Why do I keep making decisions that keep me stuck?
Aug 21, 2026
By Gwen Bach, MSc Applied Neuroscience
Published 21 August 2026
Short answer: You can keep making decisions that leave you stuck because the familiar option often has an immediate advantage: it reduces uncertainty, discomfort, effort or the risk of regret right now. Status quo bias, previous investment, avoidance and decision history can all pull you towards repeating what you already know. If stress is high or you have stopped expecting your actions to make much difference, changing course can become even harder.
You know the decision is not really working.
You keep accepting the work that leaves no time for the thing you actually want to build. You keep using the same strategy even though it has not produced much for months. You stay with a project because you have already put so much time into it. You tell yourself you will change how you work next week, and then next week arrives and somehow you are doing exactly the same thing again.
From the outside, this can look rather irrational.
And when you are the person doing it, it is incredibly easy to turn that into a judgement about yourself: Why am I doing this again? I know better.
The problem is that a decision is not evaluated only according to whether it will make your life better six months from now. Your brain is also weighing what happens if you change now.
Changing may mean uncertainty. Admitting that the last year of effort did not work. Risking regret. Giving up something familiar before you know whether the alternative will be better. Having a difficult conversation. Starting again. Or simply tolerating a few hours of anxiety rather than choosing the option that makes the anxiety disappear.
And suddenly the supposedly ridiculous decision makes a little more sense.
So why do we keep choosing things that preserve exactly the situation we say we want to escape?
Mechanism
Why does the familiar decision have such a strong advantage?
One reason is status quo bias: when one option represents what we are already doing, it can receive an advantage simply because it is the current state.
That does not mean changing is always better. Staying put can be perfectly rational when switching is expensive, risky or unnecessary. The interesting part is that experiments repeatedly find a preference for the status quo that cannot always be explained by the objective quality of the options alone (Eidelman & Crandall, 2012; Miceli & Suri, 2023).
Familiarity lowers some of the costs of deciding.
You already know how the current situation works. You know how unpleasant your job is, how your current business model behaves, how your present routine falls apart every Wednesday afternoon. The alternative contains unanswered questions.
Research on decision inertia finds that previous choices can influence later ones, with people repeating a choice even when there are reasons to reconsider it (Akaishi et al., 2014; Alós-Ferrer et al., 2016).
So the decision is not simply:
Which option has the best future outcome?
It may also contain an unspoken second question:
Which option makes me feel least exposed right now?
And those two questions can produce very different answers.
Why does everything I have already invested make changing harder?
Then there is the sunk-cost effect.
Imagine you have spent two years building something that is not working. From a purely prospective decision-making point of view, the important question is what is most likely to work from here onwards.
But humans do not find it particularly easy to erase those previous two years from the equation.
Prior investment of money, time and effort can increase our willingness to persist, even when continuing is no longer the best option (Dijkstra & Hong, 2019; Magalhães & White, 2016). Recent research suggests that cognitive effort itself can also produce sunk-cost effects: after investing mental effort, people may become more willing to continue investing in the same course of action (Bogdanov et al., 2026).
Which is rather inconvenient if you are an ambitious person who is very good at working hard.
The more you have sacrificed for something, the harder it can become to ask whether it still deserves your next six months.
Abandoning it can feel as though the previous investment becomes meaningless.
But economically, and from the perspective of your next decision, the past cost has already happened. Continuing does not recover it.
The useful question is therefore not:
Have I put too much into this to stop?
It is:
Knowing what I know today, is this where I would choose to put my next hour, month or £1,000?
Why do I choose immediate relief when I know it causes a bigger problem later?
Some stuck decisions are really avoidance decisions.
You decide not to send the proposal because the possibility of rejection feels unpleasant.
You keep researching instead of choosing because choosing creates the possibility that you choose wrongly.
You agree to something you do not want because saying no creates an uncomfortable conversation.
You check email instead of doing the difficult piece of work because email gives you something manageable to respond to.
The consequence tomorrow may be worse, but the consequence during the next thirty seconds is better.
Avoidance is particularly sticky because it can be negatively reinforced. If avoiding something reduces fear, uncertainty or discomfort, that reduction itself can strengthen the avoidance response (Ball & Gunaydin, 2022).
