4 Good Ways to Make a Tough Decision

Quick Win

Life is full of hard choices. The next time you’re torn between good options, consider one or more of these strategies.

Try This Today

• Take a beat. Practice a few minutes of deep breathing or meditation. If you are with other people, you might get up and go to a quiet space. The idea is to give yourself a break from the pressure and stress of the decision — and to give intuition a chance: What feels right to me?
• Revisit your principles. Decisions get easier when you have personal guidelines and values to lean on. A tempting job offer gets less tempting when the job would involve something you vowed never to do again, such as  commute in rush-hour traffic.
• Consider your future self. Your present self would love living close to the ocean. Your future self might hate living so far from future grandchildren. Your present self may be drawn to the turquoise walls in the design magazine, but your future self might tire of that paint color.
• Set a time limit. When you’ve tried the steps above and still come up empty, it’s time to get unstuck. Give yourself a deadline, whether that’s in an hour or at the end of the week. Reassure yourself that the decision is tough because all your choices are reasonable. After you make the decision, let it go. 

Why

Some decisions are relatively easy: vanilla or chocolate, staying in for dinner or going out. But life also presents tough choices that can lead to a spiral of stress, overthinking and “analysis paralysis.” And we know that stress can harm our decision-making capacity, according to research. In a study of 47 college students, participants who completed a task that induced acute stress made poorer decisions than participants who were not stressed, as reported in Applied Psychophysiological and Biofeedback in 2017. The steps above can help bring peace of mind to decision-making, according to Peter Bregman, author of Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Replace Counter-Productive Habits with Ones That Really Work.