Anxiety and Decision-Making: Why Most Life Choices Aren’t All-or-Nothing
Feel calmer making decisions with less anxiety
Decision-making can feel overwhelming when anxiety makes every choice seem high-stakes.
Do you get stuck in analysis paralysis? Do you believe that every decision can make or break life? Anxiety and “all-or-nothing” thinking can convince us that every choice determines if we end up with the best or worst version of life. In reality, the majority of our choices fall somewhere in between.
What All-or-Nothing Thinking Does to Your Brain
All-or-nothing thinking can trick our brain to thinking that all decisions are high stakes. This kind of anxiety and decision-making pattern creates urgency and perfectionism. This causes us to try to avoid making the wrong decision so we end up over researching and overanalyzing. Decision making becomes overwhelming and we try to avoid it.
Why Most Life Choices Aren’t All-or-Nothing
In the moments of high stress we believe that a choice is going to put us into the top 20% or bottom 20% of outcomes. In reality those outcomes are rare. Most of our choices fall somewhere more neutral like the 40-60% range or even the 20-80% range.
Think about those times when you stress about buying the perfect backpack or finding the perfect hotel for your trip, you watch all the YouTube videos and read all the blogs. You finally make the decision and the choice is just fine - not terrible not perfect. What makes or breaks the decision is our response to it rather the decision itself.
How Understanding the Middle Ground Reduces Anxiety
We can reduce indecision anxiety by noticing and accepting that most decisions fall into the neutral zone. And even if they end up falling out of the neutral zone it is how we react to the situation that matters. We cannot 100% guarantee any decision and accepting that can help you let go of the fear of making the wrong choice.
Practice “Gray Zone” Thinking
Here are some reflection prompts when you are starting to feel stuck in your decisions.
You will already think of the worst and best case scenarios. What might be the most likely scenario?
Is a neutral outcome possible?
Think of previous scenarios when “wrong” decisions ended up being neutral or better.
You can even journal your responses, writing them down can help you see that your decisions aren’t as extreme as your anxiety predicts.
Remember: Progress not Perfection
Anxiety and all-or-nothing thinking makes us believe every choice is life determining. However, most of life choices end up being neutral, somewhere in the middle. It is our response to decisions that truly make them feel aligned or misaligned to our life. We hear people say it all the time, “I do not regret that decision because it led me to where I am today”. Decisions have opportunities to progress into something aligned to you and your life.
If you find yourself overwhelmed and paralyzed by life decisions therapy can help you explore way to trust your judgement and ability to roll with the punches. Schedule a consultation with Le Therapy today to learn how I can help.