This helps explain something that otherwise seems bizarre: a behaviour can repeatedly make your life worse and still be reinforced.
The reinforcement is simply happening on a different timescale.
Your long-term goal pays later.
Avoidance pays now.
Can previous decisions actually make me more likely to choose the same thing again?
Yes, although we need to be sensible about how far we take this research.
Experiments on choice history show that recent decisions can bias subsequent decisions. Braun et al. (2018), for example, found that previous choices influenced later perceptual decisions, with the effect shaped partly by confidence in those earlier choices.
This does not mean that choosing one terrible boyfriend causes some mysterious neural force to select the next one.
Life decisions are rather more complicated than laboratory perceptual tasks.
But the broader point is useful: every decision is not necessarily constructed completely from scratch. Previous choices can become part of the information influencing the next one.
Add learned behaviour, repeated environments and familiar emotional responses, and repetition becomes increasingly easy.
You have effectively practised the decision.
What happens when I have tried repeatedly and nothing seems to work?
There is another mechanism that matters here: perceived controllability.
Classic learned helplessness research showed that exposure to uncontrollable outcomes can alter subsequent behaviour. When organisms learn that their actions do not affect what happens, later opportunities to act can be missed or pursued less vigorously (Maier & Seligman, 2016).
Contemporary work has increasingly shifted the emphasis towards learning control rather than thinking of helplessness as simply learning passivity. Experiences of behavioural control can change how later stressors are processed and protect against some of the effects of uncontrollability (Baratta et al., 2023).
There is an important caveat here.
“Learned helplessness” has become one of those psychological phrases that gets thrown at almost everything. The original research comes substantially from controlled animal experiments, and feeling discouraged because your business has had a rotten year does not mean you have acquired some clinical entity called learned helplessness.
But the underlying problem of control learning is highly relevant.
If you repeatedly act and nothing appears to change, eventually another attempt stops looking particularly worthwhile.
And then something nasty happens.
You act less.
Which means you create fewer opportunities to discover that a different action could work.
Your world begins to provide exactly the evidence your expectation predicted.
Why is changing course harder when I am stressed or overwhelmed?
Stress can make this entire system more rigid.
Under acute stress, the balance of decision-making can shift. Maier et al. (2015) found that stress impaired self-control in goal-directed choice and altered functional connectivity within neural decision circuits. Reviews of stress and decision-making also suggest that the effects depend on the type, timing and intensity of stress rather than following one simple “stress switches off the prefrontal cortex” story (van Herk et al., 2024).
In real life, however, the consequence is familiar.
You are already behind. There are seventeen things competing for your attention. You feel uncertain about money. You need to make several important decisions.
That is precisely when continuing with the thing you already know can become extremely attractive.
Changing direction requires you to consider alternatives, tolerate uncertainty and potentially accept a temporary increase in discomfort.
The status quo asks considerably less of you.
So stuck decisions can become self-reinforcing: the familiar choice reduces discomfort now, repetition makes it easier to choose again, poor results can reduce your expectation of control, and stress makes experimenting with something different harder still.
Evidence
Is status quo bias really strong enough to keep us in bad situations?
There is substantial evidence for a bias towards existing options, although the size and cause of the effect vary with context.
Attention appears to play a role. Miceli and Suri (2023) found evidence that attentional processes contribute to status quo bias, while research on limited attention suggests that evaluating alternatives less completely can strengthen preference for an existing option.
Regret also matters.
Nicolle et al. (2011) found that experimentally induced regret increased subsequent status quo bias. Sautua (2017) similarly examined uncertainty, regret aversion and decision inertia, suggesting that reluctance to switch may partly reflect anticipated emotional consequences rather than a simple inability to decide.
That distinction matters.
Sometimes people know perfectly well that another option exists.
They are avoiding what choosing it might make them feel.
Does the sunk-cost effect mean persistence is bad?
No.
Persistence is extremely useful when the underlying course of action still makes sense.
The sunk-cost fallacy describes something more specific: allowing irrecoverable previous investment to influence a decision about future investment when it should not.
If your business took three years to build and current evidence suggests another year is likely to make it profitable, continuing may be entirely rational.
If your main reason for continuing is I cannot stop now because I have already spent three years on it, you are using different information.
