You cannot get to sleep. Because of that thing.
Hundreds of thousands of people turn over on the mattress night after night, and although their circumstances differ enormously from one another, I suspect there is one lethal common denominator.
They all need to make a particular decision, and they cannot make it.
Do not take that lightly.
Being unable to make decisions is a serious matter. Very serious indeed.
Let me sharpen the tone: being comprehensively indecisive comes close to passing a death sentence on your chances of being happy.
Why? Because the good feeling you have in life corresponds clearly to the amount of control you have in your life.
And one of the main routes to obtaining control over your life is: first, to decide; second, to carry out what you decided.
Most people do not manage to decide consistently, and unsurprisingly, most people in the modern world do not really feel happy most of the time.
Now — a decision, the act of ranking alternatives and choosing between them, is an operation that takes a fraction of the available time. In its pure form it takes less than a minute.
And I am telling nobody anything new here. You are all accustomed to doing exactly that — evaluating several alternatives and choosing between them — at a remarkable speed, whenever the matter is one you perceive as less fateful.
Think about a standard trip round an enormous supermarket, or a complex, multi-level computer game.
The comparison sounds idiotic, but in both those situations the human animal demonstrates that it can process a great deal of data in real time, rank alternatives and decide on courses of action, quite satisfactorily.
But when the matter involves emotions, or other people, or significant sums of money, we change down a gear — and sometimes cut the engine entirely, which is to say we do not decide.
Why, in fact?
My hypothesis is that although the final decision takes us a minute and a half, we devote almost all of the time to preparing to decide.
It looks as though we are building a case for some internal judge — assembling justifications, anticipating objections, rehearsing how we would defend the choice to somebody. And that activity feels exactly like deliberation, which is why it can continue for years without anybody noticing that no deliberating is going on.
The test is simple and slightly brutal. Ask yourself what you would need to learn in order to decide. If you cannot name it, you are not gathering information. You are waiting to feel differently, and that is not a process that terminates.