The Psychology of your 20s - 188. Why are we so indecisive?

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Our inability to make decisions is wasting our time, keeping us acting from a place of fear and stuck in a life we don't want! It's also not entirely our fault and often stems from unconscious mechanisms, neuroticism and fears that we haven't recognised. In today's episode we break down:  Why you struggle to make decisions The consequences of our chronic indecisiveness  Perfection and indecision  Choice overload  A fear of failure  How to overcome your indecisiveness using the 80/20 rule The 'trusted advisor' method  Listen now!  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg  Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.

It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. Today, we're talking about an all too common mental dilemma or barrier that we tend to face a lot in our 20s. And that is chronic indecisiveness, struggling or being unable to make a decision to save our lives, getting stuck in this rut of analysis of information seeking, of hypotheticals and pros and cons lists, and then eventually making a decision, taking action, and finding that we are constantly ruminating and thinking about the alternative and what might have been. It is exhaustive. It is time consuming, it's unproductive, and most of all, it's really mentally frustrating

to have to overthink every minute little decision or detail of our lives. There are a lot of decisions that we feel compelled to make in our 20s, like what we want to do with our lives, what we want to do for work, what kind of person we want to be, what kind of person we want to date, where we want to go to school, where to live, where to travel to, whether to travel or to save money to take that risk or play it safe. Those are some really hefty choices. Ones that I think every one of us struggles not to overthink because it feels like each decision we make, we always have to give up something else.

There is this loss of what could have been that we're very afraid of. And so instead of this possibility of having to recognize what we have to, to give up by choosing a certain path, we stay stagnant. We get so caught up in the benefits that we might be missing out on that we never actually move forward. I think this decade is a wonderful decade of opportunity, no doubt about that. Our adult lives are really just beginning. There are so many doors that remain open to us, but it's also a decade where we feel like the stakes are really high because of how formative these years seem to be. We don't want to kind of be too rash, in closing ourselves off or restricting ourselves to any opportunities.

And in that way, we tend to borrow a lot of stress from the future, and we catastrophize and imagine a life where we are unhappy until it feels like it's destiny. We also tend to waste a lot of time contemplating, and that time that we spend contemplating, we could be spending actually seeing a result and being decisive. So it makes a really kind of toxic cycle. Well, I think that it's time that we talk about it today. I want to get into all the nitty gritty. The psychology, of course, of what makes us so indecisive at times,

why we struggle to make not just big decisions, but small decisions, daily decisions, some of us more than others and what that contributes to in the long run, but also how to be active rather than passive in our lives. How do we let go of our indecision and accept all the possibilities for what could happen, all the different options, and still feel confident that we are kind of making the right one? Still feel confident in ourselves and our intuition, even if it feels scary. How do we kind of break out of the procrastination and the contemplation cycle? And as someone who deals with this on a daily, even when it comes to this podcast and

questioning, you know, what topics to do, what to write about, what studies to quote, what decisions I need to be making. Trust me, we are in the same boat. I have a lot to say about this, so let's get into it. Okay, so firstly, what is the actual problem with being indecisive? Why are we even talking about it? Well, I think there are obviously a few problems with chronic indecisiveness. Firstly, you never really gain a sense of agency or mastery over your life, your choices and your experiences, you leave them up to chance because you never feel ready to make a decision. Secondly, I think chronic indecisiveness allows us to be ruled by fear, and that fear means that we aren't always actually going to make the best choices. We're just going to make the easiest

one, the one that leaves us feeling safest. And I think indecisiveness also is, is a huge time racter, right? I think we become very conscious of all the things that we could be doing in the time that it takes for us to make a decision. Now, I often encounter this misconception that people who are indecisive are lazy, but I actually think that that is the furthest thing from the truth. When you are someone who struggles deciding between things, making decisions, making choices, actually what you're getting caught up in is the constant mental equations that you're

you're doing where you're considering every possible outcome, every possible scenario. I think a lot of the time our indecisiveness comes down to this like very unconscious fear of choosing wrong, a fear of making a mistake, of not being perfect, of disappointing others or disappointing ourselves. Now, this is something that psychologists do have a way of measuring. one of the most common questionnaires is the frost indecisiveness scale. And this essentially asks participants to rate a series of statements between strongly disagree and strongly agree. And they include like things such as like I try to put off making decisions. I have a hard time planning my free time.

