Is Indecision Paralysis keeping you from living your best life?
Does this sound familiar? You struggle to make the smallest decisions. What to eat for dinner. What to put on each morning. How to sign-off an email. Are you unhappy and stuck in a rut because making the decision to try something new feels too overwhelming? If you said yes to any of those things, you might be suffering from indecision paralysis.
What is indecision paralysis
Unlike some of the more technical terms I use, this is exactly what it sounds like! When you get stuck trying to make even the smallest decisions because you just aren’t sure which is the right choice. You might eventually arrive at a decision (what to eat or what to wear), but sometimes, you might just give up on something entirely (this often happens with things that are optional and not necessary).
Maybe you’ve been feeling like you’re in a rut and you want to try something new this weekend. So you check Meet-Up and the local events listings on Facebook. Suddenly there are dozens of choices, and you have no idea what you want to do. After struggling to make a decision for days, the weekend rolls around, and you end up doing the same-old routine because you couldn’t figure out what new activity you wanted to try.
Check out these posts if you struggle to get out of your rut not because you can’t decide, but because you lack motivation, or new things feel too scary to step out of your comfort zone.
Why this happens
There are a few reasons you might be suffering from indecision paralysis:
Decision fatigue: This is a well researched psychological phenomenon. Studies have found that we only have so many decisions in us each day. The more decisions we make, the harder it becomes to make each subsequent decision. Eventually, even little decisions which might have been easy to make in the morning become impossible to make by the end of the day. When you second guess your decisions and have to re-decide, decision fatigue arrives even faster.
“What if”: You try to examine each decision you make – where might it turn out to be the wrong choice, and what would have happened if you had chosen something else instead. This turns what could be a simple decision into a long and complicated one.
Lack of confidence: When you don’t trust yourself to make the right decisions, you end up second guessing every decision you make. You might not lack confidence across the board, it could be limited to a specific type of decision (i.e. related to work or your personal appearance). Regardless of where you lack confidence in your own choices, this also results in difficulty making simple decisions.
Why indecision paralysis is a problem
Indecision paralysis keeps you from doing things that bring fun, joy, nourishment, and rest into your life.
Even if you always manage to eventually make a decision, the time you spent agonizing over that decision is time that you could have otherwise spent doing something you really enjoy.
You might have heard me mention before that every yes is also a no. When you say yes to an extended decision making process due to indecisions paralysis, you are saying no to everything else you could have been doing with that time.
Do you find that you don’t have enough time for self-care? Maybe you struggle to get enough sleep because you ate dinner too late since you couldn’t decide what to have? Or perhaps you know you need to wake up extra early on weekdays since you need time to change your outfit five times before walking out the door.
Wouldn’t you rather be doing something else with all the time you spend trying to make a decision?
Addressing indecision paralysis
Regardless of the cause of your indecision paralysis, there is one simple tool that will help you remove it from your life.
Learning to listen to, and trust, your intuition.
Here’s why.
Your intuition is the part of you that knows what’s in your best interest. It might not be picking the easy choice, but it will always steer you in the direction of the choice that is in your best interest. Sometimes we don’t see the whole path right away, sometimes it becomes clear as soon as you make the decision.
When you learn to tap into and trust your intuition, decisions (even the big ones) become easy. The impact of decision fatigue eases, you remove the “what ifs”, and your confidence in yourself and your decisions grows.
And just like anything else, working with your intuition is something that needs to be practiced and developed over time. I suggest that all my clients start working with their intuition on small decisions like we’ve been talking about – what to eat, wear, watch on tv, etc.
Once you’ve gotten comfortable, you can start to use your intuition to make some of the bigger decisions in your life (where to live, what relationships are worth hanging onto, should you change your job).
How to work with your intuition
Ok, that sounds great, but working with your intuition seems like such a woo woo thing to do. How do you actually make it happen?
I suggest my clients use one of two techniques when they are getting started working with their intuition. You can learn both of them (and one more) in my free Intuition Mini Course.
Here’s how to decide which is the right one for you!
Do you find you mindlessly eating and suddenly realize you are beyond overfull? Do you notice bumps and bruises and not remember how you hurt yourself? If you didn’t track it on a calendar, would your period always catch you by surprise? Do you get ready to go home at the end of a long workday and suddenly realize you haven’t gone to the bathroom since you got up in the morning?
If you answered yes to several of those questions, I’m guessing you struggle with an awareness of the physical messages your body is sending you. I would suggest you start working with the dowsing technique. This allows you to have a physical representation of your intuition’s “voice” outside of your body.
If you answered no to most of the question above, it sounds like you have a pretty good awareness of the messages your body is sending. The embodied intuition technique would be a great one for you to start with.
Ready to get started?
Head on over here and get the free Intuition Mini-Course. This course will take you less than an hour to complete and will provide you with everything you need to get started working with your intuition.
Leave indecision paralysis in the rearview mirror and start making time for all the things you want to do which bring fun, joy, nourishment, and rest into your life!
