Trying not to agonize over big decisions

Following because same

I have a lot of friends who struggle with this, bc it’s a big thing in ocd world (and also in all sorts of other brains, to be clear). What I always think about is that there’s never one right decision, and sometimes realizing your brain will beat you up over either choice is kinda freeing. If both choices are wrong, both choices are right. I gravitate towards what is essentially existentialism: the world is a weird confusing place and we’re all just stumbling around as best we can. We kinda make the meaning ourselves, and part of that is assigning meaning to our decisions long after we make them. In the moment, we’re just making choices and moving forward. I once ordered my friend a custom-embroidered sign from Etsy that said “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I flipped a coin.” I think it’s more about making any decision than making the right decision. The hard work is in the moving forward. Idk if any of that is helpful, sry to come out of nowhere and philosophize at you!

Human Design is a game changer for this one. How a person best makes a decision is a basic piece of info in the birth chart (it’s called Authority, should you want to look yours up!) For some, it’s an emotional process, for others it’s an in-the-moment gut feeling, for others it’s based in a safety instinct etc etc…It can be really liberating information. But regardless of what type of authority a person has, according to this system, NO ONE is supposed to be making decisions from their mind. Everyone has some body-based cues they’re getting that don’t involve logic. This is, of course, not at all what we’re taught to do around decision making, so it can take some work to reprogram the habit of trying to think your way through everything.

I’ve always struggled with decision making to the point where I’d feel paralyzed by choices. Sylvia Plath’s The Fig Tree poem is nice to reference. At the end of the day, you end up where you need to be. Make a wrong choice? It’s okay, its an experience and you’re learning something from it!

Totally. I once came across a quote that said something along the lines of “you won’t make every right choice, but you can make every choice right”. It’s shifted my relationship with decision-making from an elusive, agonizing hunt for certainty and “correctness” to knowing I have the power/agency to make my future reality the right one for me, whatever it might be. There’s also something really beautiful about radical acceptance of future mistakes. Like, yup I’m going to mess up big time and I’m gonna make a ton of silly decisions. There are always learnings that can be extracted from these experiences so let’s go forth and find ‘em!