Since you woke up this morning, how many decisions - big or small - have you confronted? Did the answers to these decisions naturally arrive as a calm clarity or as an abrupt lightbulb moment? Did you survey the crowd around you for insight, or suffer over ‘what-ifs’ and endless possibilities? As someone who, as a child, turned minutes into hours in grocery and book store aisles paralyzed by the simple question of what I wanted, I meet you with no judgment in this inquiry. Even simple, seemingly inconsequential decision making can be hard.
While anecdotally I can say I have witnessed the majority of my clients struggling more significantly with decision making in the past 2-3 years as we confront the ‘what now?’ of a global pandemic, research may be reflecting a similar trend. A 2021 survey by the American Psychological Association exploring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on decision fatigue suggests that upwards of 32% of Americans struggle with basic, daily decision making, with numbers as high as 48% of millennials when broken down by age group (APA, 2021).
The “why” surrounding this challenge in decision making deserves nuanced exploration; we all hold a unique set of messages, experiences, and adversities that may have understandably invited doubt or uncertainty in the decision making process. Nevertheless, today I hope to instead invite an entry-point to reconnect with your gut, your intuition, your wise mind, or what the very wise Glennon Doyle calls our ‘inner Knowing.’ In her #1 New York Times Bestselling book Untamed, Glennon speaks to this experience of connecting to her Knowing:
“The answers are never out there. They are as close as my breath and as steady as my heartbeat. All I have to do is stop flailing, sink below the surface, and feel for the nudge and the gold. Then I have to trust it, no matter how illogical or scary the next right thing seems. Because the more consistently, bravely, and precisely I follow the inner Knowing, the more precise and beautiful my outer life becomes.” (Doyle, 2020)
If you read that passage and thought, “sounds nice, easier said than done,” I’m right there with you. With a lifetime of messaging, doubt, regret, trauma, wins, failures, and implicit/explicit influence, how do we differentiate this Knowing voice from all of the other voices that make up our consciousness? Dialectical Behavior Therapy’s foundational concept of “Wise Mind” offers us a practical, approachable framework to deepen our mindfulness of where this intuitive inner compass may be pointing us.
Created in the 1970’s by researcher Dr. Marsha Linehan, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (or DBT for short) offers a skills-based, behavioral approach to the topics of mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. Nested within the Mindfulness module of DBT, the Wise Mind skill posits that each individual has access to different states of mind, namely our emotional mind, our logical/reasonable mind, and our Wise Mind. As the language suggests, we are operating from our logic mind when using data-driven, fact-based reason, logic, or problem solving, while we are accessing our emotion mind when we are driven by emotion, mood, passion, or urges (Linehan, 2015). Both of these states have value and purpose, and no one person is solely defined by one or the other (though it is entirely natural that both nature and nurture may have encouraged our access to one over the other). Accessing our Wise Mind involves the honoring and integrating of both the emotional and logical mind, without discrediting or invalidating the data from each (think of our Wise Mind as inhabiting the overlapping center on a venn diagram of emotion and logic mind). This is where we find our wise, inner Knowing!
So what does this look like in practice? How do we access this so-called Wise Mind? The foundation of this process involves mindfulness, bringing our conscious awareness to our present moment experience, and guiding ourselves through the consideration of our emotion, logic, and ultimately Wise Minds. At first this may feel effortful, even forced. With practice, it is intuitive. When facing your next decision, try asking: What state of mind am I operating from currently? What would my emotion mind tell me? What would my logic mind tell me? How is my Wise Mind guiding me? Below is an example of what this consideration may possibly sound like, using a practical example of Wise Mind in the realm of dating, one of my personal favorite spaces of exploration in decision-making.
Example: A person from my dating app asked me on a date- should I go or not?
What would Logic Mind tell us? (remember: data, facts, and reason rule here)
I have specific criteria that this person must meet. I can evaluate the compatibility of this partner based on whether or not they meet this criteria. If they do, they are a good match; if they don’t, they are not.
What would Emotion Mind tell us? (remember: emotion, urges, passion rule here)
Dating is all about the ‘spark’- if I feel excited when I talk to them, I should go! Or I have felt bored in conversation, this will be a waste of time.
What does our Wise Mind guide us to do?
Connection and compatibility can be assessed and built over time, based both on my felt experience when with this person, and whether we are compatible in values, goals, and lifestyle. From what I know so far of this person, I feel open to learning more- I’m in!
If we’re vulnerable enough to live a full, complex life, we will bump up against a million and one decisions in our lifetime- While I don’t know what will be the right move for you, I can say with full confidence that you know what will be right for you.
Sources:
American Psychological Association.(2021). Stress and decision-making during the pandemic. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2021/october-decision-making
Doyle, G. (2020). Untamed. The Dial Press.
Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT® skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.