If you’re afraid of making the wrong decision, you may assume that your fear is telling you something important about the choice in front of you. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the fear comes from something else: the way you’re imagining the emotional consequences of making the wrong choice.
In this article, we’ll look at why important decisions can feel so frightening, how your mind tries to predict how you’ll feel afterwards and why those predictions can make a difficult decision seem even more dangerous than it really is. This will be especially relevant to you if you tend to postpone major decisions because you’re worried about regret, emotional pain or not being able to cope with the consequences.
Why are you so afraid of making the wrong decision?
Important decisions usually come with uncertainty. That’s normal. You might be considering leaving a relationship, changing jobs, moving somewhere else, ending a friendship or walking away from something you’ve invested years in. In situations like these, there’s rarely a way to know exactly what will happen after you choose.
That uncertainty can easily turn into fear of making the wrong decision. For some people, this broader fear of making decisions can make even important choices feel paralysing. Instead of only asking which option makes the most sense, you begin imagining what could happen if you choose badly. You may wonder whether you’ll regret it, whether you’ll discover that the alternative was better or whether you’ll be able to cope with whatever follows.
The problem with our brains is that they start presenting these thoughts to us as if they were evidence. If imagining one option makes you anxious, it’s easy to conclude that the anxiety itself is telling you not to choose it.
However, anxiety isn’t always a reliable guide to whether a decision is right or wrong. It can seriously mislead us. So it may reflect a genuine risk that deserves attention, but it can also reflect uncertainty, fear of regret or difficulty tolerating the fact that no important decision comes with guarantees. This kind of decision anxiety can make it even harder to separate genuine concerns from predictions about what might happen.
Part of the difficulty is that when you make a decision, your mind is doing two jobs at once: on the one hand, predicting what will happen, and on the other, predicting how you’ll feel when it happens. There are also psychological forces that shape your choices without necessarily being obvious to you at the time.
How affective forecasting can influence your decisions
Psychologists use the term affective forecasting to describe the way we predict our future emotional reactions.
We’re often reasonably good at predicting the general direction of those reactions. If you lose something important, you’ll probably feel bad, right? If something you’ve wanted for years finally happens, you’ll probably feel good. Makes total sense.
Where we tend to make more mistakes is in estimating how intense those feelings will be and how long they’ll last. In other words, we amplify negative emotions and feel as though we won’t be able to cope with them.
Let’s look at a couple of very simple examples:
Imagine that you’re considering leaving a job you’ve disliked for years. You may have practical concerns about money, job opportunities or your professional future. Those are real factors that should form part of your decision. But, at the same time, you may also predict that you’ll immediately regret leaving, that being unemployed will feel unbearable or that you’ll spend months wishing you’d stayed.
Something similar can happen when you’re considering ending a relationship. You may imagine the first painful days after the breakup and then unconsciously extend that emotional state across the following six months.
The prediction may be partly right. A breakup can be extremely painful and leaving a secure job can create considerable anxiety. What’s much harder to know is whether you’ll feel exactly as bad, with the same intensity, for as long as you currently imagine.
The answer is no. Because we magnify the duration and intensity of those emotions.
You need to be aware of these little obstacles our minds put in our way because you can end up making decisions from fear and making a real decision today on the basis of an emotional future that exists only in your imagination.
Why you may underestimate your ability to cope
There’s another problem with predicting how you’ll feel after a difficult decision: when imagining something bad happening, we tend to focus heavily on the emotional blow itself and pay less attention to everything we’d do afterwards.
Going back to the earlier example, if a relationship ended, you wouldn’t spend the following six months doing nothing except experiencing the breakup. Your life would continue around it, believe it or not. Your routines might change a little, you might seek support from people you trust, you’d have better and worse days (which is to be expected), new concerns would appear and some of the things that currently occupy your mind would gradually become less important.
The same applies to any major situation in your life. Like losing a job, moving to a different country, being rejected or facing another difficult consequence.
What usually happens after a situation like that is that we try to understand what happened, reorganise our lives, seek help (in the best-case scenario), solve practical problems and gradually become accustomed to circumstances that initially felt unfamiliar, weird or unsettling.
We humans have a tendency which, when taken too far, can be very debilitating. The tendency to underestimate these future coping responses is sometimes referred to as immune neglect. This means that when you imagine a negative event, you can picture the pain fairly clearly while failing to include your own future psychological response in the calculation.
This can make thoughts such as “I wouldn’t be able to cope” feel much more certain than they actually are. As you can see, your mind is trying to trip you up. The difficulty is that you’re judging the coping abilities of a future version of yourself who hasn’t yet had to respond to the situation.
Let’s not get confused. This doesn’t mean you should breeze through every difficult situation without any trouble or automatically assume that everything will be fine.
What I’m talking about in this article is that the predictions our brains make about the future don’t contain all the information about how you’d actually respond if the situation became real.
Maybe you underestimate your own ability to deal with whatever happens. Maybe you overestimate the negative consequences of the decision you’re facing.
