How to Make a Decision Without Spiraling for Three Days

by Maria Williams

If you have ever stood in your kitchen at 7:14 PM, paralyzed about whether to order Pizza or just heat up something from the fridge, this is for you.

The decision was Pizza. We both know the decision was Pizza. And yet.

I want to talk about something that almost every woman over forty I work with knows intimately and almost no one talks about out loud: the way small, stupid, completely-no-stakes decisions can hijack your brain for days.

What it actually feels like

You said no to something. Or yes to something. Or you picked the blue thing instead of the gray thing. And then your brain went into a process I can only describe as a tribunal. You replayed it. You imagined the other person’s face. You wondered if you should send a clarifying text. You drafted the clarifying text. You did not send the clarifying text. You replayed it again.

This is not because you are a high-strung, defective, hypervigilant person. This is because you spent two or three decades developing a very expensive nervous system response to disappointing people.

You learned to read the room before you knew how to read a book. You learned that a sigh from a tired parent, or an irritated boss, or a stiff silence from a friend, had a cost that you would pay. And so your brain, which is loyal and protective and not especially nuanced, decided that all decisions are dangerous and that the danger comes from making the wrong other person feel anything other than fine.

Knowing this does not fix it. But it does take some of the shame out of it. You are not broken. You are running a program.

What I actually do now

I’d love to tell you I cured this and now I make decisions like a calm Norwegian sea captain. I do not. I still spiral. I just have a much shorter spiral now, because I built a few small habits that work.

Here is the most honest version.

1. Name the spiral. Out loud, in my head, in a text to a friend. “Oh, I’m spiraling about the Thai food again.” Just naming it shortens it. The brain hates being witnessed.

2. Give it a time limit. I literally say to myself, “You can spiral about this for fifteen minutes. After that we are moving on.” The brain protests but it also kind of likes a deadline.

3. Ask, would my answer change? Not “is the answer right.” That’s a trap. Just: “If I think about this for three more days, will my answer be different?” Almost always: no. The spiral isn’t producing information. It’s producing the illusion of producing information.

4. Move my body. Not in a wellness-influencer way. Just stand up. Walk to a different room. Reset the loop. The spiral lives in your seated body.

5. Send the text. Order the Pizza. Make the call. Action ends the loop. Discomfort with the action is normal. The discomfort is not evidence the action was wrong.

What changed for me

The shift, when it finally happened, was not that I stopped spiraling. It was that I stopped believing the spiral was producing wisdom. The spiral is just my old protection software running on a Tuesday night when there’s nothing actually at stake.

I used to think confident people don’t do this. They do. They just stop letting it run the meeting.

You can want Thai food and have to talk yourself into it for two minutes and still be a perfectly functional, intelligent, capable woman.

You can say no to something and feel weird about it and replay it in the shower and still have been right to say no.

You can pick the blue thing.

Permission slip

If you take nothing else from this: when you make a decision your body does not yet feel calm about, that is not your gut telling you it was wrong. That is your old programming protesting. They sound the same. They are not the same.

You are allowed to make decisions that feel uncomfortable for the first twenty-four hours. That is sometimes what growth feels like.

Sometimes it is just what Pizza feels like.

Order the Pizza.

Xo, Maria

Want More Pretty Truth in Your Life?

If your brain holds tribunals over Thai food, my book The Pretty Truth is for you. It is the long-form version of what coming back to yourself actually looks like, written for women who are tired of being told to just believe in themselves.

✨ Click Buy The Pretty Truth and it will take you to our Books page.

Xo, Maria

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