Are there days when you haven’t done anything particularly demanding, yet you still feel exhausted? Perhaps you’re not physically tired, but mentally drained. And perhaps it’s due to an unexpected culprit: unresolved decisions. This refers to difficult conversations you’ve been putting off, changes you know you should make but don’t dare to, or life choices you’re postponing ad infinitum and beyond.
All of this, without you even realizing it, accumulates in the background and consumes your psychological energy, so that, without noticing, you spend the whole day carrying an invisible weight. In fact, the philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed it with crystal clarity in his book “The Conquest of Happiness“: “There is nothing so exhausting as indecision, nor anything so sterile.” It’s a fairly accurate description of what happens to us when we get stuck between “yes” and “no.”
The silent cost of indecision
In the 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed something curious in a Viennese café: the waiters accurately remembered the orders they hadn’t yet served, but quickly forgot those they had already delivered. Wondering if this happened to everyone, she designed a series of experiments that confirmed that incomplete tasks remain active in the mind.
The explanation is simple: when something remains unresolved, the brain maintains a kind of “cognitive tension” that keeps that process active in the background until it is resolved. The same thing happens with decisions.
In fact, when we think about mental exhaustion, we usually associate it with doing too many things, not with what we don’t do. However, when we have to make a decision and we postpone it, we don’t simply enter a neutral pause, but rather activate the same underlying mental process as waiters with their pending orders.
In practice, every time you leave something unresolved, your brain can’t file it away; instead, it keeps it open, like a tab on your computer that you never close. Obviously, the more things you have going on, the more cognitive resources they’ll consume, and the more it will cost you.
That means the decisions you don’t make stay with you. Doing nothing doesn’t eliminate the problem; it turns it into a burden, a nagging reminder that has a nasty habit of popping up at the most inopportune moments, like when you’re trying to sleep, distracted, or want to relax and forget about the world. That, too, is part of the cost of unresolved issues.
As a result, it’s normal to find it hard to concentrate when you have a pending decision, or to feel irritable for no clear reason and overreact to the slightest setback. Even small decisions, from what to have for dinner to when to reply to a message, might feel more burdensome than usual. It’s not laziness, it’s overload.
In fact, Russell was convinced that we don’t need big things to be a little happier and more productive; it’s enough to simply “Cultivate an orderly mind, which thinks about things properly at the right time, and not inappropriately all the time.”
The indecision loop
Indecision tends to persist because it feeds on itself. The more you doubt, the more information you seek. And the more information you have, the more variables appear. And the more variables appear, the harder it is to choose. This creates a vicious cycle because every step you take to “clarify” your situation actually moves you further away from a decision. At that point, you’re no longer choosing; you’ve entered a state of analysis paralysis.
In those cases, even choosing poorly can be better than getting stuck in a cycle of indecision. If you choose a path and make a mistake, at least you will have:
- Closed one possibility and made mental space
- Moved beyond the realm of hypotheses and gathered feedback in the real world.
- Took the first step to get out of the comfort zone.
On the other hand, when you don’t choose:
- All possibilities remain open, generating the same anxiety or fear
- You don’t learn anything new; you just keep going over everything in your mind
- Psychological exhaustion progresses relentlessly
Choosing “wrong” isn’t ideal. We all agree on that, but indecision leads to passive burnout that gets you nowhere. And on that, I think we all agree as well.
How to get out of the limbo of indecision?
There’s no magic formula, but you can take small steps. The first is accepting that making a decision involves dealing with a certain amount of discomfort and uncertainty. It’s unavoidable, so waiting until you’re 100% sure or believing that everything will be easy and comfortable will only make you postpone the decision unnecessarily.
The second step is to limit the time you spend deciding. Not all decisions deserve hours of deliberation or days of analysis. Think about the impact of each decision on your life and set a reasonable maximum time limit for choosing one path or another. In this regard, Russell advised that “When faced with a difficult or troubling decision, as soon as all the facts are available, think about the matter as thoroughly as possible and make the decision. Once made, do not revise it unless new information comes to light.”
The third step is probably the most useful because it reduces the tension surrounding the decision-making process. It consists of changing the typical question we ask ourselves, “What is the best option?” to, “Which option is good enough to move forward?” This frees you from perfectionism and much of the fear of making a mistake. In fact, it’s not about settling for just anything, but about starting to move in the desired direction. After all, the vast majority of decisions are not irreversible; they are just a step subject to further adjustments.
Remember that indecision doesn’t usually make a sound, but it wears you down from the inside. Staying stuck in the “I’ll see what I do” mindset has a price. And sometimes, it’s higher than you imagine.
References:
Russell, B. (2003) La conquista de la felicidad. Random House Mondadori: Barcelona.
Zeigarnik, B. (1938) On finished and unfinished tasks. In W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A source book of Gestalt psychology (300–314). Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company.
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