“How can I be 100% sure that I am making the right decision?”
This is one of the most common questions I hear from people considering major personal or professional transitions. It is an understandable question. But it contains a premise worth examining: the idea that absolute certainty about your choices exists before those choices are made.
The search for the perfect decision is, at its heart, a search for certainty and for a 100% guarantee of success. Most of the decisions we make in daily life are made effortlessly with far lower odds of success. But some people, especially when it comes to major personal or professional decisions, struggle to accept anything less than 100%. And they believe that if they think hard enough or wait long enough, the right option will eventually reveal itself, along with absolute certainty.
How intolerance of uncertainty feeds the myth
At the root is a trait psychologists call intolerance of uncertainty. Like all psychological traits, some people have more of it than others, and it tends to be more pronounced in people who are analytical, high-achieving, and accustomed to solving problems through rigorous thinking.
When faced with uncertain or ambiguous situations, individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty tend to appraise such situations as threatening. This activates anxiety and a set of characteristic responses: reassurance seeking, excessive information gathering, hypervigilance. Applied to major life decisions, this pattern looks like months of research, endless pros and cons lists, and the persistent feeling that one more piece of information might finally reveal what the right choice is. It rarely does.
The neurological basis of this fear of the unknown is well established. fMRI studies by psychologist Stewart Shankman and colleagues show that individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty activate the insula and the amygdala more strongly during the anticipation of unpredictable information than individuals low on this trait. These are brain regions implicated in the assessment and anticipation of uncertainty and the processing of threat.
How waiting for certainty keeps you stuck
The pursuit of certainty feels like due diligence. It feels rational and responsible because it creates the impression that, with enough effort, the perfect decision can eventually be found. But the overthinking it generates tends to keep people fixed on the problem rather than moving towards a solution. In its most pronounced form, it produces decision paralysis: a state in which the volume of information and the weight of possible outcomes make any decision feel impossible.
I worked recently with a brilliant student facing a decision about her postgraduate studies. When she came to me, she was spending hours compiling lists of courses across different subjects, weighing pros and cons for each, convinced that thoroughness would eventually produce clarity. She was overwhelmed, anxious, and completely stuck.
What shifted things for her was not further analysis but small, targeted experiments: conversations with people working in the fields she was considering, a week spent shadowing someone in one of her options. Each experiment produced concrete information that no amount of abstract reasoning could have generated. Progress replaced paralysis.
What to do instead
The first step is acceptance. Uncertainty is not a problem to be solved before a major decision can be made. It is the context in which all major decisions are made. No amount of research, preparation, or analysis will deliver the guarantee you are looking for, because that guarantee does not exist.
It’s also important to reframe uncertainty and reflect on its positive effects. Uncertainty pushes individuals toward novel solutions. In their book The Chaos Theory of Careers, psychologists and authors Pryor and Bright encourage decision makers to embrace uncertainty and reframe it as a potential source of opportunity. Their research shows that a career counselling approach built around openness, flexibility, and readiness to engage with unplanned events improves career self-efficacy and career decision making more compared to standard career counselling approaches, like trait matching.
If you recognise this pattern in yourself, it can help to map out the different paths you are considering and assign a rough probability to the likelihood of a successful outcome for each. Not because the numbers will be accurate, but because the exercise makes the perfectionist cost of waiting visible. If a path has an 80% or 90% likelihood of leading to happiness, what exactly are you paying, in time, in opportunity, in the life you are not living, while you wait for the remaining 10% to resolve itself?
Good decisions are rarely those made with complete certainty. They are those made with enough information, honest self-reflection, and the willingness to adapt if circumstances change. Waiting for certainty feels safe, but in reality it is often uncertainty itself that keeps us from living the life we want.
Finding yourself stuck in a circle of overthinking?
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About the author
Dr Giulia Galli. An accredited coach, chartered psychologist, and academic neuroscientist with twenty years of experience in understanding people’s thinking, decisions and behaviour. You can read more about my story and my approach to coaching here.
