The Psychology of Hard Decisions

Recently had a friend come to me for my opinion on a serious conundrum he was contending with. I'm not going to go into the specifics, but will instead simply say that he was completely and utterly torn. It was causing him so much stress and anxiety that he was losing sleep, which in turn caused a cascade of problems in other areas of his life. I once had the same issue when making difficult decisions and, after growing sick and tired of stressing myself sick, I began looking for methods to better manage my thinking in regards to decision making. Here's what I learned:

If you've done your due diligence and narrowed things down to two decisions and find yourself agonizing at the final step, consider this: each option must be equally good or bad. This doesn't seem readily apparent when we're in the moment because our emotions are involved. But when objectively removed from the situation it becomes an obvious truth that each option is approximately equal. If one option were clearly superior, we wouldn't be be struggling to choose the best option.

So, in these instances my best advice to myself, and what I recommend to others, is to choose the option that I believe will make me happiest. I know that sounds pretty cheesy, but I swear it has helped me tremendously and vastly reduced unnecessary stress from my life.

And in the cases where things didn't turn out as well as you had hoped it's very simple to tell yourself that you should've gone with the other option because you KNEW what would happen if you chose the option you ultimately went with. Don't give into the hindsight bias. It's counter productive and only reinforces a bad habit in stressing about decisions.

The truth of the matter is you didn't know what was going to happen either way. You may have known that the outcome was a possibility, but you had know way of knowing it would be the reality. If you did, you wouldn't have made that choice and wouldn't have ever been conflicted in the first place.

If things don't go as well as you'd have hoped, try to remember you made the best decision possible with the information you had at the time. Get up, dust yourself off, and move forward. Things tend to ultimately work out when we are persistent and patient. And even when things fall short of our desires and expectations, we become richer for the experience.

I know this doesn't really solve any problems outright. It's certainly not a magical wand to fix anything. But it's something I've practiced for years and it has greatly improved my quality of life and outlook on things. I sincerely hope it can help you, too!