There’s this moment when you’re facing a big life decision: do you go back to school? Do you change your career or move house? Or maybe even start a business?
You start questioning this decision, thinking, “What if you make the wrong choice? What if you waste years chasing something that just doesn’t work out?”
So you do loads of research, you ask your friends, and you make pros and cons lists. All of this thinking feels really productive and sensible. And you think that clarity will come when you’ve explored all of your options.
But more often than not, you’re still stuck. And you feel more confused and overwhelmed than when you first started.
Understanding Decision Paralysis
This is decision paralysis, and the emotion that’s driving it is actually fear.
In uncertain situations, your amygdala lights up. That’s your fear detector.
When you can’t predict the outcome of a choice, your brain treats it like it’s a potential threat. Your fight-or-flight response is activated, and it does this for any emotionally risky decision – things like changing careers, ending a relationship, or saying what you really think.
And fear doesn’t always scream, “I’m scared.” It can show up in other ways, such as:
- endless research
- wanting to give yourself “just one more week” to think about it
- overanalyzing pros and cons lists
- waiting for a sign from the universe.
But underneath all of that is your brain trying to protect you from your fears: your fear of regret, your fear of judgment, and your fear of failure.
Psychologists call this loss aversion. It’s a principle from behavioral economics, which means that we feel the pain of loss a lot more strongly than we feel the pleasure of gain.
Which means we avoid decisions that might cost us something that could cause us discomfort, even if there’s a potentially massive upside.
Whenever I feel myself thinking about all the things that could go wrong, there’s a quote that always shifts my mindset:
“What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?”
Erin Hanson
But here’s the truth: avoiding the decision doesn’t protect you from discomfort. It just prolongs it.
The Science of Good Decisions: Maximizers vs. Satisficers
Let’s look at what science actually says about making good decisions, because if you’ve ever spent hours agonizing over the best choices, just like I do, then it’s reassuring to know that you’re not alone.
Psychologist Barry Schwarz found that there are two distinct decision-making styles:
- Maximizers need to find the absolute best option. They research endlessly, compare all the details, and constantly wonder, “What if I choose wrong?” This is the camp that I naturally fall into.
- On the other hand, there are the Satisficers. These look for something that is “good enough,” and when they find the option, they commit to it. They don’t endlessly obsess over all the other options and constantly wonder if they chose wrong. Once they find it, they just move on.
And here’s the twist: you would think that maximizers would be happier, but research actually shows it’s the opposite.
Maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions. But maximizers are also less optimistic, have lower self-esteem, and overall general life satisfaction. They’re more likely to be depressed, have perfectionistic tendencies, and even feel regretful of their previous decisions.
Whereas satisficers are more likely to be satisfied with their decisions, even if they pick the worst option on paper, because they’re not stuck in an endless loop of second-guessing and FOMO.
Decision making energy
Your brain has a limited amount of energy for making decisions and choices every day. And every little decision you make drains it.
That’s why you’re more likely to impulse buy junk food at 9:00 p.m. than you are at 9:00 a.m. in the morning. Or you find it really hard to plan your life after a long day at work.
Too many choices equals mental burnout. And when your brain is tired, you don’t choose better. You either avoid the decision altogether or randomly pick something and then regret it later.
The more time you spend overthinking a decision, the less clear it often gets. Your brain starts spinning in circles, imagining all of the worst-case scenarios and trying to future-proof all of the different steps.
But clarity actually comes from action, not from analysis paralysis.
So if you’re stuck, don’t assume that the answer will come from thinking harder. Sometimes, it just comes from deciding faster.
But if you’re a maximizer, it’s not easy to switch over from analyzing everything and then settling for “good enough.” It will just fill you with anxiety because you haven’t explored all the options first.
Three Practical Activities for Making Better Decisions
1. The Two-Way Door Mental Model
I’ve put off some really key decisions in my life for years. I wanted to start a blog in the personal development space 17 years ago, but because it would be public, I felt like I needed to have everything figured out and perfect right from the start.
So I never started.
And I really wish somebody had told me this.
Most of the pressure that you feel is not actually about the decision itself. It’s because you believe that there’s a single right path.
And if you don’t find that right path, then your whole life is going to fall apart.
Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has a really cool framework that helped me think about this differently. He calls it the two-way door mental model.
- Some decisions are one-way doors. You walk through them, and then there’s no going back, like having a baby, or jumping out of a plane, or selling your house.
- But most decisions are actually two-way doors. If you try something and it doesn’t work out, you can walk back through the door and go and try something else.
The problem is when you treat a two-way door like a one-way door, then you freeze. You overanalyze and wait for some magical clarity that never comes before you walk through the door.
You’d be surprised at how many decisions feel permanent but they really aren’t.
