Should I Stay or Should I Go? How to Make Tough Decisions
We’ve all been in situations where the choice is anything but clear. How do you know when to keep on keepin’ on, or wave the white flag of surrender? This week on the Savvy Psychologist, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen offers six tips to help you decide when to stay and when to go.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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Should I Stay or Should I Go? How to Make Tough Decisions
Fish or cut bait. Put up or shut up. There’s even a certain saying regarding the bathroom. Whatever you call it, it’s the endless conundrum of choice that comes from that pesky thing called free will.
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We make a million decisions a day, from what to eat for breakfast to what shoes to wear, but some choices can get a lot more complicated. For instance, a job that fills your bank account but drains your humanity one billable hour at a time: stay or go? A partner you adore but with whom you fight daily: stay or go?
For better or worse, what we truly want and what is best for us can be hard to tease out. Therefore, this week here are 6 tips for handling ambiguous situations that leave us wondering if we should stick it out, or get out.
Tip #1: Would you expect others to do the same? Loyalty, a sense of duty to a larger cause, or plain old fear of ruffling feathers can all complicate matters when we’re deciding whether to stay or go.
For example, imagine you land a meaningful job for a noble purpose, but soon realize your boss is toxic and your co-workers are even worse. You don’t want to stay, but quitting feels like abandoning the cause. In another example, maybe your once-heavenly housemate pulls one too many maneuvers from hell. You want to move out, but you’d hate to burn bridges with this friend.
Try this: regardless of whether you’re inclined to stay or go, when making your decision, ask yourself, “Would I expect anyone else to do the same?” While there is always room for empathy and tolerance, don’t ask of yourself what you wouldn’t ask of others. If you set a double standard, you’re setting yourself up for martyrdom at worst, resentment at best.
Tip #2: Make room for some emotion. While making a major decision in the heat of the moment goes about as well as getting a tattoo when drunk, some emotion is necessary for good decision-making. In the 80’s and early 90’s, teams of researchers found that individuals with damage to the parts of the frontal lobe that feel emotion and produce an emotional drive can’t learn from their mistakes or make sound decisions. In other words, it turns out your gut is actually in your frontal lobe.
The take-home? Wait until you’re not in the throes of feeling angry, depressed, or freaked out to make a big decision—luckily, most acute emotions dissipate over time. But also let yourself go with what you feel, rather than just with what you think. Turns out a little emotion is necessary to make your own best decision.
Tip #3: Expand the classic pros and cons list. Even Spock would approve of the logic in this classic decision making tool: the pros and cons list. But consider giving Spock a run for his money by expanding it from one list to two: pros and cons of staying and pros and cons of going. You might think they would just be opposites of each other, but you’d be surprised—listing the positives and negatives of both sides help you dig a little deeper and make a better gut decision with that frontal lobe of yours.
Tip #4: Notice how much you’re justifying the decision. A pregnant client of mine was deciding whether to go with a renowned pediatrician who practiced at an underfunded clinic in the inner city or a run-of-the-mill pediatrician who practiced in a fancy suburb. She said she really wanted to go with the inner city doc, but she was worried about finding street parking, she thought it might be tough to get to in the winter, she though the waiting room was too crowded. It was clear she wanted to go with the suburban doctor, but felt guilty about going the less noble and more convenient route. But you could tell she had made her choice.
The point? If you find yourself rationalizing, justifying, and plain old convincing yourself, just do what you really want. Better to shamelessly walk a straight line than twist yourself in a pretzel of guilty explanation.
Tip #5: Stand up for yourself before resigning yourself. Assertiveness falls somewhere on the spectrum between passive and aggressive, and it falls somewhere between the two in terms of respect, as well. Being passive disrespects you. Being aggressive disrespects your partner. Assertiveness, on the other hand, respects both of you.
To be sure, it’s hard to make your needs known, but give being politely assertive your best shot before you put the final nail in the coffin of quitting, moving out, breaking up, or stewing in a pool of resentment.
If assertiveness doesn’t come naturally to you, imagine yourself in a role where you’re both helping and in charge. Use the same voice a friendly doctor might use in firmly instructing you to take all of your medication, the same voice a concerned teacher would use if you failed your last test she told you to go to tutoring, or the same voice your mom would use in telling you to put on a jacket because it’s forty degrees outside. You’re going for caring but in charge.
Now, it’s always possibility that self-advocacy will fall on deaf ears, or that nothing can be changed, but at least you can walk away knowing you stood up for yourself.
Tip #6: Take the choice out of the matter. We’ve talked about this exercise on the podcast before, but it bears repeating. To make a tough decision, sometimes it can be helpful to test the waters of both outcomes by imagining you don’t have a choice. For instance, pretend you’re trying to decide between staying or walking from a less-than-stellar job. First, pretend all other jobs in the universe vaporize. You have to stay in your job. How would you feel? Pay attention to your gut reaction: relief, resentment, something else? Next, go the opposite route: pretend your position is cut. You have to look for another job. Now how would you feel? Take your feelings and use them as information to make your decision.
To wrap up, it’s hard to make a big decision. We can’t tell the future, we operate with limited information, and emotion both facilitates and clouds our judgment. Sometimes it seems like if you go there will be trouble and if you stay it will be double. Somebody should write a song about that.
https://www.facebook.com/savvypsychologistBut ask yourself if you’d expect the same of others, notice your justifications, assertively stand up for your needs before you decide, make your pros and cons lists and then go with your gut, and you’ll come to your own best decision every time.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.