Finding Your Way When the Answer Isn’t Clear
Learn how to make thoughtful decisions when the answer isn’t clear by balancing emotions, values, uncertainty, and what matters most.
You have thought about it in the shower. You have thought about it in the car. You have made a pros and cons list, talked to three people you trust, slept on it, revisited the pros and cons list, and somehow added two new cons that weren’t there yesterday. At some point, you may have even announced that you were done thinking about it, only to find yourself thinking about it again approximately eleven minutes later. You have gathered the information. You have considered the possibilities. You have done all the things you’re supposed to do when making a responsible decision, and still, you don’t know what to do.
There is something uniquely uncomfortable about a decision that refuses to become clear. We tend to believe that if we think long enough, gather enough information, or find the right person to talk to, eventually one choice will reveal itself as the obvious answer. Sometimes that happens. Plenty of decisions really are information problems, and once we know enough, the path forward becomes easier to see. But the decisions that keep us awake at night are often difficult for a different reason. They aren’t hard because we haven’t thought about them enough. They’re hard because there may be good reasons to choose more than one direction.
Sometimes Both Things Are True
Imagine you’ve been offered a new job. It’s work you’ve wanted to do for years. It’s more interesting, there is room to grow, and something about it feels exciting in a way your current job hasn’t felt in a long time. There is only one problem. It pays less. Suddenly, what looked like a career decision has become a conversation about nearly everything that matters to you. You want work that feels meaningful, and you want financial security. You want to take a chance on yourself, and you want to protect the stability you’ve built. You can picture yourself accepting the job and wondering whether you’ve made a terrible mistake, but you can also picture yourself turning it down and wondering exactly the same thing.
Our instinct is often to treat these competing thoughts as a problem that needs to be solved before we can make the decision. Surely one of them must be the real feeling. Maybe the excitement means you should go, and the hesitation is just fear. Or maybe the hesitation is your intuition trying to warn you, and the excitement is making you reckless. We can spend an enormous amount of time trying to determine which voice is telling the truth when the more uncomfortable possibility is that they both are.
This is one of the ideas behind dialectical thinking, which is central to Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT. Dialectics asks us to make room for ideas that appear to contradict each other. You can love someone and be angry with them. You can be grateful for what you have and want something different. You can be afraid to do something and believe it’s worth doing. The existence of one truth doesn’t necessarily cancel out the other, which means sometimes the reason you can’t find clarity isn’t because you’re confused. It’s because two things that genuinely matter to you are pulling in different directions.
That changes the task. If you’re waiting to feel completely certain before making a difficult decision, you may actually be waiting for one side of a very real conflict to disappear. It might not. The person considering the new job may never reach a point where meaningful work stops mattering or financial security becomes irrelevant. The decision isn’t about figuring out which concern is legitimate. They’re both legitimate. The question becomes how to choose when both deserve a seat at the table.
Why Our Decisions Make Sense in the Moment
There is another idea from DBT that can change the way we think about decisions, particularly the ones we later wish we’d made differently. DBT operates from an assumption that people are doing the best they can. Importantly, that doesn’t mean every decision is healthy, wise, kind, or harmless. DBT holds another idea right alongside it: people can be doing the best they can and still need to do better, learn new skills, and change. That sounds contradictory, but that’s exactly the point.
Think about a friend who has spent the last six months trying to move on from a relationship. They know the relationship wasn’t working. They’ve talked about it endlessly. They’ve deleted the number, put the photos away, and promised everyone, including themselves, that this time they’re done. Then one night, they’re sitting alone at home, the loneliness starts getting louder, and at midnight they send the text.
From the outside, it’s easy to ask, Why would you do that? We usually don’t mean it as a genuine question. We mean, You knew better. We talked about this. What were you thinking? But try asking exactly the same question with actual curiosity. Why would someone do that? Maybe they were lonely. Maybe they missed the person. Maybe they wanted reassurance. Maybe not knowing what their ex was doing became harder to tolerate than whatever consequences might come from reaching out. Maybe for five minutes, sending the text seemed like the fastest available way to feel a little better.
None of those explanations magically turns the text into a good decision. They simply make the decision understandable. That’s an important difference. When we assume someone’s behavior must make sense somehow, curiosity starts replacing judgment. Instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we start wondering what problem they were trying to solve. Behavioral approaches like DBT often look at behavior this way because even behaviors that create problems can serve a purpose in the moment. If something gives us relief, connection, escape, reassurance, or a sense of control, we’re more likely to return to it, even when we know there may be consequences later.
The same curiosity becomes especially useful when the person making the confusing decision is us. Most of us have looked back at something we’ve done and wondered what on earth we were thinking. Usually, though, we were thinking something. The decision made sense according to the information, emotions, needs, fears, skills, and circumstances we had available at that moment. Understanding that doesn’t mean excusing everything we’ve ever done. It means understanding our choices well enough to make different ones when we need to.
What Matters Right Now and What Matters Beyond Right Now
Emotions are part of that equation, and they aren’t the enemy of good decision making. Fear tells us something. So do anger, excitement, sadness, loneliness, and joy. Trying to make decisions without emotions would be neither realistic nor particularly helpful. Besides, most of us have met a spreadsheet. They aren’t nearly as comforting as advertised.
