How to Make a Decision When Both Options Feel Wrong

Some decisions are hard because both options are good. Those are the nice ones.

The ones that really pin you down are the other kind. Stay in the job that is wearing you out, or leave with nothing lined up. Have the awkward conversation, or keep quiet and carry it. Say yes and resent it, or say no and feel guilty.

Both feel wrong. So you do neither, and you go round again.

I think most advice on this starts in the wrong place. So this is the order I use instead.

Why This Kind of Choice Pins You Down

A choice between two good things is easy to live with. Whichever you pick, you get something good.

A choice between two things that feel wrong is different. Whichever you pick, you lose something. And your mind hates a sure loss.

So it does something clever. It keeps the choice open. As long as you have not chosen, you have not lost anything yet.

That is why you can spend weeks on it. Not deciding feels safer than deciding.

But not deciding is a choice too. It is usually the stay-as-you-are option, picked quietly, one day at a time, without you ever saying yes to it.

I think that is worth being honest about. You are not avoiding a choice. You are making one slowly.

One more thing. Look at the words in the title. Both options feel wrong. That is not the same as both options being wrong.

The gap between those two is what this whole post is about.

What the Usual Advice Says

If you search for help with this, you get three main tips.

Pick the least bad option. Work out which one hurts less, and go with it.

Check which one you can undo. If one choice can be reversed and the other cannot, try the one you can take back.

Look for a third option. Maybe it is not really a choice between two things. Maybe there is a door you have not seen yet.

I do not think any of that is bad advice. All three can help.

But they all assume you can see the options clearly. And when both feel wrong, I do not think you can. Not yet.

Here is what I think happens when you try them too early.

You sit down to work out the least bad one, and the fear does the sums. You look for the one you can undo, and both look permanent. You look for a third option, and what you are really looking for is a way out of feeling anything at all.

The tips are fine. The timing is the problem.

The Stuck Point Is Usually the Feeling

My honest read is this. When both options feel wrong, you are usually not stuck on the options. You are stuck on a feeling.

Often it is fear. Sometimes it is guilt. Sometimes it is plain sadness, because one of the two means something ends.

Underneath the feeling there is usually a want. I find it is nearly always one of three.

Wanting security. You want a choice that cannot go wrong. Neither option offers that, so both feel wrong.

Wanting approval. You want a choice nobody will be upset about. One option lets someone else down. The other lets you down.

Wanting control. You want to know how it turns out before you choose. You cannot, so you wait.

None of those wants is silly. Feelings like these arrived to help you survive, not to help you choose well.

But look at what they are asking for. A choice with no loss, no upset and no unknowns. That choice is not on the table. It rarely is.

So the options get the blame for something they did not do. They are not wrong. They are just not perfect, and the feeling wants perfect.

I think the need to be certain is a feeling you have not let go of yet. It is not a fact about the decision.

That is good news, in a way. You cannot change the options. You can do something about the feeling.

Clear It Before You Choose

This is the order I use. It is The Catalyst Method, and the first three steps take about a minute.

Catch it. Stop thinking about the choice for a moment. Notice what you feel when you picture each option. Name it. Fear. Guilt. Dread.

Let it go. Find where it sits in your body. Chest, stomach, throat, jaw. Do not argue with it. Do not try to fix it. Stay there until it runs out.

The energy behind a feeling is limited. It burns out if you stop fighting it. The full technique is in how I let go of negative thoughts and feelings every day.

Ask what's true. Now separate what is actually happening from what your head added on top.

"If I leave, I will have less money for a while" is what is happening. "If I leave, I am a failure" is the story on top.

Do this for each option, one at a time. Picture the first one. Feel what comes up. Let it fade. Then do the same with the second.

This is not a trick to make you feel good about a bad choice. It just takes the noise off, so you can see what you are really choosing between.

If you are not sure where a feeling sits, I wrote a whole post on where you actually feel feelings in your body.

The order matters. If you try to think your way to a better view while the feeling is still loud, you are just hiding it under a nicer sentence. Feeling first. Story second. Choice third.

