Signals have no words

Your body and emotions send signals all the time: a tight chest, a heavy feeling on Sunday evening, a lift of energy after a conversation, restless legs in a long meeting. Those signals have no words. Your head supplies them. It narrates, turning each signal into a story: “This means I’m not cut out for it.” “This means it’s the wrong time.” “This means they don’t respect me.” “This means I should be grateful and stop.”

The story then decides what you do next. Two people can feel the same tightness before a pitch. One hears “I’m about to fail” and backs out. The other hears “this matters to me” and goes in.

You can’t stop the narrator. You can learn to hear it, and to choose which of its stories you act on.

Why overthinking doesn’t help

Capable people tend to treat a big decision like a work problem: gather more data, model the scenarios, think it through until the answer appears. For many decisions that works. For decisions about your own life, it often turns into a loop.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Blair Wisco and Sonja Lyubomirsky reviewed two decades of research on rumination: repetitive, passive focus on problems and their causes. Rumination tends to deepen and prolong low mood and get in the way of problem-solving. People who ruminate are also less likely to act on the solutions they find (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco & Lyubomirsky, 2008). It feels like working on the problem. It mostly keeps you inside it.

There’s a related trap. Barry Schwartz and colleagues found that “maximisers”, people who try to find the best possible option instead of a good enough one, ended up less satisfied with their choices and less happy overall (Schwartz et al., 2002). Overthinking a life decision is often maximising: looking for the version with no risk and no regret. That version doesn’t exist.

Facts and stories

Ontological coaching, which shapes how I work, makes a distinction that helps here. An assertion is a statement you could check: “Revenue dropped 12% last quarter.” “I’ve applied to three roles and heard back from none.” An assessment is a judgement: “The business is failing.” “Nobody wants to hire someone my age.”

Assessments aren’t bad. You need them to decide anything. The trouble starts when an assessment passes for an assertion, so you stop checking it.

Stories tend to pass for facts in four ways:

  • Mind reading: you know what someone else thinks. “My partner would hate this.”
  • Fortune telling: you know how it will end. “It won’t work.”
  • Always and never: one event becomes a rule. “I always quit things.”
  • A verdict about you: a signal becomes a label. “I’m not a risk-taker.”

Catch it. Check it. Choose it.

This is the core skill in the method I use, the Two Compasses, and it can be trained.

Catch it. Write down the exact sentence, word for word. Vague worry is hard to work with. “If I leave and it fails, I’ll have thrown away fifteen years” is something you can look at.

Check it. Ask: is this an assertion or an assessment? Which of the four disguises is it wearing? Who first said it, and when? What else could be true? What would I need to see to know?

Choose it. Pick the reading that stays closest to the facts and serves where you want to go. “I’d lose some income for a while” is closer to the facts than “I’ll have thrown away fifteen years”. Then test the new reading with a small step, and see what comes back.

This draws on decades of work on cognitive reappraisal. People who habitually reinterpret situations report better well-being than people who habitually push feelings down (Gross & John, 2003). And checking thoughts against evidence sits at the core of cognitive behavioural methods, one of the most researched approaches in psychology (Hofmann et al., 2012).

Get some distance

Two kinds of distance make the narrator easier to hear.

Distance in language. Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who talked to themselves using their own name or “you”, instead of “I”, handled stressful tasks with less anxiety and performed better (Kross et al., 2014). Try writing the decision as if advising a friend: “Ana, what do you know for sure here?”

Distance in the body. The narrator tells different stories in different bodies. A 90-minute walk in nature reduced rumination, compared with an urban walk (Bratman et al., 2015). Slow breathing is linked with calmer physiology and lower anxiety (Zaccaro et al., 2018). I often take decision conversations outdoors for exactly this reason.

Move, then decide

Many big decisions don’t need to be made all at once. They can be broken into small tests that give you real information.

Thinking about leaving a job? Have three conversations with people who did. Thinking about starting a business? Sell one thing to one person. Thinking about moving countries? Spend two weeks there working remotely. Thinking about cutting your hours? Try a four-day week for a month.

Each test turns some of your assessments into assertions. “I don’t know if anyone would pay for this” becomes “two of five people said yes”. The narrator has less to work with, and the decision gets lighter.

A composite example

Details from several clients, combined and changed.

Nina had been going back and forth for a year about leaving her corporate role to join a friend’s startup. She had a spreadsheet with forty rows of pros and cons. “Every time I look at it, the answer changes,” she said.

We put the spreadsheet away and caught the sentences instead. There were really only two that mattered. “If it fails, I can’t get back into corporate.” And: “If I stay, I’ll be wondering forever.”

The first was fortune telling. She checked it by calling two former colleagues who had left and come back. Both had. The second was closer to an assertion: she’d been wondering for a year already.

Her next step was to work with the startup two days a week for a month, on unpaid leave. By the end of the month, the decision had more or less made itself.

One thing to try this week

Take the decision you’ve been going around on. Write the three sentences your head repeats most often, word for word. For each, mark which of the four disguises it uses. Then write one small test that would turn one assessment into an assertion, and do it before Sunday.