Analysis Paralysis

In this episode I will be talking about "analysis paralysis." Those times when you get caught up in a loop, thinking things through from every possible angle to be sure you are making the right decision. Then going over and over it, again and again, until you've overthought it to death and find yourself unable to move forward in any direction. 

How do you jump off the mental hamster wheel? Listen in and I'll share some thoughts with you about that. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Have you ever found yourself caught in analysis paralysis? You know that endless loop of overthinking a question trying to find just the right answer to the point where you're unable to move forward with any decision at all. Welcome to the Joyful Dicity Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Wakefield. I was talking with my son the other night. He's 16, almost 17, a senior in high school, and he's right at that point where he's trying to decide which colleges to apply to. And he's putting in, you know, a few applications here and there. And they're all asking him what his intended major is or if he knows what it is. And so he's been looking at all of the descriptions for the majors and talking them through with me. And he's a really smart kid and he's unusually fascinated by a lot of different topics for somebody as young as he is. He has a real grasp on politics and world history and a lot of things that are beyond his years. But it's causing him a little bit of a problem, actually, in that he's interested and knowledgeable and fascinated by so many things that how do you narrow it down to one field of study? How does he know what he wants to do when he grows up, so to speak? And so he's talking about maybe double majoring and double minoring, trying to have multiple majors because he's having such a hard time deciding what he wants to do. And we've talked it through quite a bit. And finally I just said to him, you know, it's really impossible for you to know what you're going to want to be doing when you're 30 at your age. It's really impossible for you to even necessarily know what you want your major to be right now because you don't have enough information. There are those rare people, and it does happen that somebody knows when they're 16 exactly what they want to do with their life, and they pursue it from the start and go on to have a career in that. Maybe you always knew you wanted to be a doctor and you just never wavered in that and you enjoy a wonderful career as a doctor. But for most of us, we don't know when we're 16 and 17 years old what we want the rest of our life to look like. We've barely even begun to discover who we are. It's sometimes in the process of getting to college and taking some of those college-level classes that we begin to really realize that maybe the things we liked in high school aren't what we like now. And maybe something we didn't like in high school when it's taught at the college level by a professor that just really resonates with us, we discover that we love it. And so what I counseled him to do is to not overthink it too much, to pick something that he thinks he would enjoy, talk it through with his counselor once he's accepted somewhere to get a better idea of what the different majors actually mean and what kind of jobs they might represent, but to not worry too much about making the absolute beat-all, end-all decision right now in his senior year of high school. Because a lot of people, including myself, changed their majors. Several of his siblings changed their majors once they got into college and just realized that there was a whole other topic maybe they had never even thought of before, that resonated with them more than what they originally thought. And it might take you a little bit longer to get done with school if you decide that later into your college career. But making that final decision today wasn't necessarily going to be where he landed anyway. So I wanted him to lighten some of his anxiety over it. And it's not that you don't give it your best shot. You know, it's more convenient and easier in some ways if you do know what you're going to major in right from the start. You know, you might waste a couple of classes if you don't. But that's not the end of the world. And that's what I was trying to convey to him. And I'm not sure if he completely believed me, because it's taken the perspective of a long life, having been through college, having actually changed career paths a couple of times along the way to realize that life is long and change happens, and the decisions that you make can be altered, sometimes because of things outside of your control, but sometimes just because you grow and you evolve and you change and you make a choice to change them. But when we're in the midst of a current decision, so even me being able to look at his situation from perspective and knowing that whatever he chooses now is changeable and that he shouldn't stress too much about it doesn't always help me in my life today when I'm facing a decision. Even though I'm well versed in that concept and have even seen it play out in my life so far, I still will find myself very hung up sometimes over questions that I'm faced with. Relationship questions, where I should live, what I should do for my career, what I should do for housing. That's a big one for myself right now, is I'm in the middle of a move. And I'm a smart woman. I have a high IQ and I've studied a lot, I've learned a lot, I'm capable in many areas, and that's all great, except for sometimes it actually gets in my way. Because sometimes we think that the way to find the answer is through our intellect. Now, I'm not saying that the intellect doesn't play a key and pivotal part of finding answers. Of course, we study things out. Of course, we research to find out what our options are. Of course we do that. It would be foolish not to to just go through life not using the brain that you've been given. So