Do you constantly overthink decisions or worry about making the “right” choice?
If so, the problem may not be that you’re bad at making decisions. It may simply be that you’re asking the wrong question.
In this episode of the Living Midlife Well Podcast, I explore why decision-making becomes so much harder in midlife and why trying to find the one “right” answer can leave us mentally exhausted, anxious and stuck in overthinking.
I’ll share a simple question that has completely changed the way I make decisions and explain how shifting from externally driven decisions to internally aligned decisions can help you find greater clarity, confidence and inner peace.
In this episode you’ll discover:• Why decision-making often feels harder in midlife• Why searching for the “right” decision creates overthinking and drains your energy• The difference between decisions driven by obligation and decisions driven by self-love• How your head and heart process decisions differently• The science behind the heart-brain connection and heart-brain coherence• One simple question that can make difficult decisions feel clearer and easier
If you’ve ever found yourself asking:“What should I do?”“What if I make the wrong decision?”“How do I stop overthinking?”
...then this episode is for you.
💛 Just One Thing
This week, try asking yourself:
“What would I do if I truly loved myself?”
Notice what changes when you begin your decision-making from a place of self-love rather than obligation.
If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave a comment. It really helps support the channel and allows more people to discover these simple ideas for creating a calmer, happier and more meaningful life.
🌿 Living Midlife Well – Helping you slow down, feel better and enjoy life more—one simple step at a time.
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Transcription
If you find yourself overthinking every decision, second-guessing yourself or constantly wondering whether you’re making the “right” choice, you’re in good company and there is nothing wrong with you.
Decision-making can be difficult especially in midlife as careers, relationships, family responsibilities and life changes all demand your energy and consideration.
If you find it challenging to make the right choice then the real problem may not be that you are bad at making decisions. It may simply be that you are asking the wrong question.
One simple shift in the question you ask yourself can cut through the mental noise, help you stop overthinking and enable you to make decisions that feel calmer, clearer and more aligned with who you truly are.
Kia ora and hello, welcome to the Living Midlife Well podcast.
I’m Janine Lattimore, a wellbeing coach here to help people in midlife get off the treadmill of stress and exhaustion, rediscover their joy, and create a life that is aligned with who they really are and what they really want.
Today we’re talking about something that affects every single one of us, but especially those of us in midlife.
Making decisions.
Some decisions are small and simple.
Others have the potential to change the direction of our lives.
Whether it’s deciding about a career change, a relationship, setting boundaries with family, looking after our health, or simply deciding how we want to spend our time, making decisions can sometimes feel exhausting.
So let’s explore why that is.
Making decisions can be hard, especially in our forties and fifties.
We experience having to make choices and decisions throughout our lives, but midlife can be a significant crossroads for many people.
We can be faced with some big questions and choices about our career, our relationships, our children, our finances and our future.
In addition to that, many of us in midlife are feeling a shift or loss in our identity.
Children leaving home, career changes, menopause, divorce or ageing can all prompt the question,
“Who am I now?”
And without a clear sense of self, decisions can feel even harder.
After years of caring for children, partners or ageing parents and/or giving a large part of yourself to your work, you may have become disconnected from your own desires and don’t even know what you want anymore.
On top of that, most people don’t just want to make good decisions.
They want to make the right decision.
We can feel even more pressure to do this in midlife when we have children relying on us, bills to pay and the weight of past mistakes sitting on our shoulders.
As a result, we go into a mental battleground of conditioned beliefs, trying to identify the one right and perfect answer.
We ask ourselves:
What should I do?
What would other people do?
What are the pros and cons?
What if I make the wrong choice?
What if I fail?
What if I disappoint someone?
What if people judge me?
What if I miss out on something?
Does any of that sound familiar?
I confess...
I like to get things right, do things right and have things done right.
I have perfectionist tendencies and often like to control how things are done so that they are done well.
On the flip side of that, I grew up very sensitive to doing the wrong thing or getting things wrong.
Having a very critical father probably helped instil that fear in me, but there are personality and neuro-type traits that feed into all this as well.
In many ways these are helpful patterns of behaviour.
I can be relied on to do a good job.
I am conscientious and I complete things to a high standard.
But then there is the downside.
The almost constant underlying anxiety.
Regularly pushing myself to the point of burnout.
Finding it hard to settle if things are messy, undone or out of place.
Yes...
I am a recovering control freak.
And because of that, I understand the need to get things right and the fear of making the wrong choice or decision.
One of the pieces of life wisdom that I learned in my forties was that rightness is subjective.
It is a constantly moving target.
When you aim to get everything right, the only thing you are guaranteed to get is stressed.
Life is messy.
It is unstructured.
It isn’t black and white.
There is very little, if anything, in life that is absolutely right or wrong.
Even the laws of the land sometimes need to bend to meet particular circumstances.
Which brings us to the question most of us ask whenever we’re faced with a decision.
“What is the right thing to do?”
We may frame it in different ways.
“What’s the responsible thing to do?”
“What’s the best thing to do?”
“What should I do?”
But underneath, they’re all asking exactly the same thing.
And if you’re anything like me, that question leads to a back-and-forth mental debate that can be completely exhausting as we wrestle with trying to work out the right choice.
There are two reasons trying to make the right decision is so hard.
And that’s what I’d like to explore next.
The first is quite simple.
As I mentioned earlier, the goalpost of what is right isn’t fixed.
It moves with different people, different situations and different perspectives.
There is no one objectively right decision... ever.
So, if you’re trying to find the one perfect answer, you’ll often find yourself going round and round in circles.
You toss ideas around in your mind.
You argue with yourself.
You look at every angle.
Then you look at every angle again.
It’s exhausting because you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually have one universally correct answer.
But there’s a second reason making decisions can feel so difficult.
And I think this one is even more important.
What your head thinks is right and what your heart thinks is right are often two different things.
That’s usually why you feel resistance to a particular thought or decision.
Your heart is connecting to something different.
Now, when I say your head and your heart, I’m not suggesting they’re in conflict with one another.
In fact, I think they’re on the same team.
They simply have different strategies.
Your head operates in terms of logic, rationality and patterns.
It wants to follow established pathways.
It wants to make sense of things.
It wants to do what is logically right and fit within the systems we’ve learned to live by.
Your heart is different.
I believe it is connected to your soul and to the wisdom and intelligence of your body.
It doesn’t present you with pages of analysis.
Instead, it usually offers one simple knowing.
One quiet truth.
I sometimes picture it like this.
Your heart sits quietly in the centre, connected to both the earth beneath you and something greater above you, gently speaking one clear message.
Meanwhile your head runs around your heart like an energetic dog, stopping to sniff every possibility, trying to work everything out and trying to keep everybody happy.
It’s quite a funny image...
...but for me it captures exactly what overthinking feels like.
Your heart knows that obligation and “shoulds” are not your truth.
It holds your truth.
Now, before we go any furthe
