Doubting Every Decision After You Have Already Made It

The choice is made and now all you can think about is whether you chose wrong. The doubt didn’t exist before the commitment. Now it’s everywhere. Now every reason for the choice looks like a mistake.

You could look back at why you picked it and that would probably help but you don’t. You just sit with the new doubt and let it grow. The doubt finds all the ways this could be wrong and ignores all the ways it could be right. The doubt is very good at its job.

Other people seem fine with their choices. They picked something and they are just living with it without this constant questioning. Either they picked right or they are better at accepting that they might have picked wrong. Either way they are not drowning in this the way you are.

The second-guessing eats up energy that would go toward making the choice work. Instead of investing in what you picked you are spending time imagining what you didn’t pick. The imagining feels productive like you are figuring something out but you are not. You are just torturing yourself with possibilities.

The doubt might be real. You might have picked something that isn’t going to work and the doubt is your internal wisdom telling you that. Or the doubt might be the normal discomfort of doing something new mixed with the human tendency to think the other path would have been better. Both kinds of doubt feel the same so there’s no way to know which one you are having. The doubt doesn’t come with a label that says whether it’s accurate or just noise.

What’s strange is that you could have picked the other thing and doubted that instead. People pick different options and feel the same doubt about those options. The doubt follows the choice. The doubt follows the commitment. It doesn’t necessarily mean the choice was wrong. It might just mean that making a real decision about your life creates uncertainty and uncertainty feels terrible.

Some of the doubt will probably fade as you live with the choice. Some of it might stay forever. You might always wonder what the other path would have looked like. But you’ll also start to see how this path is actually turning out and the actual turning out usually matters more than the wondering.

Maybe you did pick wrong. That’s possible. But you also might pick wrong and it turns out fine anyway. You might pick wrong and the wrongness creates its own path that’s better than right would have been. You might pick right and doubt it forever anyway because doubt doesn’t care whether the choice was right or wrong.

The doubt is going to stay for a while. It might always stay a little bit. Making peace with the doubt means accepting that you can be unsure and still move forward. It means making the choice and then choosing it again every day even when the doubt shows up and says maybe not. It means accepting that certainty about decisions doesn’t really exist and living anyway.