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Key points
- Living life is about making decisions, but if you fear making a "wrong" decision, you can become immobilized.
- The underlying obstacles are self-criticism and worry about future regrets and what others may think.
- The key is to realize when anxiety has taken over—you can't control the future or make everyone happy.
Like it or not, everyday life is a factory of decision-making: What to wear for a first date, whether to take the new job, whether to circle back to the argument you had on Saturday night with your partner, or what to make for a dinner with friends. Some decisions are bigger, some smaller, but making choices is always a part of running your life. But because decisions have consequences, decision-making can often be challenging; for some, even minor decisions can feel like big ones. If you have a difficult time making up your mind, here are three common underlying obstacles along with ways to resolve them to help you be more decisive.
You’re self-critical or perfectionistic.
If you tend to be self-critical, always giving yourself a hard time over some “mistake,” or worse, are perfectionistic, needing everything to come out perfectly, every decision—the clothes, the job, the dinner, and the argument—feels equally important. Your mind flips through a checklist of criteria your decision needs to meet: Is this what I really want? Am I overreacting? Is the timing right? What will others think?
Consequences: You start to obsess, and that checklist is long. So you go online and look at dress combinations, make endless pro-and-con lists about the job, scour through dozens of recipes, and plug in multiple AI questions to compose the perfect sentence that tells your partner how you feel without creating resentment.
Solution: Your brain is telling you that the only way to put this to rest is to work harder to get it right—get more information so you don’t make a mistake. But the real problem isn’t what to wear or say, but that your self-critical or perfectionistic mind has taken over, pressuring you to make every decision, however small, the right one.
Time to get your rational brain back online: Realize that every decision doesn’t have the same weight—the job may be more important than the dinner—and that you’re spinning your wheels going down rabbit holes. Next, take concrete action to move forward: Talk to someone who works at the potential job about their experience or ask for a follow-up interview to answer your lingering questions; say what you want to say to your partner, and if they get defensive, back off but circle back later to mop up and clarify. Only by moving forward, no matter how small the baby steps, will you discover what to do next.
You worry about having future regrets.
This is a variation of the other. Even if you know what you want to do, you worry about the results in the future: You’ll take the job, but you’ll wind up hating it; you’ll talk to your partner, but it won’t go well, and your bringing it up will only add fuel to the emotional fire, eventually leading to divorce.
Consequences: Obsessing all future worst-case scenarios undermines your confidence in your decision.
Solution: Just as it’s easy to go down rabbit holes of information, you can do the same with future worst-case scenarios. The reality check is that not only can't you control the future, but your past is constantly being recreated through the lens of the present: If two years from now you're happy at the new job, you’ll not only pat yourself on the back for making a good decision but also think you should have switched jobs sooner. If you’re miserable two years from now, you’ll wish you had stayed at your old job. It’s a moving target. The best you can do is the best you can do right now. You can only deal with future problems if and when they arise.
You worry that others will judge your decisions.
I’ve met folks who struggle with decisions because they worry that “other people” won't approve of their choices. This fear is usually part of a learned childhood hypervigilance where "I'm happy only if the whole world is happy."
Consequences: The thinking is understandable, but the solution is not. You can’t be sensitive to the whole world. With that large an audience looking over your shoulder, you get paralyzed.
Solution: You may care what those close to you think, and you want to be assertive and help them understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, but agreement isn’t always necessary. Worrying that you need to explain yourself to those outside your intimate circle pushes you off course from what you want; you wind up living their lives, not yours.
The underlying driver is anxiety.
Indecisiveness is a solution to the problem of creating the right outcome, whether it is about making your present plan work out the way you want, having no regrets in the future, or making everyone happy. The best you can do is make the best decision in the present and see what happens. If it works out, great—good for you. If not, it’s not because you screwed up, but you now have a new problem, and hopefully you’ve learned what not to do. Take each problem and each decision one at a time.
The key is seeing anxiety as the driver, stepping back, and realizing that your anxious brain is taking over—causing you to obsess and fall into little-kid emotions and irrational thinking. Stop doing what your anxious brain tells you to do; realize that your thoughts are running you rather than you running your thoughts.
Learning to be decisive is learning not to let anxiety run your life, learning that there are no mistakes, focusing on doing the best you can right now, recognizing that all decisions are not equally important, and accepting that you can control only this moment.