Look at the Options Again

Once the feeling has settled, look again. I think one of four things tends to happen.

One option stops feeling wrong. It was never wrong. It was frightening. Those are different things, and you can only tell them apart once the fear has faded.

Both still have a cost, but now you can see the costs. This is where the usual advice starts to work. Which cost can you live with? Which choice can you undo? Now is the right moment to pick the least bad option.

A third option appears. Not because you hunted for it. Because you stopped needing an escape, and noticed a smaller step you could take first. Ask a question. Try it for a month. Have one honest conversation.

You find out you had already chosen. This one is common. You knew. You were waiting for it to stop feeling bad before you admitted it.

There is one test I lean on here. Hold each option in your mind and ask a single question.

Does this make me feel stronger and more open, or smaller and tighter?

Frightening and open is usually worth a closer look. Safe and tight is usually the fear's pick.

I went into that test in more detail in should you trust your first instinct or think it through.

Choose, Then Let Go of the Result

At some point you have to pick. And you will pick without knowing how it turns out.

I think this is the part nobody likes. There is no way of choosing that removes the risk.

What helps me is to split it in two. There is the part I control, and the part I do not.

The part I control is the intention and the effort. Am I choosing this for a good reason? Am I being honest with myself and with the people involved? Will I do the work the choice asks of me?

The part I do not control is the result.

So I try to put in the work and let go of the result. I leave that part to God, the universe or the divine, whatever you call it.

I am not religious. I just find that when I stop gripping how it has to turn out, I can actually live in the choice I made. I am not lost in thoughts about why not this way, or why not that way.

That is not the same as not caring. And it is not sitting back and waiting. Letting go of the result without doing the work is just waiting. I wrote more about that in why letting go is not the same as giving up.

The biggest risk I have ever taken was like this. Before I had kids, my wife and I got married. Then we both quit our jobs and went travelling for six months. We had no real plan. It was a big leap of faith, and we took it together.

It was a gut decision, not a confident one. There was no way to know how it would turn out before we went.

I do not tell that story to say you should leap. I tell it because most choices that matter look like that. You choose first. You find out after.

What Does Not Work

I want to be honest about what does not work, because a lot of popular advice lands here.

Waiting until one of them feels right. If both carry a loss, neither will ever feel fully right. You can wait a long time for a feeling that is not coming.

A pros and cons list while the feeling is loud. Lists are fine for facts. But when the feeling is loud, it writes the list. You end up with a very tidy case for whatever the fear wanted.

Asking everyone you know. One person who knows the facts is useful. Ten opinions is usually a way of borrowing someone else's certainty. Often it is the wish for approval again.

Flipping a coin and obeying it. A coin can show you what you were hoping for while it was in the air. That is useful to notice. But handing the choice to the coin is a way of not owning it.

Choosing late at night. At the end of a long day, both options look worse than they are. I wrote about why in decision fatigue and why your choices get worse by evening. Come back to it in the morning.

Beating yourself up for being slow. You are not weak. You are facing a choice with a real cost on both sides. That is hard for anyone.

And I do not always manage this myself. It takes a minute, and in a busy week the minute is the first thing to go. That is fine. It is like going to the gym. The value is in doing it most days, not in getting every one right.

If you notice the same thing happening with tiny choices too, the pattern is the same but the fix is quicker. That is in how to stop overthinking small decisions.

When It Is Bigger Than a Decision

Some choices are heavy for a very good reason. A relationship. Your health. Money you do not have. A place where you do not feel safe.

I am not a trained life coach or counsellor. I can only share what has helped me.

If your choice involves your safety, your health or serious money trouble, please get proper support from someone trained in that area. A GP, a debt advice charity, a solicitor, a counsellor. Do that alongside anything here, not instead of it.

And being stuck between two hard options is not a verdict on you. It does not mean you chose badly to end up here. Sometimes life hands you two hard things, and that is all there is to it.

What I can say is that the order still helps. Clear the feeling. Check the story. Then decide what to do next, even if the next thing is asking someone for help.

So if you take one thing from this, take that. Before you weigh the two options one more time, spend a minute with the feeling instead.

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