A couple of weeks ago I ran a session on overthinking in my Tired & Wired group. A room full of clever, capable, high-functioning people, all of them very good at their jobs.
About halfway through, I noticed something that had nothing to do with overthinking at all.
Nobody in that room had a thinking problem. They could all think wonderfully! The actual problem was that most of them had a decision sitting completely still while the thinking went round and round on top of it.
Many of their tasks weren’t avoided. They were considered. For weeks.
There's a name for that which I like better than procrastination, because procrastination sounds lazy and this is the opposite of lazy.
Under-acting.
You're not doing nothing. You're doing a lot! Unfortunately, all of it is in your head, and none of it in the world.
Protection
For a lot of us, the sitting still gets filed under discipline. If we just wanted it more, or got up earlier, or found a better system, we'd move.
But if you investigate what's stopping you, it's rarely the size of the task.
It's the moment just before, either when your body realises that choosing means one of your options won’t happen, or when it realises one of your options might turn out to be wrong. And for some of us, being wrong has never felt like a small thing.
This reaction isn't laziness. It's protection.
Maybe, somewhere a long way back, whether you remember it or not, getting it wrong might have cost you something real - warmth… approval… someone's good mood at the dinner table.
If giving the wrong answer ever meant criticism, or ridicule, or love going quiet for a while, then your nervous system filed "being wrong" under “dangerous”, and it learned to keep you in the safest place it knows.
It learned to keep you in the thinking. The considering. The data collecting.
If nothing has happened, then nothing can have gone wrong.
Thinking feels like progress. It looks like work and feels like work. It just doesn't move the needle much of the time.
The decision isn't the decision.
When a decision won't move, it's worth asking what else that decision is carrying. Because often the decision itself is small, but the weight sitting on top of it is not. The job isn't really about the job. The email isn't about the email. Underneath, it might be something that sounds like this: ‘If I choose wrong, what does that make me?’
And that's a different question. That's not a decision any more. That's a test.
And once you see that, there's a simpler question to ask. Not "which option is right?" but "am I still deciding here, or am I just trying not to be wrong?"
Because those are two different activities.
Deciding ends - you pick an option, you live with what happens, you adjust as you go. Trying not to be wrong never ends, because the only way to guarantee you're never wrong is to never choose anything. And that's not caution. That's a very respectable way of standing still.
So, two things. These came out of the session, and I've been using the first one on myself all week.
Give the decision a deadline that matches its size. If you only take one thing from this email, take this one. Here's how it works. When you catch a decision that's stalled, ask how big it really is, then give it a deadline to match.
A truly small decision gets a minute. Which restaurant. What TV show to watch tonight. Which ice cream flavour to choose (I have experienced full mental shutdown standing in front of an ice cream counter, not knowing which flavour to choose, so I'm not judging 😅). Give yourself a one-minute time limit, then choose. What’s the worst that can happen?
A medium decision - which supplier, whether to go to the ‘thing’, what to do about the awkward email - gets until the end of the day.
And a genuinely big one, a job, a house, a school, gets a date, written in the diary. And when the deadline arrives, you decide with the information you have. That's the whole tool. No deadline extensions for more research, because if more research were going to settle it, it already would have.
The reason this tool works is that thinking expands to fill whatever time you give it (this is Parkinson's law, the old observation that work expands to fill the time available). Give a decision no deadline, and you've given it forever, and forever is exactly how long your nervous system will happily take. There's a smaller second benefit too. Every deadline you set and stick to is a small piece of evidence that you can be trusted to make decisions. That evidence adds up.
Practise deciding fast on things that don't matter. This is the deadline tool shrunk down and turned into daily reps. Those one-minute decisions we just talked about, the ice cream, the restaurant, which email to answer first: don't just rescue them when they stall. Go looking for them, every day, and decide them in ten seconds flat. Choose, and then, and this is the important part, don't revisit it. No changing your order after the waiter's gone. No checking whether the other route would have been faster.
Here's why it works. Big decisions feel dangerous partly because your nervous system has had so little practice at the actual moment of choosing. You've been protecting yourself from that moment for years, so it never gets to learn that the moment is survivable.
Every ten-second decision is a tiny rehearsal. You choose, the world doesn't end, and your body quietly logs it: “we chose, and nothing bad happened”. Do that twenty times a week and the moment of choosing slowly stops feeling like a cliff edge. You're not practising choosing well. You're practising being someone who chooses.
See you next week!
Chibs 💙
If this is familiar, I made a short video on what to do when a decision won't move 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Perfectionism | Sleep-Friendly Guided Night Meditation (Let Go and Rest)
And if the decisions all queue up and start talking the moment the room goes quiet, this is the one I'd put on 👇🏾
▶ Watch: Zero Thoughts Tonight | Deep Sleep Hypnosis for Overthinkers
