It seems to me that we are all pretty hard on ourselves when it comes to decisions.

We put so much weight on them, especially the larger ones. Are we doing the right thing? What will the consequences be? How will we ever know if we chose correctly or not? We can riddle our minds with anxiety that has no end, worrying about the pros and cons of each option until we’re so turned around that we don’t even know what we wanted in the first place.

I used to agonize every time that I had to make an autonomous choice for my life, one for which I held total responsibility. I didn’t like that element of the equation. If I changed a job, started working on a new project, started dating someone, quit dating someone, ended a friendship … it all made me feel sick with nerves. I would seek any source of outside validation that I could, talking things out with those friends or family patient enough to listen. I was petrified to make the wrong move, even when deep inside I knew that it was the only way that was viable for me at that time. I wanted the comfort of confirmation from the people around me.

I’m not saying that I’m cured of this – far from it, but I now recognize what I’m doing when it comes up. I often have more trouble with more options, even if that seems to ostensibly be a positive thing. Life would be so much easier if the choices were out of my control! I know that wouldn’t really make me happy, but it relieves a lot of pressure.

But – that pressure is something that I manufacture entirely out of my survival-mode, problem-solving brain. If I can trust my body to tell me what is correct in this moment, I can relax. If I can understand that there is no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” choice, but simply the choice that I make, I can relax.

We cannot make a bad or good choice because it is the only choice that exists in our reality. We have no idea whether the other option would’ve worked out the way we think it would. That’s impossible to determine. The more that we can accept what is, and work with that, the better off we are. It keeps us in our present situation rather than off in some dream world that doesn’t exist.

Once we have made a decision, we can definitely use the events following that choice as feedback on whether we truly listened to our hearts and bodies instead of letting our mind interfere. We can use any information we gather to inform future choices. But I firmly believe that whatever happens, we needed whatever we got out of the decision that we made. It was either the result of us learning something from a past choice, or further learning material that we needed in order to get closer to ourselves and our truths.

Think about how good it would feel if you could make a regular practice of removing the pressure that you put on your decisions. Once you take the anxiety and worry out of it, you can see and feel everything more clearly. The irony is that you are actually more likely to make the decision that’s most resonant with you in this state, not the other. You can’t decide erroneously. You simply can’t. Wherever you are is where you are meant to be, for one reason or another.

I encourage you to sit with this concept. Meditate on it. Journal about it. Perhaps revisit past decisions that felt incredibly stressful and look at how it all ended up. In my experience, nothing is ever as scary or as awful as what your mind can imagine. Let your body settle into the knowledge that you are capable of trusting the signals it gives you and following them, with some patience and practice.

It’s all just life. If we can learn to release a bit, go with the flow, and tune in to our internal vibrations, we can more easily align with choices that make sense for us. If they stop making sense, we make new choices. If they don’t work out as hoped, we adjust or pivot. It’s all a part of our journey here on this earth. Try not to take it so seriously. Life is not meant to be rife with anxiety, stress and mental chaos. It really isn’t.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you get the opportunity to work on this for yourself. I find that breathing exercises really help me clear negative energy and get back in touch with the truth of my body. Sending you luck and all the love in my heart.