of course we do. And and sometimes we can do that for a lengthy period of time. But sometimes we can find ourselves caught in this cycle that becomes this endless stress loop of indecision. And I've heard it called analysis paralysis, and I like that because that's exactly what it does. You overanalyze something so many different ways and for so long, and on this cyclical loop to where it makes you incapable of moving forward with any decision, because you might be making the wrong one. And we just keep looking for that magic piece of information that will make it clear that this is the right thing to do. And there's some inherent problems with that. Sometimes that's actually true. That if you just keep researching, you will find the answer. And that's wonderful when that happens. But sometimes there's not only one possible answer. Sometimes multiple paths might be wonderful. And that's where we really get hung up because we're like, but which is the best? And the problem is we can't know that until we've gone down the road a little ways. So trying to outthink in the beginning, like let's say you've got two different people you're considering dating, just to keep it simple, and they're both wonderful. You can get caught in a cycle of indecision over who to date because you might choose the wrong person to where you end up losing both of them. And people have found themselves in that situation because they just simply would never commit. And that can be held true in other areas of our life, also. Trying to choose a job, trying to choose where to live, trying to decide how many children to have, or whether to get married or not, or any of the big decisions in our life where, you know, like I said, sometimes an answer is readily apparent. And if our brain is screaming at us, that is not a good choice, listen to it. Of course, listen to it. My goodness. We have intuition and we have things built in based on information that's stored in our brain. But sometimes intellect alone is not going to be enough to get us out of the loop. So what do we do then? How do we make a decision when it's so important? It comes down at that point to balancing the mind and the body and the spirit. The conjunction of all of those three is where your essence of truth is gonna lie for you. And when I say body, I mean how do you make a decision with your body, right? But we've all we've all known that experience where we just like we meet somebody and just it just feels off. Like we don't like this person instinctively in our body, we feel this horrible feeling about this person, or the direct opposite. Immediately we find ourselves responding to a particular person as if we've known them forever. Listen to your body and the way it's responding in your body language, in whether you feel anxious or relaxed, your body will speak volumes to you sometimes that your brain is afraid to speak. Because the brain is overthinking, of course, but your body knows the truth quite often. Now, not always, it's not infallible in and of itself, because it can be deceived, as we all have discovered in different areas of our life. But often that immediate body feeling that we have about a situation, some people say trust your gut, and they use the word gut rather than anything in the mind because it really is a body experience, a feeling deep inside that something is either right or it's wrong. It's a green light to go ahead, or it is a red light, or it's a yellow light. It's a caution. We ought to take our time and invite the other areas in. So weigh that. Take what's what's your body telling you is the right decision? What is your brain telling you is the right decision, or what are the possible decisions? So once your brain is narrowed it down, say to maybe three, what does your body feel like when you evaluate those three? Option A, how does my body feel? My body kind of tenses up and doesn't seem real excited about that. That's significant and pay attention. Or your body just feels excited and ready to go. That's also significant and pay attention. The next part in this balancing act is your spirit. Asking your spirit for the truth. Some people say prayers in the morning to God. Some people go out in nature and meditate. Whatever your method is for accessing that spiritual force that exists by whatever name you call it, that speaks to your soul in truths that are undeniable. Take the time when when you feel stumped. I mean, if it's an easy answer with the intellect, you don't have to challenge that every time. But when you're in the cycle and you're stuck, and maybe even the body response is sort of still unclear, it's time to go to the spirit and access that. I do that often through prayers and often through meditations, but another thing I've discovered that has helped me to access that a lot has been a concept called channeled writing. People call it different things. And there was a book I read called The Artist's Way that was amazing. And I'll probably talk about that book specifically on a future podcast because it was so influential to me. But she calls it morning pages, where you just free write three pages every morning. And I've been doing that. And it's also called channeled writing, where you kind of have a topic in your mind or not, and sit down and just write. Just start writing and see what comes out. And it's truly amazing and life-changing what will come out on the paper. You thought you had thought this through from every angle, and then some just crazy thought comes to you that flows out onto the paper when you're not thinking anymore about what to write. You're just letting the words flow. Your brain has been working on this, so it's not about eliminating the brain, it's about turning it down a little bit, the volume down on your brain, just a little bit, and allowing the spirit to now speak to the same question. And I have had insights come to me in my morning pages that have been life-changing to where it's like suddenly everything just made sense