I often worry about making the wrong choice. And it seems that deciding on the most trivial things takes me a lot of time. These questions really get to the bottom of not just how indecisive we are, but why we are indecisive. Here's the scary thing. The higher that someone scores on this scale, the lower that they tend to score on measures of life satisfaction. Now, this is based on a study conducted in the Netherlands a few years back, whereby they

wanted to see if there was any correlation between indecisiveness and our overall. well-being. And there definitely were some. People who were self-reporting that they put off decisions, that they were worried about making the wrong choice. They were also the same kinds of people who were more likely to say, if I could do my life over again, I would do it. The conditions of my life are not great. There are a lot of things that I want to change, but I don't feel able to, which I think just shows the link between not feeling a sense of control over your life that actually contributes to you being indecisive because you don't feel like anything you do is going to make much of a difference.

It comes down to something else as well. We are faced with hundreds, if not thousands of decisions every day. We have to think about what time to wake up in the morning, what we want to have for breakfast. We have to think about whether, you know, how are we going to get to? to work, what we're going to listen to on our commute, whether we should call our friend or not, whether we should reply to that text, when we should reply to that text, what to have for lunch, what we're going to wear. The list is honestly endless. And some estimates suggest that in a single

day, you and I are making around 35,000 decisions. That honestly sounds ludicrous. That sounds so excessive. But when you break down just how much we have to decide on in our daily life, that makes a lot of sense. That is a lot of information to process and a lot of decision making for one small brain. And what it can lead to is decision fatigue, whereby the more decisions we feel we need to make and the more important those decisions feel, the lower our quality of decision making is. That occurs for quite obvious reasons, right? When we have a million things to think about, eventually we have to start to cut some corners or we begin to behave impulsively because we don't quite have the necessary cognitive space to rationally and logically think everything through.

Or the other alternative is that we just don't make the decision at all. You know, think about when you come home from a long day at work. You're exhausted, you're tired, you're sitting on the couch and you have to decide whether you want to go for a run, whether you want to see your friend, clean your room, or, I don't know, go out for dinner. But suddenly like two hours pass and you realized you've spent that whole time on your phone sitting on the couch. And so you end up doing none of those things. That is an example of what happens when you face decision, fatigue. You end up choosing the path of least resistance because there has been so much else in your mind, on your mind, bothering you, consuming your limited cognitive space that you just end up doing the thing

that is easiest and that is mindlessly scrolling on your phone. Now, I will say not all indecisiveness is necessarily negative. There is definitely an important line between being decisive, being someone who gets shit done and being impulsive or being rash and not thinking things through. I think when it comes down to big decisions, it's important to have some caution. It's important to actually have a clear idea of what you want and why. And that is kind of the lucky balance that we need to strike. Not getting too caught up in the what and the why, but actually making sure that we're conscious of what we actually desire.

So there was a really interesting BBC article published a couple of years ago and it made the argument that indecisiveness actually makes us smarter because we tend to engage in more complex decision making when it comes to our choices and what we want from them. We take a lot more time to pause, to think things through. We think about things from a different perspective, right? It's kind of like you have this ball in your hand. either you pick it up and throw it or you take time to examine it. You look at it from all different angles before you end up throwing things away, before you end up just tossing it anywhere. I want to throw something else into the mix as well. So according to a recent paper from two researchers out of Germany, what matters in our life satisfaction like that research paper was

saying before, you know, it said that if you're indecisive, you're not as happy. What they found was that it's not about being indecisive, it's actually about being ambivalent. And the two things often get confused. When we overthink what the right choice might be, what's going to make us happier, that is an indicator that you're actually thinking about your future. You actually care. You care about doing the right thing. When you're ambivalent, though, and that's why you're not making decisions, that kind of demonstrates that you just, you know, you have this level of apathy, whereby maybe there's something else going on in your life, you're unhappy, you're self-sabotaging, maybe you're even depressed,

which means that you actually don't have the energy or the motivation to care about what happens to you. And that is the worst kind of indecisiveness. Indecisiveness that comes from not caring about your future. The indecisiveness that we typically think about, though, is indecisiveness about caring too much. And I think it's super fascinating because at face value, society tends to see people who struggle making decisions as just being lazy, right? But really, they can be anxious, they can be perfectionists, they can be struggling with this concept known as choice over low depression.

