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The Paralysis of Choice: Why Overthinking Is Destroying Your Peace
2 Playsin 1 day
In this episode of Connected for Iva, I talk about the exhaustion of overthinking everything — relationships, decisions, timing, identity, and the constant pressure to get life 'right.' May left me feeling emotionally unsettled, caught between intuition and anxiety, certainty and doubt, and wondering why trusting myself suddenly felt so difficult.
We live in a world full of endless possibilities and constant comparison, where every choice can begin to feel existential. This conversation is about the paralysis that comes from trying to optimize your entire life, the fear of making the wrong decision, and learning that peace might not come from finding the perfect path, but from finally allowing yourself to live the one you’re already on.
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Reveal
00:00:00
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Hello and welcome back to Connected for Iva. Topic today, the paralysis that choice creates.
The Onset of Self-Doubt and Reassessment
00:00:06
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May has been a reminder to me that life is a spiral. There was a lot of doubt this month about my decisions, being really untrusting with my own self, reassessing conversations, questioning choices I had technically already committed to,
00:00:20
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yet somehow never fully emotionally settled into. felt like my brain had turned against me this month, in an almost life falling apart kind of way, because everything we focus on becomes this huge thing in our head.
00:00:33
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Every decision i was making had to be dissected, and that only made me doubt myself more.
Trust Issues and Relationship Impact
00:00:39
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There was a scary realization that when you panic, everything around you becomes shaky, and if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anything else, right?
00:00:47
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The prominent question this month for me was, have I become incapable of trusting myself? If I can't have a relationship with myself, how can i ah trust or have a relationship with anyone else?
00:01:00
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Quite drastic, I know, but it just felt so uncertain. Like I wasn't firmly settled on the ground. And that's a very scary feeling. I also noticed how difficult it became to simply let things be, to allow a choice to be a choice, to live with that choice for a while, to trust myself enough to move forward without constantly glancing backwards, wondering whether another version of events would have suited me better.
Mental Exhaustion and Multiple Realities
00:01:25
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There's something so exhausting about mentally living inside multiple realities at once. And I did this a lot over the month of May. Nightmares, too. There was a week when I was just so stressed out, i would wake up physically weak and emotionally drained.
00:01:41
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Decisions. The one you choose, the one you almost choose, the one you think maybe you should have chosen instead. That would follow me into my dreams a lot of nights, and what we don't process during the day continues to linger at night, taking root into the subconscious.
00:01:58
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And because modern life constantly presents us with evidence of alternative ways to exist, it becomes incredibly easy to start feeling emotionally displaced inside inside your own life.
00:02:11
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I think one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is the idea that there is a perfect way to live. If only we think hard enough about it. Especially for me, I like to think a lot.
00:02:22
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I like to think things into perfection, only there's no such thing. If only we become self-aware enough, productive enough. healed enough, intentional enough, then eventually we will arrive at some beautiful place of certainty where every decision feels aligned and every choice confirms itself naturally.
00:02:42
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But what I've realized this month is that certainty is perhaps one of the most unsustainable things a human being can chase.
Overthinking and Life Comparison
00:02:49
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Because life keeps moving, feelings change, priorities shift, people evolve.
00:02:56
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And yet we keep expecting ourselves to possess absolute clarity whilst navigating something that is inherently uncertain. There is a particular kind of overwhelm that comes from no longer trusting your own internal compass.
00:03:10
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When every decision immediately gets met with another voice asking, Yeah, but what if there's something better? Better opportunities, better relationships, better timing, better cities, better version of yourself, waiting somewhere else entirely.
00:03:25
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And before long, you stop experiencing life directly because you're too busy evaluating it from above, constantly trying to calculate whether you're maximizing your existence properly.
00:03:39
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I found myself doing this so much to me. Starting to ask and then immediately wondering whether I should actually be focusing on something else. Saying no and wondering if I should have said yes instead.
00:03:51
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Second-guessing myself, replying to messages and rereading them afterwards, trying to detect whether I sounded strange, distant too much, not enough. It's tiring when your mind starts treating ordinary moments, like problems to solve rather than moments to simply move through.
00:04:07
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And perhaps what makes this kind of self-doubt particularly difficult is how invisible it is. From the outside, life, you know, can appear functional. You can still show up to things, reply to people, continue its routines.
00:04:21
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But internally, there is a constant noise playing in the background. A questioning of yourself that is slowly draining the enjoyment out of everyday life. Not because anything catastrophic has happened, right?
00:04:34
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But because your mind no longer allows you to rest fully inside your own decisions. I think modern life amplifies this. There are simply too many visible alternatives now. Too many ways to exist. Too many lifestyles presented us daily, thanks social media. Too many people embodying lives who suddenly convinced ourselves we should also want...