because I turned the volume down on my brain. Again, I didn't turn it off. I would never recommend that somebody make a lot of decisions without using their brain. You do, but sometimes you've got to quiet the noise that has come up when that brain function has started to feel anxious or stressful or loopy. Those are the times to turn that volume down just enough to let the spirit now come through and interpret all of that thought process in a soul truth for you. And it's truly beautiful when that happens. So, how do we get caught in this? You know, I my my son teases me a lot that I'm I'm terrified of technology. And if something's new, I won't even touch it. And he'll just get in there and figure it out, right? And and I'll say, You're so smart with technology. And he'll say, Mom, it's not that I'm smarter than you with this, it's just that I'm not scared of it. You're terrified of it. And I'll tell him that that's because I'm 55 years old. So we didn't even have computers when I was a kid. I think they existed, but they weren't something that everybody had at home. Almost nobody did when I was a child. But when they first came out, they were not the same machines that they are now. They were not as infallible as they are now. And it was very, very possible when I first started using computers that if you press the wrong key, you literally could mess up your whole project. You could accidentally delete it. There was no cloud that things went to. If you deleted it, you deleted it and it was done. And you could even press the wrong key and sort of corrupt the entire program. It was very possible to make a mistake and the whole thing just was messed up. And so people my age are still living in that reality in our minds with technology and we're scared to death to press the wrong key. Kids today don't have that in their memory. And so they just start pressing keys until they figure out which one works. So I think fear of messing up is one of our biggest holdups. That's what gets us in this loop. If I make the wrong decision, my whole life will be affected by this. There are times when that is true. Obviously, making a decision of whether to get married and to whom is pretty pivotal in our life. So some decisions are bigger than others and will have more impact. But the truth is there's almost always a way to solve the mistakes that you make. It might not be easy, but there's almost always a solution to a mistake. If you make the wrong choice, there's a workaround later on. It's very rarely fatal. Occasionally, sometimes it is. And so that's where the brain comes in in the first place, because generally, in those cases, the decision probably was readily available as maybe a red light. We shouldn't do that. Those are the ones that usually turn out to be fatal or huge, is the ones that we knew from the start what the answer was. We just maybe fought against it or didn't listen. But the ones where we're stuck between maybe two equally dangerous situations or two equally potentially wonderful situations, and we want to make sure that we make the right choice. Sometimes it's that fear of messing up that holds us back. And just remembering that almost no decision you make is permanent. You can almost always start over, try again, rebuild, rethink, pivot, swerve, whatever you want to call it. There's almost always, in almost every case, an opportunity to do that. It might not be easy, but it's almost always there. Also, like with my son's situation, sometimes we simply have to start walking before we will truly know the answer. So sometimes just pick one and start moving. I told him, just pick a major and get into it and then see how you feel about those classes, because that's when you'll really know if you like that major or if you don't. And there's really no way for you to know that until you just simply make a choice, start walking that path, and then evaluate once you've started walking it. And that key of evaluation is so important to remember that first steps of a decision don't have to be final steps, that we really can make a choice, start, stop, evaluate, change, pivot, do something else. And we can do that at the beginning, in the middle, we can do that at the end. If we choose a career that feels I my my first husband was an attorney, and there was a classmate of his in law school that went all the way through law school and began a life as an attorney a few years in, didn't really like it, ended up taking over the family farm and becoming a farmer. I mean, really could there be anything more different than that? You feel sometimes like, hey, I've gone all the way through law school, I've spent all this money, I'm stuck in this forever now. No, you're not. You're not. You can make a change in midlife, you can make a change at any time that you want to make a change. Your life's not over till it's over. So it's always okay to start again and make a different choice. Again, it's not always without difficulty to rewind decisions that we've made. So we want to walk into these things cautiously. And if one answer was more clear, maybe that's the one we should have chosen to start with. But I'm really talking about those times when we just get stuck, just completely stuck, unable to move forward, because oftentimes that means there really isn't only one right answer. Multiple different things would have been okay. When I was in college, in early college, I wanted to be an actress. I was taking theater classes and I really enjoyed it. I my plan was to go to New York and become an actress on Broadway, and that was a big dream that I had. And then I met my husband and I got married and we had a family, and my life went a completely different way. And then we ended up getting divorced. So it would be really easy for me then to be like, well, you made the wrong decision, right? You should have gone and become an actress in New York because this didn't end well. No, that's ridiculous. That's that's ridiculous. We had a 25-year marriage. We