Relationships Making decisions is hard for me, and that’s why life feels like a drift – How do I get under the control of my own life?

I don’t understand how people make the choices of their lives. I often feel like I’m a little an outsider in my own life. Sure, I make choices, but I don’t remember how or why in retrospect.

I do not know how to identify with a situation where it is decided to move to the country, to have a first or fourth child, to change the field. Personally, I just feel drifting, and smaller, often partly forced decisions determine the direction of my life.

I would like to be more in control, but I can’t sit behind the wheel. I don’t know how I would really recognize what I want inside myself.

The problem is opened by Priska Pennanen, a psychologist in charge of study community work from the Student Health Care Foundation at FSHS. Experts do not comment on individual cases in the column but address the issue at a general level.

“To experience The difficulty of making choices can be influenced by a variety of things. First, at various turning points in life, such as when you start or end your studies, or even in the middle of a difference, you may not really know what you want.

The situation can feel new and big changes bring to the surface an experience that you may not even feel.

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The abundance of opportunities can sometimes increase the pain of choice.

Another thing that influences making choices is that today there are so many different options. So there are different paths from which you can choose the ones that suit you best. The abundance of opportunities can sometimes increase the pain of choice.

Third as human beings we are different from each other. Some see more options around them than others. For some reason, others seem to know more clearly or earlier, for example, what they want to do for work or where to live.

Fourth, choice can become a particularly painful experience if you are prone to compare yourself to others. It is worth keeping in mind the truth about the lives of others that choices can seem outwardly certain, even if one is experiencing uncertainty.

If choosing is a genuinely awkward thing over and over again, you should think about your values, that is, things that are important to you. Ignorance of them can make choosing difficult if the direction of life is not, so to speak, clear.

Values ​​are simply about what you like and what you want out of life. So the value may even be that you want to spend time with friends. Or that you are a trusted friend yourself.

When you have consciously thought about your values, you can, as it were, see in your direction the direction you can take through various choices. Then it doesn’t hurt to even implement them in every single situation.

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When thinking about a choice, you should listen to what are the pros and cons of the different options.

It is not always possible to even choose, let alone do it according to one’s values. But if you get to choose whether to work overtime or not, it may be easier to decide that right now I’m not doing it because friendship is an important value to me and I’ve promised a friend my time.

Traditional the pros and cons listing works as well. So when thinking about a choice, it’s worth listening to what are the pros and cons of the different options. It can clarify your own thinking.

If you have then made a choice and lived with it for a while, you can write it down or think again about its pros and cons.

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Making choices is a skill that can be learned.

It’s also worth thinking about what you learned about yourself when making that choice. And is there anything you would do differently next time? Making choices is a skill that can be learned, and such reflection in retrospect can be helpful.

In life, one particular choice often precludes other options. It can make a person weighing a choice feel uncomfortable, especially if there is a fear of failure at the time of the choice. But in many situations, many different solutions end up being just as good. ”