How to Stop Second-Guessing Your Decisions

It was never really about the chandelier. It’s the deciding.

I worry about my decisions. Before I choose, I want to find the best one, which means running down every outcome of every option until I’ve built a fourth-order case against a light fixture at 2 a.m. In Six Seconds language, my Consequential Thinking works overtime, which sounds like a compliment until you meet it in the dark.

Then I choose. And I go back and check the work. Was that the right one? Should I have waited for the sale? What did I miss?

The worrying doesn’t end when the decision does. That’s the part that took me years to notice.

Barry Schwartz and his team would call me a Maximizer. In their research, people driven to find the very best option report more regret, more comparing, and less satisfaction with what they chose than people who find something that meets their standard and get on with their lives. They also score higher on perfectionism (hello me!), which felt a little on the nose.

Here’s the thing about maximizers. We aren’t making worse choices. We’re just enjoying them less.

Changing your mind

In 2002, Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert’s work on decision making also captures my dilemma.

Students in a photography course took pictures, printed their two favorites, and chose one to keep. Some were told the choice was final. Others were told they could swap it within a few days if they changed their minds. When asked ahead of time, most students said they’d want the flexible version of the decision. But the students who could change their minds ended up liking their photograph less. The open decision kept them considering, questioning, ruminating on the decision. The ones who were stuck with their choice went to work finding reasons to love it, without ever noticing they were doing it.

I had always treated the escape hatch as a kindness I was doing for myself. It turns out the escape hatch was the thing keeping me from finding peace.

Which is probably why the chandelier stopped bothering me the week the box went to recycling and the return window closed. Nothing about the chandelier changed. What changed was that I could no longer take it down.

When the Feelings Don’t Agree

Part of what kept me circling was that I felt two ways about the same option, and I kept reading that as proof I hadn’t figured it out yet.

A Six Seconds colleague wrote about choosing between two job offers. He laid out Mixed Emotions cards for each one. Under the first: safe, trapped, unfulfilled, resentful. Under the second: curious, afraid, inadequate, empowered.

The cards didn’t tell him what to do. What they showed him was that his fear and his excitement were pointing at the same thing. Two expressions of one need. Once he could see that, the fear stopped being a reason to say no.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Conflicting feelings about a choice aren’t evidence that you’re confused. They’re usually evidence that the choice is real, and that something you care about is sitting on both sides of it.

The Mixed Emotions deck is built for exactly this. Lay out a card for each option, then choose the cards for how you imagine feeling when you say yes to it.

🛒 Get your deck →

2. Set the bar before you start looking

I’m too flexible with my limits. They slide upward, always with a very good reason, and by day nine I’m pricing lights at double what I said I’d spend. A bar set in advance is kinder to myself than one that keeps moving, because the moving one can never be met.

EQ Tip: Write one sentence before you begin. Then take the first option that clears it. → This choice is good enough if it ________. → What am I willing to give up to get that?

3. Firmly close the door

Gilbert’s photography students didn’t get happier because they chose better. They got happier because they couldn’t go back, so their minds finally stopped reconsidering.

EQ Tip: Say it to yourself, or to someone else, in the past tense. → This is the one. I chose it with the best information I had at the time. → What can I do now with the energy I’ve been spending on second-guessing?