had nine wonderful children. My life went the way that it was meant to go and brought me immense blessings. And if I had gone that other direction, would my life have looked different? Well, yeah, it would have looked very different. Would it have been better? There is no way in retrospect for me to do that. So you can't play the what if game. Once you make a decision, if it doesn't go the way you hoped, you can't look back and say, I should have, I should have, I should have, I should have, because you have no idea what that path would have looked like actually. You know what you dreamed it would look like, but you don't know what it actually would have looked like or been like or felt like. So just stay on the path, enjoy the blessings that it brings, pivot when you need to. I could still go and be an actress in New York City. There's nothing stopping me from doing that now at 55 if I really wanted to go do that. I could pick up everything and I could go and do that today. At this point in my life, that's not what I dream of anymore. I have other plans and other dreams that have come up along the way. But I could if I wanted to. So sometimes there's not a right answer. We let fear stand in the way, and sometimes we just need to start walking and let the way reveal itself and not get so hung up that each decision we make along the way carries such huge import that our like our entire life and happiness is hinging in the balance of whether or not we do the right thing. Because most of the time that's that's not true. I'm sure there's cases where it is, but most of the time that's not true. And it really is okay to just pick one. Because by not picking one, you sit in limbo. And limbo is not a great place to be because you're not reaping the benefits of any of those different decisions. Like let's just say that we're trying to pick between two job offers that we have, and they both seem wonderful. And and one's in Nebraska and one's in Illinois. And how in the world do we decide this has this, these benefits, these have these benefits? You know, there does come a point sometimes in a decision like that where you can outthink this thing, you can study everything about the areas, everything about the companies, everything about the salaries, everything about everything, and one true answer isn't going to reveal itself. So, like I said in the beginning, go to the body. What is your body saying when you ask that question? Nebraska, Illinois. And let's just say they both feel the same on that too. Do some channeled writing, and you might be surprised at what comes out. But try not to tell yourself before you start to write which answer you hope it's gonna be. That's the other key that I'll end on. Oftentimes, very often, we do know which one sounds right to us. What's holding us up in those cases often is a lack of confidence in ourself. The answer in our body, mind, and spirit is saying, pursue this. This is what you're meant to do. This is where you're meant to be. This is the person you're supposed to share this next phase of your life with. Whatever it is, sometimes we know where our green lights are. We know what our body, mind, and soul are telling us, but we don't think we're up to it. We think we will fail. We don't think we're good enough, we don't think we'll succeed. And so we keep weighing that dream and that excitement against reality and what we think our real reality is. And we get hung up afraid to step out of what we think is our comfortable reality, comfort zone is what people say, out into that thing that we want so badly that we can taste it. We can feel it. But man, if we do that, it's maybe gonna require some sacrifice and some risk. And we are so afraid that we're gonna fail that sometimes we will simply not move forward with that choice to stay in our comfort and safety zone. That's not always a terrible thing. The comfort zone's not always awful. But you have to ask yourself, what am I missing out on, though, by not following that green light, by not taking that risk. And add that into the mix as well. Not just don't just tell yourself, oh, these are all the things that could possibly go wrong. Loop, loop, loop, loop, and you're scared to death, and you just sit and you don't move and you you just stay afraid. Add in the question, what would it be like if it went well? Just think about that. What if it worked? What if it went perfectly? And what if everything we are thinking of and dreaming of happened? And think about how that feels inside of you. And is that worth the risk? Don't weigh your comfort and safety zone against the risk only. Also weigh the potential of what you're wishing and hoping and dreaming for coming true against the risk. And see what answer that gets for you. I would never tell anybody, of course, not to use their brain. Your brain is a valuable resource, and it's a wonderful starting point and sometimes ending point. Some decisions, like I said, are just so obvious that you know right away that's a bad decision. I'm not gonna do that. Trust your brain in those cases. It knows maybe that that person has a horrible track record and won't make great boyfriend materials, and we'll sometimes try and talk our brain out of the truth that it's telling us, and we really need to be careful about that. Because when the brain is giving us an actual answer, it's quite often and usually probably correct, and we ought to pay attention. But when there's a loop, also ask your body and your spirit to weigh in in conjunction with your brain and see what comes up for you. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you for joining me today on the Joy Felicity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share, and come follow me on all major social media sites at JoyFelicity or on my website, joyfelicity.com. You can follow the link in the description for this episode to all of the places that we can connect. Have a great day, everybody, and remember dare to dream, plan to play, live to learn.