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Key points
- Worry is endlessly trying to answer questions that can't actually be answered with certainty.
- Decision-making is choosing an action to take about a problem and then ending the analysis about it.
- Decision-making is useful when there is an action to take and right now is the time to make that decision. Otherwise, it's pointless worry.
- Make decisions fast to decrease anxiety about decision-making in the future.
Worry is all about analyzing things you feel uncertain about in an effort to feel more certain about what is going to happen and what you should do about it. I often spend a lot of time in therapy with my clients, working on the critical skill of cutting off this analysis and ending the worry process (see my previous article on how to do this).
Part of this work involves recognizing that worry solves nothing and only causes suffering. But clients will often ask me, "Don't I need to analyze things sometimes? If there is a real problem, don't I need to worry about it?" This is a great question because the answer is definitely yes; it is of course sometimes useful to analyze problems in your life. It's impossible to never do this. But how do we keep ourselves from falling into the worry cycle and causing lots of suffering?
We need to make a clear distinction about when it is useful to analyze a problem and when it is not.
The distinction I like to make is that there is a difference between worry and decision-making.
Decision-making is when there is actually some action that needs to be taken about the problem. There is something to do about it. There is an endpoint to the decision-making process: At some point, you make the decision and implement it, and then the process is over.
For example, let's say you have two different job offers, and you need to decide which one to accept. If you suffer from anxiety, you might worry a lot about which decision is the best one, and it might take you a lot of time and cause a lot of stress to make such a decision. But at some point, you have to decide and pull the trigger on taking one of the jobs, and the process does end.
Worry, on the other hand, is never-ending.
The worry process is an effort to answer questions that are impossible to answer with 100 percent certainty, so it can just go on and on forever. Think about the questions that you typically worry about: Can they actually be answered?
An example would be worrying about whether you are going to lose your job. This is a question about the future, and while you can make guesses about whether it will happen, the future can never be predicted with certainty. So worrying about it can go on and on until you retire one day. The worry process about this never produces an answer, it never ends, and it creates a ton of suffering for you.
So if you're in doubt about whether it is actually helpful to be analyzing the thing you're worried about, you can ask yourself the following two questions to distinguish between worry and decision-making:
1. Is there an actual decision for me to make here?
In other words: is there an action for me to take based on my analysis of this problem? Is there something I can actually do here? If the answer is no, you can cut off the process right now.
Give up on trying to answer this question because you recognize that it is an impossible question to actually answer with certainty. Instead, redirect your attention towards what you are actually doing in front of you in the present moment. Regular mindfulness practice can be a helpful skill in this regard.
If the answer is yes, you can move on to the second question:
2. Is right now the time for me to make this decision?
When I say right now, I mean literally right now in this exact moment. If you are busy doing something else, like playing with your kids or watching TV or eating dinner, then the answer is no, now is not the time. Again, if the answer to this question is no, give up on trying to make the decision right now and redirect your attention towards what you are actually doing in front of you.
Another reason it might not be time to make the decision right now is if you don't have all the information that would be required to make the decision. For instance, in the example of having two job offers that you are deciding between, let's say you know you are being offered the jobs, but they haven't actually told you yet what each job pays. That is critical information, and you obviously could not make the decision without it. So if you don't know that yet, then analyzing the decision is pointless, and the answer is no; it is not time to make the decision right now.
The time to analyze a problem is only when the answer to both questions is yes: There is an actual decision to be made, and I can make that decision right now.
If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then make the decision... but do it quickly.
This is where people with a lot of anxiety can struggle as well: They take too much time to make a decision because they want to be certain they are making the right one. The way you get yourself over this problem is by making the decision rapidly, even though your mind is saying you need to think about it more. If it's a tough decision, by definition, you are not going to end up feeling certain about it by the end of the decision-making process anyway.
The decision-making process is stressful, so the less time we can spend on it, the less suffering there will be. Once you know it's time to make a decision, get that process over with as fast as you possibly can. More time spent making the decision rarely leads to a different or better decision. Doing it fast also serves as a form of Exposure Therapy, which helps train your brain to recognize that uncertainty about decisions is not dangerous, which also helps the decision-making process become less anxiety-provoking in the future.