There is so much more nuance to be had in this conversation. So what causes us to become chronically indecisive or chronic overthinkers when it comes to. to our options and our choices. Well, we're going to focus on four explanations, starting with the biggest one, which is the fear of failure or the fear of choosing wrong. A lot of us experience decision paralysis because we are very innately aware of the possibility of screwing up, right? When it comes to big life choices, even small ones, we cannot mentally handle the possibility of being wrong and then eventually regretting our decision. A lot of us fear regret, especially in our 20s,

and we know that a fear of regret contributes to inaction. When we are trying to make a choice between option A, B, C, D, what we're judging these choices by is the potential outcome. And all of this is based on hypotheticals. We don't actually know what's going to occur, right? So we are like subconsciously running this like mental pro con equation in the back of our mind to determine what we think will maximize the things that we want, whether that's happiness, wealth, pleasure, and minimize the things we don't want like pain, disappointment,

but we actually don't know how these things will turn out. And so we're faced with a lot of uncertainty. When we face uncertainty, we tend to catastrophize, which means that. that we focus excessively on how things could turn out poorly for us, rather than the likely chance that they will turn out all right. And if they don't, we'll be okay. The reason that we focus on the possibility of things going wrong is because our brains naturally want to protect us from emotionally and physically, mentally, psychologically, painful experiences. And the way that it protects us from them is by avoiding them in the first place. And the way that it avoids them in the first

place, I know, keep following me here, is by trying to predict the future. We cannot predict the future. So instead, we choose the option that makes us feel safe and more comfortable. And what ends up happening is that we get so worked up by what could possibly occur that we just don't make any decision at all. not making a decision makes us feel less responsible if the worst case scenario were to happen. It's also why we kind of constantly seek reassurance from others, right? We ask our friends what they think we should do. We get our parents or even our partner to make our choices for us, whether that's like deciding on the restaurant for tonight or the plans or the movie.

All of this is a way of reducing or even eliminating our sense of personal responsibility, and accountability that we believe might contribute to a greater sense of disappointment or regret if things aren't as good as we thought they would be. If the restaurant is a letdown, if we actually end up screwing up our lives, at least we can kind of maintain a sense of like, well, at least it wasn't my fault. At least it wasn't all me. At least these people helped me. In this day and age, we are also increasingly facing a bias known as choice overload.

So it is both a blessing and a curse that this generation, we have so much freedom to choose what we want with our lives. More than any generation before us, we have so much freedom to decide whether we want to work full time, whether we want to go back to uni, pick up a trade or travel or freelance or pursue our creative interests or work behind a bar. I think especially with the creation invention of the internet, our eyes are a lot more open. to the opportunity that this world provides. But researchers have begun to notice that when we have too many options, this actually has the opposite effect that we would assume. It doesn't necessarily make us feel more free.

It actually makes us feel in a really strange, counterintuitive way. It makes us feel more restricted. Because now, now that we have more options, we start to perceive that we have a greater risk of, of choosing the wrong one, if that makes sense. So if you only had two job offers to consider versus, let's say, six, there is like a 50-50 chance that you'll choose the right job in the first scenario. And in the second scenario where there are like six different options,

there's only a 15% chance that you're going to choose the best case scenario. Obviously, there are other factors that come into consideration and things aren't always coming down to that kind of simplistic math. But that's how our brain sees it. Our brain sees all these things in front of us and goes, okay, more opportunities, that is more information to consider. There is more of a risk that we're going to choose the wrong one, essentially. We also tend to feel like with each choice, we kind of close more doors than we open, which is really scary, especially when we are so young and we want to feel really free and liberated and able to do what we want. So again, we put off making a decision to keep our options open when in fact what we're actually doing is closing ourselves off because we're never fully embracing those opportunities.

We're just keeping them there in case we might decide one day that we want to do them. So it's really interesting because when we are indecisive and we are forced to make a decision, we actually tend to look at less information than people who are more decisive. Because we understand intuitively that more information is going to make it a lot more difficult for us to choose just one thing. We don't want to get caught up in this choice overload. One researcher put it really well. So, for instance, you're an indecisive person and you're shopping for a car.

