How to Make a Decision When You Keep Changing Your Mind

On Monday you were sure. You told your sister you were taking the job in Denver, and it felt like setting down a suitcase. By Wednesday, driving home, you were building the case against it. By Friday you were back on Denver, and you were tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

If you're trying to figure out how to make a decision when you keep changing your mind, you've probably already made the list, slept on it, and asked three people. All of that assumes you're short of information. I don't think you are. I think each flip is carrying a message, and the trick is to read it before you try to end it.

What was happening right before each flip?

Start with a small notebook, or the notes app on your phone. Every time your answer changes, write one line: the time, where you were, and what had just happened. "Wednesday, 6 p.m., stuck on the highway, after my mother said 'Well, it's far.'"

Do this for a few days, then read it back like a detective. Some people find the flips cluster in the late afternoon, when they're hungry and spent. Others find that one particular phone call tips everything toward yes or toward no. A flip that follows a bad commute is a different thing from a flip that follows a quiet hour with a map and a calculator. The first is mood. The second might be a reason.

This also takes some heat out of the whole thing. You stop being someone who can't decide and become someone collecting evidence about when their opinions change.

What is each side protecting?

Now take the two answers and give each a voice. Write "Yes, go" at the top of one page and "No, stay" at the top of another, and under each finish this sentence: "If I'm wrong about this, what I'll lose is ___."

You'll often find that neither side is really about the option. The yes side might be guarding your sense that you're still someone who takes chances. The no side might be guarding the Sunday dinners and the friend who knows how you take your coffee. Those are two good things, and they can't both fully win. That's why the argument never ends: you're not weighing a right answer against a wrong one, you're weighing two kinds of loyalty.

Once you see that, ask the side that keeps losing one question: "What would you need to see to be able to live with the other answer?" Sometimes it's a number, such as a return ticket or six months of savings. Sometimes it's a promise, such as a standing call every Sunday. Write down what it says. Often the "no" was never a no. It was a request.

What will you pay for the choice you make?

Every choice you make has a bill, and people who flip-flop are often the ones trying to find the option with no bill. There isn't one. If you go, you pay in distance. If you stay, you pay in the sentence "what if" at some quiet hour in your forties.

So do something slightly uncomfortable. Pick the answer you're leaning toward right now, and say its cost out loud, in plain words, as if you'd already agreed to it: "If I take Denver, I'll miss my niece's early years, and I'm choosing that." Then say whether you can imagine signing for it. If you can, you're closer than you think. If you flinch, say the other option's cost and see if that one holds up better.

Notice that this doesn't ask which choice is best. It asks which cost you're willing to carry, which is a question you can actually answer.

When am I allowed to change my mind again?

Here's the step most advice skips. Deciding isn't the hard part. Letting the decision stay decided is. Without a rule, every restless Wednesday reopens the case.

So make one. Once you've chosen, the question can only be reopened by a new fact, never by a new mood. A fact is something you could point to: the salary changed, the lease fell through, you found out something you didn't know. A mood is a feeling that arrived on the highway. Moods will keep arriving. When one does, you can say to yourself, "That's a mood. Nothing has changed," and let it pass without a vote.

If you want, tell one person the rule so they can hold it with you. "If I start relitigating this next week, remind me what counts as a reason."

For a decision this big, give the first month some room to feel strange. Doubt in the first weeks of any choice is common. It doesn't mean you picked wrong. It means you're no longer imagining.

What if I can't stop the loop anyway?

Some loops are really about something underneath, and a better method won't touch them. If every decision, even small ones, ends up spinning, it may be worth asking what you're afraid the choice says about you. Can't Stop Replaying What You Said? looks at the same kind of loop when it's about the past. And if the decision is about where to live, Should You Move Back to Your Hometown? has some different questions to try.

If this has been constant and affecting your sleep or daily life for weeks, it's worth talking to a doctor or mental health professional.

If you'd like a person to think out loud with, you're welcome to set up a private conversation with me.

Here's what I'd leave you with. Sometime next spring, you'll be living inside the choice, and it will have stopped being a choice at all. It will be a commute, a grocery store, a Tuesday. Nearly every decision you've agonized over looks that way from the other side. Picture yourself there, buying milk, and ask which answer got you to that aisle.