00:04:55
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One person moves abroad and suddenly your own city feels insufficient. Someone starts a business and your career starts feeling like a stepping stone. Someone falls in love. That's probably quite a big one for me.
00:05:07
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And you begin questioning whether your own life is emotionally behind somehow. There's always another reality being advertised to us. Again, thanks social
Existential Decisions and Anxiety vs. Intuition
00:05:16
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media. And there are many good things about social media. Don't get me wrong.
00:05:20
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But whilst possibly it is beautiful, I also think there is something psychologically exhausting about constantly witnessing parallel lives unfold in front of you. Human beings were perhaps never meant to emotionally process this many alternative lives at once.
00:05:36
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Because with every visible option comes another opportunity to wonder whether the we ourselves are getting it wrong. I've noticed that when people talk about overwhelm, they often speak about busyness, schedules, burnout.
00:05:50
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But I think there's another form of overwhelm that gets discussed far less, which is the overwhelm of endless possibility. The overwhelm of feeling like your entire existence is permanently open for reconsideration.
00:06:04
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The overwhelm of believing every decision must somehow perfectly reflect your identity, your purpose, your future happiness. And that's that's a big one. And because of this, decisions stop feeling ordinary.
00:06:17
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They start feeling existential. You know, this one simple decision could affect the rest of my life. You know that's big. Should I stay or should I leave? Should I commit or let go? Should I rest or work harder?
00:06:30
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Should I trust this feeling or ignore it? And, you know, there's this whole other conversation about anxiety versus intuition. Am I growing or am I simply uncomfortable? Am I settling or am I sabotaging myself?
00:06:44
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Is this intuition or fear? And at some point the mind becomes so overcrowded with analysis that even simple choices begin feeling emotionally dangerous.
00:06:54
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One thing i kept returning to this month is how exhausting it is to constantly seek reassurance from the future, wanting guarantees before making decisions, wanting proof that things will work out before fully committing to them emotionally.
00:07:10
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But life doesn't really offer this kind of certainty. Most meaningful decisions arrive incomplete. You choose without fully knowing, right? You trust without a guarantee that things will work out, necessarily. You follow a hunch.
00:07:24
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Or you open a door and then another door presents itself from seeming in nowhere. You move forward without absolute clarity about the future. And perhaps what creates so much suffering is not uncertainty itself, but our resistance towards it, our discomfort around uncertainty.
00:07:44
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Because the truth is, there are no lives untouched by doubt. No decisions completely free from regret.
Living Functionally Amid Internal Struggles
00:07:50
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Every path eventually contains difficult days, confusing periods, moments of wondering whether or another the version of life would have suited you better. Yes, we often interpret these feelings as evidence that something must be fundamentally wrong with how we live our lives.
00:08:06
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This month I started realizing how much energy gets wasted trying to eliminate discomfort completely. Trying to think my way into the perfect emotional state before acting. Trying to analyze myself into certainty, which never arrived.
00:08:20
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But overthinking has never once brought me peace. If anything, it usually carries me further away from myself. It's like the more uncertain you are, the deeper the whole of confusion and panic gets.
00:08:33
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The strange thing about chronic second-guessing is that eventually you stop trusting your own ability to handle life altogether. Every decision becomes loaded because you begin believing that making the wrong choice would somehow emotionally destroy you, maybe physically too.
00:08:50
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And so you hesitate, delay, reconsider, reanalyze, until eventually the exhaustion comes not from the decision itself, but from carrying it around mentally for weeks, months afterwards.
00:09:02
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I think many people are living like this, functional on the surface, yet internally trapped inside endless negotiations with themselves, trying to optimize every aspect of life, whilst simultaneously craving relief from the pressure of ah optimization altogether.
00:09:20
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Paradox. And maybe that's what I've needed most this month. Relief. Relief from the constant evaluating. Relief from trying to predict every outcome, control every outcome. Relief from treating every choice like a final verdict on who I am becoming.
Overcoming Self-Doubt and Living in the Present
00:09:37
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Because life is not asking us to become perfect decision makers. It is simply asking us to participate, to trust ourselves enough to move, to stop demanding absolute certainty before allowing ourselves to live.
00:09:51
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The key here is trust. Trust in the process. Trust the things are working out. As May comes to a close, I think the thing I'm trying to return to is presence.
00:10:03
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Letting things unfold without immediately questioning them, allowing myself to exist inside my life instead of constantly standing outside of it, assessing whether I'm doing it correctly.
00:10:15
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There will always be another possibility, another version, another imagined future that appears shinier right from a distance. But perhaps peace is not found in endlessly chasing the perfect path.
00:10:28
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Perhaps it begins the moment we stop abandoning ourselves in search of one.
Conclusion and Encouragement to Stay Connected
00:10:34
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We can work things out. We can. Stay connected.
00:10:39
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Until next time.