And what you might do is willfully choose to not do as much research as you should so that you have fewer options, so that you have fewer things to consider. That is like one way of being strategic about our indecisiveness so that we don't overload ourselves. But the thing is, is that in those situations, we don't make an informed decision, right? We just made an easier decision. We recognize that if we were to have all the information, to have all the facts, there is no way that we're getting through all that. There is no way that we are not going to, that we are going to make a choice and not have some kind of doubts about it, because that's where like our decisional procrastination comes in. It might not surprise you either that people with ADHD

are more prone to this as well because they already feel overwhelmed by a lot of information coming from their environment. So making choices like this becomes agony. I think across all neurotypes, indecisiveness is also more pronounced. If you are someone who just lacks a certain level of confidence in your own skills and abilities, in your ability to make good choices. Now, our confidence really derives from our sense of self-esteem. how resilient, competent, intelligent we see ourselves as being, and therefore to what degree

we feel that we can trust our assessments of a decision or a choice. Our level of confidence in our decision-making ability comes back to how we were raised, as most things in psychology tend to do. There's always some kind of behavioral, psychological, mental origin in childhood. So if you were raised in a family in which you had maybe overbearing, parents, that's one example, especially an authoritarian father. That's what one study suggests that it's not just about an overbearing mother, but an overbearing father in particular. If you were raised in that environment and you never had the opportunity to make decisions, or you were raised

in an environment where any small failure was really intensely criticized, you don't feel strong enough in your ability to trust yourself and the choices that you're making. So in those situations when your hand is kind of forced, you genuinely are paralyzed. You have this constant mental back and forth, not because you don't know what you want, but because you don't trust what you want. You don't trust that this might not lead to some kind of consequence that you can't foresee. You're not used to making decisions for yourself. You feel like if you are to mess up, you're going to be criticized. People are going to judge you. So you spend more time thinking things through. So family is another explanation. But another component of our indecisiveness that I find

particularly interesting, I think this relates to me a lot, is the interactions between indecisiveness, perfectionism, and anxiety. Now, perfectionism is a very broad personality trait. It essentially describes people who are overly concerned with striving for flawlessness. And they're very critical of themselves when they don't meet the kind of unrealistic standards. or goals that they set for themselves. When they fail to meet their own expectations, or maybe those of others, but normally they are self-imposed expectations,

this just means they place a lot more pressure on themselves to do better next time, to not make that mistake again, to make sure that we are hitting our targets every time, we're making the perfect decisions, we cannot screw up. And so it makes them incredibly hypervigilant to the possibility of mistakes.

perfectionism makes it so hard to make decisions because like we said before you just don't know what's going to happen sometimes and it's this trait that is a lot higher in people who display anxious traits or who have anxiety anxiety really exacerbates our perfectionism because there is this innate tendency within both to really overthink or ruminate on what could go wrong and what has gone wrong in the past. So that makes it really hard to not be focused on what could go wrong in the future. So as a result, our perfectionism means that it takes a lot of time to work through small choices, small decisions, because they take on a whole new degree of importance.

If everything has to be perfect, if everything has to go according to plan and be flawless, then we're not taking any chances here. We're taking all the time we can get to make sure that we know exactly what we're doing and that this is the right thing for us. Because again, we can't cope with the idea of misstepping. So we delay any kind of action or movement towards our goals. We become, again, just so paralyzed in the contemplation stage. We think that if we stay there long enough, eventually we're going to be able to see some kind of have some epiphany about what we should be. do, that the future will reveal itself to us, we'll know exactly what the perfect plan is,

what exactly what's going to like optimize everything in our lives. If we go to this school, then we're going to get this job and we're going to live in this city and make this much money and meet this person. That is never going to be clear. A lot of decision making kind of comes down to chance. A lot of the outcomes of our decision comes down to chance. and chance is not something we can control, which means that it's not something that really lends itself to creating like the perfect life, to making ourselves feel flawless and perfect, to allowing

ourselves to meet our high standards. Not to kind of be a dead horse, but I think perfectionism is also a real breeding ground for unrealistic expectations, right? As annoying as it is, you can't get it right. movie you choose to watch isn't going to be your favorite. Every restaurant isn't going to be amazing. Sometimes you do wish that you could go back. But sadly, you can't. And you have to make the most of what you have. That's especially hard for perfectionists because perfectionism. Of course, it doesn't leave any room for that kind of self-compassion. It doesn't leave any room for valuing what we learn, for valuing our mistakes. Because that is not on the agenda, right? That does not match the overall mission of getting everything right the first time.

So we've kind of got a good lay of the land around what causes our chronic indecisiveness. And that's all great. You know, that's all fine and lovely. But knowing that, what do we do about it? If we're just sick of getting stuck in the analysis paralysis, of wasting our time, of feeling judged because we get stuck and we're stuck overthinking, we can't truly confront our fears. We need to make the perfect choice. What do we do about it? What do we do about it so that we can accept failure as being part of this process, except that it's not going to be

the correct decision every time, but still move forward and still actually do something. Well, I'm going to talk about all of that and more after this short break, so stay with us. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.

