A strength of overthinkers is that they’re willing to exert cognitive effort to experience better outcomes. Here’s how overthinkers who are considering a major life decision can best reap the benefits of this strength.
These tips will help you cut through confusion and feel empowered to make your own choice.
1. Recognise When You’re Choosing Between Multiple Good Options
Decisions aren’t hard when we’re choosing between a good option and a bad one, like staying in a five-star hotel or a one-star hotel for the same price.
Decisions are hard when we’re choosing between multiple potentially good options, or multiple non-ideal options (like between medical treatments that all have risks or side effects).
Simply recognising that a decision is hard because we’re choosing between multiple good options or multiple bad ones can help us have more clarity.
2. Use These Checks to Distinguish Productive and Unproductive Thinking
Ask yourself, “Did I already decide?” Overthinkers regularly keep thinking long after they’ve actually made their choice. They keep a decision hanging. This can happen when the person unconsciously believes they need to justify their choice, beyond the fact that it’s their choice.
Sometimes we keep thinking even after we know our choice because we feel pressured to conform to social norms. For example, we’ve chosen to only have one child, but we’re bothered by the myth that children who don’t have siblings will be lonely or maladjusted, even if we don’t personally believe this. Conformity pressure can feel like confusion or uncertainty when we actually know what we want.
Sometimes it can feel like we haven’t decided how to act when we’re actually just delaying enacting our choice. For example, you’ve decided what to name your child, but you’re hesitant to announce it because you’re unsure if your family will approve. In cases like this, uncertainty about others’ reactions can cause us to delay acting on decisions we’ve already made. We’re not actually undecided; we’re procrastinating due to anxiety about the response.
3. Accept That There Isn’t a Right Way to Approach a Decision
We base some life decisions on feeling: We just want what we want. Other times, we can feel a greater sense of control when we thoroughly explore a decision from all perspectives. Finding a dedicated resource can help you feel confident you’ve covered your bases and cut down on repetitive thinking. For example, Just One, a book by my PT colleague Dr. Susan Newman, provides guiding questions to explore the decision to have a second child.
Even among overthinkers, it’s common for anxiety to stop us from doing a thorough, objective analysis of a decision. That can happen when we worry that the objective analysis will point in one direction, when we actually want something different. But this isn’t something to be scared of. You’re entitled to make your own choice. If you find you feel strongly one way or the other, despite what an objective analysis points to, this can actually help you better understand what you want your own choice to be.
4. Consider a Single Session With a Therapist to Break a Thinking Rut
If anxiety causes you to experience repetitive overthinking instead of objective analysis, consider a single session with a therapist. This isn’t a case of starting therapy and dropping out after one session. It’s a planned single session devoted to a specific topic. For example, if you’re choosing whether to stay in a relationship, you might schedule a single session with a psychologist to explore your thinking.
Many people aren’t aware this option exists. Single sessions can be extremely helpful in certain situations. Not all therapists offer single sessions, so you’ll need to specifically inquire about the availability of this service if it’s what you want.
What I recommend: Set a date for when you’ll try a single therapy session if your thinking is still cloudy or distressing at that time. Research a therapist who could provide this service now to reduce that roadblock later.
5. Recognise Inherent Uncertainty and Unpredictability
With major life decisions, we don’t have a crystal ball to know how the decision will work out. For example, I know people who stayed with partners through long, unhappy periods yet are content and happy together 10 years later, perhaps to other people’s surprise. Equally, I can think of examples of people who, when they eventually leave a relationship, regret they didn’t do it much sooner. You can’t know for sure which camp you’re in.
Many major life decisions, like whether to stay living in one location or move, to change jobs or careers, or add to your family, have similar qualities.
Make Complexity and Autonomy Your Strengths
Overthinkers are skilled at seeing complexity. They’re incapable of seeing situations in oversimplified ways. This is inherently a strength, but can also feel like a burden. The more you understand your thinking style, the better you’ll be able to take advantage of its strengths and manage the ways it can make decisions more heavy and fraught, for example, when considering what could go wrong, it makes it feel too hard to commit to any decision.
Remind yourself that you’re free to make the choice you want, in the way you want to make it. For practice in expressing your autonomy, read this guide.
