When Making a Decision Means Feeling Responsible for What Happens Next
You're perfectly capable of making decisions.
You make them all day long at work, at home and for your family. People may even come to you when they don't know what to do because you're thoughtful and usually pretty good at seeing the whole picture.
But there are certain decisions that seem to take up far more space in your head than they should.
You recommend a contractor to a friend and find yourself worrying about whether they'll do a good job. You choose the restaurant and notice whether everyone likes their meal. You make a decision at work and, when someone questions it, you mentally go back through everything you knew at the time to determine whether you should have chosen differently.
The decision has already been made.
But somehow you still feel responsible for what happens next.
If this kind of mental responsibility feels familiar, Burnout Recovery for Women in the Bay Area explores how subconscious patterns can create exhaustion that has very little to do with how many hours you're working.
You're Not Just Making the Decision
Imagine you're planning dinner with several friends and they ask you to choose the restaurant.
You're not simply asking yourself what sounds good. You're thinking about what everyone likes, whether it's too expensive, whether parking will be difficult and whether the friend who doesn't eat gluten will have enough choices.
You finally pick somewhere.
Then someone doesn't love their meal.
Nothing terrible happened. Your friend ordered dinner she didn't particularly enjoy.
But a little part of you thinks, I should have picked the other place.
That's where the decision becomes something else.
You're no longer responsible only for making a reasonable choice. You've made yourself responsible for everyone's experience of the choice.
When Other People's Reactions Become Part of the Decision
This doesn't only happen with restaurants.
You tell your teenager no and then spend the evening wondering whether you were too strict because they're upset. You recommend someone for a job and feel embarrassed if they don't perform well. You make the best decision you can with the information available and still question yourself when the outcome isn't what you hoped.
The common thread isn't indecisiveness.
It's responsibility.
If your subconscious has learned that other people's disappointment, frustration or discomfort means you may have done something wrong, every decision contains an additional question:
How will everyone feel about me if this doesn't go well?
Now you're not simply choosing.
You're trying to choose an outcome.
This is one of the ways Overthinking Burnout can hide inside competence.
The Impossible Decision
Once you feel responsible for the outcome, it makes perfect sense that you'd want more information.
You research longer. You consider another possibility. You ask someone else's opinion. You mentally run through what could happen with each option.
You're looking for the choice that will allow you to stop worrying.
But that choice doesn't exist.
You can hire an excellent contractor who makes a mistake. You can make a thoughtful parenting decision your child hates. You can make the best business decision available and still have circumstances change three months later.
A good decision cannot guarantee a good outcome.
And someone else's disappointment doesn't automatically mean you chose badly.
What Belongs to You—and What Doesn't
There is a different kind of responsibility that doesn't require you to predict everything.
You can gather the information you reasonably have, listen to yourself, make the best choice you can and take responsibility for that.
What happens afterward contains variables that were never yours to control.
This can be surprisingly difficult when your subconscious has spent years measuring the quality of your decisions by other people's reactions to them.
When that pattern begins to shift, decisions become lighter. Not because you care less about the outcome, but because you stop treating every imperfect outcome as evidence that you should have known better.
You don't have to guarantee what happens next in order to trust the decision you're making now.
The Work Beneath the Overthinking
Through Trauma-Release Hypnotherapy and the Regressive Release Method (RRM), we look beneath the decision itself and work with the subconscious experiences that created this sense of responsibility.
The goal isn't to make you less thoughtful. It's to allow thoughtfulness to stop carrying a job it was never capable of doing: guaranteeing that nobody is disappointed and nothing goes wrong.
You can make a good decision.
And then you can let the future belong to itself.
If you'd like to understand this work more deeply, join me for my workshop, Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of Burnout
If you're curious about what's underneath your own overthinking, schedule a complimentary consultation.
Continue Reading
Burnout Recovery for Women in the Bay Area
Why You Replay Conversations Long After They're Over
Why Your Mind Starts Looking for Problems When Everything Is Fine
The Exhaustion of Trying to Think Three Steps Ahead
Ready to Go Deeper?
Join the workshop Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of Burnout, or schedule a complimentary consultation.