Have you ever stood in front of a fridge full of perfectly good food and somehow decided you have nothing to eat? Same energy.
We do it with bigger things too. The job we keep meaning to apply for. The hard conversation we keep meaning to have. The move, the boundary, the goodbye, the hello. We tell ourselves we are being thoughtful. Careful. Responsible. But somewhere in there, “thinking it through” quietly turned into “stuck.”
Here is the part most of us miss:
The thing we are so afraid of, making the wrong decision, is rarely as expensive as the thing we are already doing, which is making no decision at all.
Why We Freeze in the First Place
We freeze because we want to be right. That is it. Underneath the spreadsheets, the pros-and-cons lists, the “I am just not sure yet,” there is almost always a single fear: I might choose wrong, and then what will that say about me?
I get it. I have stayed in rooms way too long because the door I needed to walk through felt scarier than the wallpaper I had already memorized. And I have watched brilliant women, smart, capable, deeply intentional women, sit on a decision for months because they were convinced they needed more clarity before they could move.
Most of the time we do not actually need more clarity. We need permission to be human.
Indecision Has a Bigger Bill Than We Realize
Researchers estimate the average adult makes around 35,000 conscious decisions a day. Most of them are tiny. Some of them, though, sit on our shoulders for weeks. Months. Years. And they cost something every single day they go unmade.
Studies on long-term regret show something striking. In the short term, we tend to regret the things we did. In the long term, we regret the things we did not. The “what if” stays louder than the “oops” almost every time.
So when we tell ourselves we are protecting ourselves by waiting, we may actually be choosing the version with the bigger price tag.
The Reframe That Changes Everything
Most decisions are not permanent. Read that again, because it is the part that changed everything for me.
We act like every choice is a one-way door. Most of them are not. A study on revision behavior found that when people were given a chance to change their minds, more than 75 percent did. Translation: most decisions can be adjusted, refined, or completely rerouted. The catastrophic, life-defining moments we are terrified of are far rarer than our anxiety wants us to believe.
When we stop treating every decision like a last meal and start treating it like a first draft, the whole game changes.
Four Small Shifts That Make Deciding Easier
We do not need a personality transplant to become better at this. We need reps. Here are four shifts I keep coming back to, both for myself and for the women I work with.
- Start with low-stakes practice. Pick the restaurant. Pick the paint color. Pick the route. Practice deciding when nothing is on the line, so your nervous system learns that choosing is not dangerous. Confidence in big decisions is built on top of small ones.
- Try snap decisions on the unimportant stuff. Give yourself a 10-second rule for things that do not matter. The cereal aisle does not deserve five minutes of your life. Speed on the small things saves your energy for the things that actually need careful thought.
- Listen to your gut, with one filter. Research suggests intuition is most reliable when we have real experience with the situation in front of us. So if your gut is loud about something you have lived through before, listen. If it is loud about something brand new and emotionally charged, slow down. Your gut is a great advisor and a terrible only advisor.
- Forgive yourself in advance. Every single one of us has made a decision we wish we could redo. That is not evidence of bad judgment. That is evidence of being alive. The faster we forgive ourselves for the imperfect choices we are going to make, the freer we are to actually make them.
A Calming Truth to Take With You
There is no version of your life where you make every choice perfectly. There is, however, a version where you trust yourself enough to choose, learn, adjust, and choose again. That version is built one small decision at a time.
The next time you feel that familiar freeze, the spinning, the over-researching, the “I will figure it out next week,” try this. Ask yourself one question. What is staying stuck costing me? Not what might the wrong choice cost. What is no choice already costing?
That answer tends to move us.
A Note from Rosemary
If you are sitting on a decision that has been sitting on you, you do not have to figure it out alone. I offer a free, no-pressure discovery session for women who are ready to get unstuck and move forward with clarity. We will look at where you are, what is holding you back, and what your next honest step looks like. No sales pitch, no agenda, just a real conversation. If that sounds like the breath of fresh air you have been needing, I would love to meet you.