Where we can get into trouble is when what will make me feel better right now quietly becomes the only question we’re answering. Go back to that midnight text. In that moment, reaching out might offer connection, reassurance, relief, or even just a few minutes without wondering whether the other person misses you too. Those are real wants. Telling yourself you shouldn’t have them probably won’t make them disappear. But there is another question you can place alongside them: What matters to me beyond right now?
Those two questions can lead to very different places. What do I want right now? I want to send the text. What do I want beyond right now? I want to move forward. What do I want right now? I want to quit this job in the middle of an awful Tuesday. What matters beyond right now? I want to build a career that gives me more freedom, but I also need a plan for paying the mortgage. What do I want right now? I want to avoid this difficult conversation. What matters beyond right now? I want to be someone who can be honest in my relationships even when honesty is uncomfortable.
This is where values become particularly useful. Values aren’t rules about what you’re supposed to do, and they don’t magically reveal the correct answer. They’re simply the things that matter enough to help orient your choices: family, honesty, stability, adventure, compassion, independence, growth, community, creativity, or whatever else makes your life feel like yours. Research on values clarification, particularly in health care where people often have to make difficult decisions without guaranteed outcomes, suggests that becoming clearer about what matters can reduce decisional conflict and help people make choices that better reflect their priorities.
Maybe that’s what our person considering the new job actually needs. They may never discover whether the new job is objectively “better” because there probably isn’t a universal answer to that question. Instead, they can ask what they’re trying to build. Maybe financial stability is especially important right now because they’re supporting a family. Maybe they’ve spent years choosing security and have realized that meaningful work matters more than they allowed themselves to admit. Maybe taking the job is consistent with their values. Maybe turning it down is. The important part isn’t choosing the value that sounds most impressive. It’s understanding what you’re choosing for.
Future You Knows More Than You Do
There is, of course, one person who will eventually have considerably more information about this decision than you do: Future You. Future You gets to know whether the relationship worked out, whether the company survived, whether moving across the country became the best adventure of your life, or whether you spent six months wondering why anyone voluntarily lives that far from their favorite pizza place. Then Future You gets the deeply unfair advantage of looking backward and saying, Obviously, I should have known.
Psychologists have studied something called outcome bias, which describes our tendency to judge the quality of a decision partly by how it eventually turned out. In classic research, people evaluated identical decision processes differently when they were told those decisions produced different outcomes. In everyday life, we do this constantly. Something works out and we congratulate ourselves for trusting our instincts. Something falls apart and suddenly every warning sign seems obvious, even if it wasn’t obvious at all when we actually had to choose.
But the quality of a decision and the quality of an outcome aren’t the same thing. You can make a careless decision and get lucky. You can make a thoughtful decision and have something completely outside your control go wrong. Someone can drive recklessly and arrive home safely, but the safe arrival doesn’t suddenly make the decision responsible. In the same way, someone can thoughtfully leave a job for an opportunity that aligns with everything they want from their career only to have the new company close six months later. The bad outcome doesn’t automatically mean the original decision was bad.
This matters when we think about regret because hindsight has a way of rewriting the information we believe we had available. It would be comforting to say that if you always make values based decisions, you’ll never experience regret, but people are more complicated than that. Even thoughtful choices can hurt. We can wonder what would have happened if we’d chosen differently. We can miss what we gave up. We can wish things had worked out another way.
Still, there is an important difference between wishing an outcome were different and believing you abandoned what mattered to you when you made the choice. You can wish the new job had worked out without believing you were wrong to pursue work that mattered to you. You can grieve the end of a relationship while knowing that leaving reflected what you needed from your life. A values guided decision isn’t a guarantee against disappointment. It gives you something steadier to return to when the outcome isn’t what you hoped.
Finding Your Way
Maybe the hardest part of making a decision is accepting that we don’t get to make it from the future. We make it here, with the information available today. We make it while emotions are loud, priorities compete, and several things we care about may be pointing in different directions. We make it without knowing exactly what will happen next or who we’ll become on the other side. That uncertainty can feel like evidence that we aren’t ready to choose, when sometimes uncertainty is simply part of choosing.
When the answer isn’t clear, then, the goal doesn’t have to be forcing yourself into certainty. It can be slowing down enough to understand what’s pulling you in each direction. What does each choice give you? What does each choice ask you to give up? What are your emotions asking for right now, and what matters to you beyond right now? If you stop trying to determine which feeling is the correct one, can you make room for the possibility that several of them are telling you something worth hearing?
Eventually, we still have to choose. We make the best decision we can with what we know, what we feel, what we need, and what matters to us at the time. We may discover later that we would choose differently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we failed. Future You will have information, experience, and perspective that Present You simply doesn’t have yet, and part of growing is allowing new information to change what we would do next time.
There probably isn’t a way to move through life making every decision with perfect clarity. But maybe clarity isn’t the skill we need most. We can learn to tolerate competing truths, become more curious about what drives our choices, pay attention to the difference between what feels good now and what matters beyond now, and make decisions that reflect the lives we’re trying to build. We may not always know exactly where a choice will lead, but we can get better at knowing what we’re using to find our way.
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