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What fear of making the wrong decision can look like in real life
Imagine that you’ve been in a relationship for ten years and have been thinking about leaving.
There may be very good reasons to stay and very good reasons to go. Those need to be evaluated separately with careful thought. But one factor keeping you in the relationship might be the fear of being alone and the belief that leaving would leave you devastated for a very long time.
You picture yourself six months later still regretting the decision, feeling lonely and waking up every morning wishing you could undo what you did.
That powerful image in your head is what’s influencing your decision. The belief that there will be devastating emotional consequences.
The difficulty is that your mind may be constructing those six months almost entirely from how you expect to feel during the first days or weeks after the breakup. Which is basically you being an absolute wreck.
A real six-month period would contain much more than that. You might establish new routines, spend time with different people, experience good and bad days, face completely unrelated problems and gradually discover how you actually respond to the loss.
Perhaps you’d regret leaving. Or maybe not.
The point is to distinguish between the information you currently have and a prediction about how your future self will feel.
The same mechanism can appear in other decisions. You might refuse a job because you imagine that leaving your current one will create intolerable uncertainty, stay in a city because you’re convinced you’d feel lonely elsewhere or postpone an important conversation because you anticipate an emotional reaction that hasn’t yet happened.
In each case, the feared outcome deserves consideration, of course, but the emotional prediction shouldn’t automatically be treated as a fact. Just a feeling.
How to think more clearly when you are scared of making the wrong choice
If you’re wondering how to make a difficult decision when you can’t eliminate all uncertainty, trying to achieve complete certainty usually makes things worse. Calling all control freaks out there! Sorry to say that there’ll always be information you can’t have until after you choose.
A more practical (and realistic) way to deal with this situation is to separate what you know from what you’re predicting.
Start with three questions:
- What do I actually know?
Write down the facts you currently have about the situation: what has happened, what options are available, what previous attempts have produced and what practical consequences you can reasonably anticipate.
- What am I predicting?
Identify statements such as “I’ll regret it”, “I won’t cope”, “I’ll still feel terrible in six months” or “I’ll never find anything better”. These possibilities may eventually prove correct, but right now they’re predictions rather than facts.
- What might my prediction be leaving out?
Consider what you’d actually do if the feared outcome happened. Think about previous situations you’ve adapted to, the support available to you, the practical actions you could take and the fact that your future circumstances will contain elements you can’t currently anticipate.
The purpose of this exercise is to help you see more clearly where the available information ends and where your imagination begins.
Now. You may still decide not to take the risk, and you may conclude that the possible consequences genuinely outweigh the benefits. But that decision will be more useful if it’s based on the situation itself rather than solely on the assumption that your future emotions will be unbearable.
Frequently asked questions about fear of making the wrong decision
Why am I so scared of making the wrong decision?
Fear of making the wrong decision can come from several sources, including uncertainty, anticipated regret and concern about having to live with consequences you can’t reverse. It can become quite intense when you start treating predictions about how you’ll feel afterwards as though they were facts about what will happen.
The fact that a decision makes you anxious doesn’t by itself tell you whether the option is right or wrong. It tells you that something about the uncertainty or the possible consequences feels threatening and needs to be examined more carefully.
How do I stop worrying about making the wrong decision?
The aim isn’t to eliminate worry completely. That’s impossible. You aren’t a robot. Important decisions will involve legitimate uncertainty.
It can be more useful to distinguish between the facts available to you and the emotional predictions you’re making about the future. You can then evaluate practical risks while recognising that statements such as “I’ll never recover from this” or “I’ll regret this forever” involve information you can’t actually know.
Can anxiety make it harder to make decisions?
Yes. Hell yes. Anxiety can increase your focus on possible negative outcomes and make uncertainty harder to tolerate. Remember that anxiety is always the consequence of something. In this case, anxiety is just a sign that you’re afraid. This can lead you to keep analysing the same options, looking for more reassurance or postponing a decision because none of the alternatives feels completely safe.
More thinking is useful when it produces new information. It becomes less useful when you’re repeatedly reconsidering the same possibilities in an attempt to achieve certainty that the situation can’t provide. In some cases, the fear of making mistakes can intensify that search for certainty even further.
How do I know if I am making the wrong decision?
In many important situations, you can’t know with certainty beforehand. We don’t have a crystal ball.
But what you can do, what is within your control, is this: you can examine the available evidence, consider the risks and consequences, think about your priorities and identify what you’re assuming about the future.
What you can’t do is guarantee that you’ll never regret your choice or know exactly how you’ll feel in the future.
Recognising that limitation doesn’t make decisions easy, but it can prevent fear of an imagined future from becoming the only factor determining what you do.
If you regularly find yourself going round in circles over decisions, relationships or patterns you can’t quite understand, that’s exactly the psychology I explore at Gangatu: psychology applied to the questions people actually struggle with in everyday life.
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Love,
Noemi
