Chronic Indecision

Photo by nrd on Unsplash

Finding "can't make decisions" on a list of anxiety symptoms recently was a revelation. Even though I have a psychology background (although I haven't studied anxiety), and even though I've known I was struggling with anxiety for a while, it never occurred to me that my chronic indecision is an anxiety symptom.

Before I knew this was an anxiety symptom, I could spend thirty minutes thinking about what I want for lunch. I could stare at a marketing email about a new play for twenty minutes trying to decide whether I want to watch it. I still spend hours each week thinking about my schedule and what I want to work on.

It's really an obvious mechanism. Every decision is an uncertain situation. Every decision carries with it the potential to be wrong. And for anxious people, being wrong is dangerous. Anxiety makes committing to a sandwich rather than a pizza a life-threatening situation.

The thing is, since I realised that this is an anxiety symptom, I can more easily check myself. It's not that I don't deliberate anymore; I just break the cycle faster. I note that it's not an important decision, that it's just my anxiety that makes it feel important, then I make a decision and move on. Sometimes I am, indeed, wrong. At least now I don't spend hours on it. And, more importantly, I stopped treating indecisiveness as a character flaw.