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ourselves time limits. It's not about going over the options and making pro-conless. It's not about choosing randomly. And it's not about just swallowing your fear and hoping that it goes away. That might work for some people and congratulations if it does. You have done my work for me. but I think that when we use those band-aid fixes of being impulsive or just trying to like force ourselves into something that feels unnatural, we're inevitably going to revert back to our previous pattern and habit of procrastination and contemplation. So what we actually are required to do is identify why it is that you feel stuck, why it is that you lack confidence, why it is that you feel failure,

that you are perfectionist, that you are anxious or ambivalent, and start from there. Address the root cause before you can kind of address the problem, right? So the biggest contributor, as we discussed, is fear of failure and perfectionism. We can't cope with the possibility of things not turning out how we'd like or experiencing regret. In order to overcome this, we need to focus on being good, not perfect. and we call this the 80-20 rule. So the 80-20 rule is actually something that I learned from my previous workplace. Shout out to them when I was a consultant back in the day.

And essentially the premise is that in anything that you do, it doesn't need to be 100% amazing. It only needs to be 80% amazing. And you have 20% like room for error, 20% like space to not be perfect. This stops us from obsessing over the minor, small details, and we focus on the things that are going to be most important. And we focus on just getting that 80% right so that we don't get stuck on the final 20% and end up kind of losing all the work that we've done before that. Right. Like if, for example, you have an essay that you're trying to get done and you're getting incredibly indecisive about like, what topic am I going to choose?

What am I going to write it on? is this right? Is this good research? Is this going to get me an A? You're spending so much time focusing on everything being correct that you're actually sacrificing 100% of the project, right? But if you said, okay, I'm just going to start and I'm just going to focus on getting it about like 80% there, 80% happy with it, you realize that that remaining 20% isn't actually that big of a deal. And so it stops your brain. from getting stuck in the loop. It takes the pressure off. You know, your new 100 is 80.

And that 20% is a nice buffer. I also saw some amazing advice that said, getting 10 things done at 85% or 80%, so good but not perfect, is going to do a lot more for your life than getting five things done 100% perfectly and stressing out over the other five things that you didn't do. I think in that situation, right, it really goes to show that We spend a lot more time actually worrying about the stuff that we didn't do than the stuff that we did do. And when we think about that in the context of our decisions,

we spend a lot more time worrying about regret than actually experiencing regret. I think it's also important to delineate between the big decisions and the small ones and focus on what is important. Devote your time to that rather than getting held up and all the small stuff and getting stuck in a rut of decision fatigue, think about the decisions you need to make as if they are on a scale. You have your littles, you have your mediums, you have your massives. The littles are the daily choices that won't really impact you for more than like maximum 24 hours. You can make most of them pretty impulsively or quickly and most of the time they won't matter.

What you choose to eat, what you choose to wear, what you do in the evening, you can over. overthink them if you'd like and you can catastrophize each little one. But A, you just create more stress for yourself and you don't deserve that. And B, you probably won't even end up enjoying whatever it is that you choose because you're constantly comparing it to something potentially better. So by focusing on the bigger stuff, we free up a lot of cognitive space that is probably better devoted to the things that are actually going to matter. It's also important to remember that every outcome normally turns out to be okay. Because usually we end up happy with what we have and we do our best with our circumstances

regardless of what got us there. It's not, if you're caring this much about these small decisions, that is great because that's not going to be harsh about it, but that's not going to disappear. You're not ambivalent. You're not apathetic. You do care. And that level of care is going to carry with you regardless of whether the decisions you're making now turn out great, amazing, fabulous or not so great. There's no way of knowing if it

would have turned out differently. You just have to focus on the moment you're in and how you can make your current circumstances better right now. You have all of the necessary skills to get yourself out of a situation you don't want to be in. And if you made the wrong choice, your decisions aren't permanent. They can be undone. The only decisions you can't undo are the ones that you didn't make. are the ones that you spent being indecisive about to the point where life just kind of made the decision for you. You know, you can change courses at uni. You can switch jobs. You can move back to your old hometown. You can return early from a trip, whatever it is. But at 80, 90, 100 years old, you can't come back to where you are right now and make these choices. You can't come back

and tell yourself, just do it. It's not going to matter. Just do the damn thing. You can't reverse the regrets that you have around your inaction. So it makes more sense to just do the thing, even if you're not sure. And I also think it's important to shift your mindset from seeing mistakes as a failure to being part of the plan. Mistakes are a necessary ingredient. They're part of the process. We learn more from the times things didn't go our way than the times they did,

because these situations provide a space for reflection and redirection. If everything goes perfectly, according to plan, 100% tick, tick, tick, we never fail. We also never grow because growth comes from discomfort. It comes from learning, pushing past fear and realizing that even if things don't turn out completely okay, you're going to be totally fine. You're going to be okay. Something else that really works for me is to actually let my fear get as big as it wants. I let myself catastrophes, even if it seems a little bit counterintuitive, hear me out.

