than half of us feel that life is more confusing than it was ten years ago. The Welsh are the most unhappy and confused people in the UK (they’re even bewildered by the term “smart casual”). The average large supermarket contains about 10,000 products from which to choose; 42 per cent of the UK population lies awake at night agonising over dilemmas and 47 per cent admit that “even little decisions can be hard to make”.

“We carried out a national survey, followed by some intensive work with focus groups,” Bradley says. “The outcome was not a surprise in itself, but I was amazed at the scale and extent of the problem. We seem to live in a wonderful world of options, but it can actually be quite frightening and scary.”

According to Bradley’s report, shifts in society over the past few decades — the end of jobs for life, the rise of a consumerist, celebrity culture, the technological revolution, multiculturalism — have led to a state of “liquid living” in which people are in a constant state of flux. Citing the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has lived in Britain since 1971, she claims we have been thrown into a “hotbed of uncertainties”. As the American psychologist Barry Schwartz put it, we’re living in a “tyranny of choice”. One participant in the study, Lynn Carpenter, a 52-year-old massage therapist, lamented: “We don’t need five million shampoos. Just a couple would be enough.”

“Although on the positive side individual freedom has increased,” says Bradley, “the pressure to make choices and take responsibility for one’s fortune can lead to great anxiety and stress for many people.” A third of the people she studied described themselves as “very indecisive”, and the same proportion revised decisions they had already made, thus reawakening the source of heartache.

Bradley has even coined a new term to describe the very worst offenders: Indeciders. These are people who “suffer high levels of confusion” and display a fundamental “inability to be decisive”. In some cases, this can lead to depression. The professor estimates that this term may be applied to 47 per cent of Britons.

Val, one of the older participants in the study and a suspected Indecider, describes the condition vividly. “It’s impossible for me to make a decision,” she says. “If I see something in pink and think I’m going to get that, then if you were to say you’ve got it in blue, I wouldn’t know what to do. It drives me crazy.”

Dr Peter Collett, a social psychologist and author of The Book of Tells: How to Read People’s Minds from their Actions, recognises the increased confusion of recent decades. “It has become so severe that psychologists have recently upgraded it to a fully fledged emotion,” he says. Collett has devised some basic guidelines that can be used “whether your state of confusion is emotionally overwhelming or just a frustrating grumble”. In a nutshell, his advice is to worry less, and become better informed about the things that you find confusing.

Sheena Iyengar, professor of social psychology at Columbia Business School and the author of The Art of Choosing, is an authority on choice. She is best known for her jam experiment, widely acknowledged as one of the most important social science studies of the past two decades. The study found that people bought ten times less jam when presented with 24 varieties than when their choice was limited to six. The equation is simple. The wider the choice, the harder it is to make decisions. Yet while Iyengar acknowledges the damaging effects of an overload of choice, she also recognises its importance. “Choice can be a burden but without it our life loses meaning,” she says.

“Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we are tomorrow.”

But Bradley is not suggesting that all choice is bad. To a large extent, it depends on the sort of person we are. “The psychologist Herbert Simon identified two approaches to making choices,” she says. “First there are the Maximisers, who put tremendous energy into researching the options. These people find it difficult to settle and often suffer from regret. The second group, the Satisfiscers, are happy with good enough. Although more influenced by habit and routine, Satisfiscers suffer less from an overload of choice.”

This report was conceived by the insurance website confused.com as a PR initiative, and was never intended to make a political point. Even so, the implications for David Cameron’s Big Society are obvious. “Frankly, the Big Society will just add to the confusion,” Bradley says. “Cameron is talking about giving important choices about schools and hospitals and local democracy to the citizens. But given that people are already struggling with their individual choices, they are never going to take responsibility for the big decisions. Adding to the average person’s burden of choice would be disastrous.”

Of course, Cameron’s office denies this. “We think that people are able to make the choices that really matter,” a Downing Street spokesman says. “That’s why the Government’s priority is to give power to ordinary people so that decisions can be made at the local level.” In the light of Bradley’s research, this doesn’t seem particularly realistic.

Maybe The Hoosiers should change their name to The Indeciders? Or maybe they shouldn’t? Stop giving me choices, indeed. Stop giving me choices.

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The ten most confusing areas

1 Bankers’ bonuses

2 Policies of political parties

3 Global warming

4 Pensions, share prices and interest rates

5 The term smart casual

6 Job interviews

7 Fuel bills

8 Twitter and predictive text

9 The TV drama Lost

10 Flat-pack furniture

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How to get to grips with confusion

Investigate – Familiarise yourself with a subject so that you’ll find it less confusing.

Prioritise – Distinguish between those things where you don’t mind being confused and those where you’d prefer to have clarity.

Anticipate – Spend time working out how things could go wrong and how you could deal with it.

Don’t fret – Make sure that you worry only in a special “worry location” and only during “worry time” — never, for example, when you’re in bed, trying to get to sleep.

Share – Talk your confusion through with someone else. Voicing your opinion will clarify your thinking.

Expertise – The best way to eliminate confusion is to consult an expert.