If you move cities and you really don’t like it, you could always move back or move somewhere else. And if you start a business and it doesn’t quite work out, you can pivot or pause it.
When I started my first YouTube channel last year, I thought I needed to decide between a music channel and this channel. But I actually started the music channel and then stopped working on it, and I started this one.
I can pick the music one up again, just leave it there, or I could even delete it. If I’d seen the decision for what it was, which was a two-way door, then I would have got started with it so much sooner rather than overthinking it for six months.
So here’s your challenge
Pick a decision you’ve been stuck on and ask yourself, “Is it a two-way door?”
If the answer is yes, then the next strategy will show you how you can move forward on it without any risk.
2. Prototyping Your Future
Your brain hates uncertainty. It’s always looking for patterns, trying to predict outcomes, because from an evolutionary perspective, uncertainty meant danger.
But most real life decisions don’t come with any guarantees. There’s no map that says, “If you take this job, in the next 5 years you’ll feel fulfilled.”
So when you feel stuck, if you’re waiting for total clarity, then you’re not being indecisive; you’re just being human.
The trick isn’t to learn to get rid of uncertainty. It’s to learn how to move forward with it anyway.
One of the best ways I found to do this is the idea from the book Designing Your Life (Amazon affiliate link) by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and it’s called prototyping your future.
Instead of sitting around trying to think your way to the perfect decision, you test your way forward, just like designers do when they’re prototyping something new.
You start by choosing a path you’re curious about. It might be switching careers or starting a YouTube channel, moving to a new city, or going back to school. Now you create a tiny version of that life. It’s just a low-risk test that you can run in the next week or month. That could mean:
- Talking to someone who already does the thing that you’re thinking about.
- Taking a short online course in the area.
- Volunteering or freelancing.
- Doing a “day in the life of” simulation: actually plan your week as though you were living that life, right down from when you get up in the morning to when you go to bed.
- Starting a side project, even if it’s really tiny.
The goal is to experience the decision, not really think about it, because your brain can’t guess how something will feel, but your body knows.
You will know whether you feel energized, or maybe you feel more curious about it, or maybe you feel really drained. And that will give you so much information that you wouldn’t have gotten if you just thought about the decision.
So after your mini-experiment, ask yourself: “What did you learn?”
If it felt wrong, tweak the idea and test it again. And if it sparked something, then explore it deeper.
You don’t need to have the whole plan. You just need to know your next experiment.
There’s a phrase I say to myself: “Action creates clarity,” not lots of thinking and planning and waiting for the right time.
So you need to let go of trying to predict the perfect path and instead start asking: “What can you try next? What might you learn from it? And how will that move you forward, even if it doesn’t work out?”
3. The Regret Test
If you’ve got lots of different options for things that you might want to explore, even as experiments, it can be hard to choose which one to try first. So here’s a mindset shift that can cut through all of the noise and narrow down that decision.
Imagine yourself at the end of your life, like 80 or 90, or whatever number makes you feel that big-picture perspective. Look back at the decision you’re wrestling with right now and ask yourself
“Will I wish I had taken a chance on this? Will I regret not exploring this while I could?”
This is powerful because it moves you out of fear and into wisdom. Because right now, your brain is wired to focus on all the immediate risks: “What if I fail? What will people think of me? What if it’s the wrong choice?”
But your future self, the one that looks back from the end of your life, they don’t care about short-term embarrassment or a few mistakes. They care about regret, about the chances you didn’t take and the things you never tried.
Anticipated regret
Psychologists call this anticipated regret, and studies show it’s one of the most reliable ways to figure out what actually matters to us.
Researchers at Cornell asked people to reflect on their biggest life regrets. In the short term, people mostly regretted the things that they did, like saying the wrong thing, choosing the wrong job, or making a mistake in a conversation.
But over the long term, the pattern flipped.
Most people regretted the things that they didn’t do: the chances they didn’t take and the dreams they never pursued.
And that’s because over time, we can explain away all of our actions. But an inaction leaves an open loop because we never tried and we never found out the answer. So you’re more likely to regret not starting that business, not moving to the new city, or saying how you felt, than you are to regret trying and failing at it.
So picture yourself at 80 years old. Look back at the decision in front of you right now and ask yourself: “Will you regret not giving this a shot?”
This doesn’t guarantee you’ll be successful or that the road ahead is going to be easy. In fact, it’s probably going to be more difficult if you choose a new path. But it does help you live with intention.
Big decisions don’t exist in a vacuum; they affect the course of your entire life. And I share how you can find direction for your life as a whole here.
Books
Designing Your Life (Amazon affiliate link) by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
The Paradox of Choice (Amazon affiliate link) by Barry Schwartz
References
Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1178.
Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? R F Baumeister, et al. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1998 May;74(5):1252-65. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.74.5.1252. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9599441/