The reason I do this is because when you stare at the worst case scenario, when you look at it head on, when you make it as big and scary as you possibly can, it's never actually that bad. There is always a way out. You realize that actually the thing that you're overthinking, in the grand scheme of things, it's not life-ending. It's really not that important. It's not going to destroy you. It's all coming down to the fact that our brain likes to focus on what is scary and what it thinks is dangerous to protect us, even if that thing is not as important in reality. Okay, I have two final tips for you. The first one is to choose your advice selectively. I think sometimes we use excessive advice seeking as a way to put off making a decision.

When we do this, we get stuck in the information gathering stage where we mistakenly believe that the more we know, the better and easier the decision will be. That is unfortunately incorrect, as we know already, because it creates choice overload, information overload. It means that there is just too many factors, too many things to add to the procon list. So choose your trusted people, and I would say choose two of them, whether that is a parent and your best friend, a partner. a mentor, and then of course you have yourself. There's three people there who get to have a say in what you're going to decide. Then make a decision based on averages. If, you know, your best friend and your boyfriend both think that you should do the thing, you should obviously do it. You don't need to seek any further advice. And if you feel the need to, I think that's really revealing. It's so fascinating

because when other people tell us what we should do, it often makes us more aware of what we really want. it's like when you're trying to decide what you want for dinner, right? And you ask your friend, do you want Thai food or do you want pizza? I can't really choose. You sell them like, I just, I don't care. You choose. It's all up to you. And then they say pizza and you're like, damn it, I really want a Thai food.

And that is how you reveal your preference. The same goes for some of our bigger choices, right? When someone else has a strong opinion about what you should do, sometimes it causes an equally strong reaction in us that reveals our preferences done, there you go. You know what you need to do now. And finally, this is not like a practical thing, but go easy on yourself. I just want to remind you, you are one small person and in the grand scheme of things, it might feel comforting, maybe it doesn't, but you know what, your choices are not going to end the world. They're not going to destroy lives. Most of the time, anything that you do

can be reversed. Anything that you do, you can fix. you can add on to, it's not the end. Don't feel like you are locked into any one decision. Don't let your decisions take on more gravity and severity than they deserve. If it's not going to matter in five years, do not spend more than five seconds thinking about it. In fact, sometimes the decisions that we're not too sure of actually bring about even better scenarios than we ever could have imagined in the first place because we can't predict

the future. And if we tried, we normally end up with the future that we didn't even think of in the first place. So take the pressure off. It's all going to be okay. I saw someone say this the other day, but there is no one best choice. There is no one decision that is going to completely change your life. You can make the best of the outcome. You can make the best of what happens.

It's actually not about the decision. It's about the conscious daily choices that you make. to just keep going with your life, to keep yourself well, to keep yourself focused, to keep yourself on a path. You know, it doesn't really come down to the big decisions. It comes down to the small, daily choices, the littles, like I said before, that you can make quite quickly. So you've got this, believe in your capacity to make good choices. Remember that if you don't, it's not the end of the world, you have a chance to do it over. You have a chance to reverse decisions, change your mind and do them.

So go gentle on yourself. I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learnt something. I hope that it was comforting. And if there was someone else in your life who needs to hear this, please feel free to share it with them. And leave a five-star review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you're listening right now. Make sure you're following along for future episodes.

If you enjoyed this episode, please let me know. know, I would love to hear from you. I actually feel really indecisive when I make this show sometimes. I really worry about the episodes I put out and like if anybody's going to relate to them, if anybody even cares. Like, I always think, oh, what if people see this episode and they're like, well, I'm not going to listen to that because it doesn't apply to me. And then they never listen again.

That is an example of how I catastrophize my small, tiny choices. So like I said, I'm in the same boat. I would love to hear from you if you enjoyed this episode, if you can put my own sense of self-doubt to rest. And until next week, be kind. Be gentle to yourself. And we will see you soon. Hey, what's good, y'all?

You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to.

Listen to learn the hard way on the IHard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Snellins, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian,

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