The distinction is future value versus historical cost.
There is also evidence that sunk-cost bias can be reduced. Ohlert and Weissenberger (2020) found that simply warning people about escalation of commitment was insufficient in their study, while decision aids that made appropriate decision rules more explicit helped people de-escalate.
In other words, “be less biased” is not a particularly useful instruction.
Changing the question you use to make the decision can be.
Does stress really make us fall back on poorer choices?
Stress does not inevitably produce bad decisions, and the effect depends heavily on circumstances.
But evidence does show that acute stress can alter goal-directed decision processes. Maier et al. (2015) found stress-related impairment when participants had to integrate information relevant to self-controlled choice.
This becomes particularly relevant when the alternative requires more deliberate evaluation than the default.
Under pressure, the option which requires no new system, no difficult conversation and no experimentation has a structural advantage.
And that is often the option you are already using.
What does the research on helplessness actually tell us?
The learned helplessness literature has changed considerably since the early work.
Maier and Seligman (2016) revisited fifty years of research and argued that the neuroscience points towards controllability being central. Later work has continued this shift towards understanding how experience with control changes responses to subsequent adversity (Baratta et al., 2023).
This is useful because it changes the practical implication.
If repeated failure has contributed to stuckness, endlessly analysing why you feel powerless may not be enough.
You also need experiences in which an action produces an observable outcome.
Agency needs evidence.
Can anything actually interrupt this pattern?
Yes, although there is no single intervention specifically designed for every variety of “I keep making decisions that keep me stuck”.
The intervention literature overlaps with several of the mechanisms involved.
CBT-based approaches can target avoidance, unhelpful predictions, procrastination and behavioural patterns. ACT is particularly relevant where someone knows what matters but repeatedly avoids the discomfort involved in acting towards it. Research on procrastination also supports interventions that address emotion regulation rather than treating the problem purely as time management (Schuenemann et al., 2022).
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy takes another useful angle: identifying exceptions, resources and concrete movement towards a preferred future. Meta-analytic evidence supports SFBT across a range of psychosocial outcomes, although that does not mean an individual SFBT question has been specifically validated as a treatment for status quo bias (Franklin et al., 2024).
That combination gives us something quite useful for everyday decisions.
We can stop trying to make the giant decision perfectly and instead change the conditions under which we are making it.
Application
How do I stop making the same stuck decision?
Try treating the next decision as a small experiment rather than a referendum on your entire life.
Take one decision you keep revisiting and write it at the top of a page.
Then work through these questions.
1. What am I getting from the current choice right now?
Be annoyingly literal.
Not what it gives you eventually.
What does it give you today?
Perhaps staying with the existing plan means you do not have to admit it failed.
Perhaps delaying the conversation means you do not have to deal with somebody being disappointed.
Perhaps researching for another month means you do not have to risk publishing something imperfect.
Perhaps saying yes gives you immediate reassurance that someone wants you.
The point is to find the short-term consequence that may be reinforcing the decision.
If you cannot see what the behaviour is doing for you now, it is very difficult to understand why you keep repeating it.
2. Remove everything you have already invested
Now imagine the history disappears.
You have not spent the money.
You have not worked on it for two years.
You have not already told everybody this is your plan.
You are arriving at the decision today with the information you currently have.
Would you choose it now?
If the answer is still yes, excellent. Your past investment may not be driving the decision.
If the answer suddenly becomes an emphatic absolutely not, that tells you something important.
3. Ask what you are predicting will happen if you change
Write down the feared consequence.
“I'll lose the money.”
“People will think I failed.”
“The new option might be worse.”
“I might discover I cannot do it.”
“I'll regret leaving.”
Then separate what could happen from what you actually know will happen.
You are not trying to convince yourself everything will be fine. You do not know that.
You are trying to stop an uncertain prediction quietly masquerading as a fact.
4. Look for an exception
Ask yourself:
When have I handled something like this differently?
Maybe you once ended a project earlier.
Maybe you said no to a client and survived.
Maybe you changed direction before you had certainty.
Maybe there is one part of your life where you experiment quite easily even though you freeze in another.
Then ask:
What was different about that situation?
This is useful because you are no longer asking your brain to imagine some entirely theoretical person who makes brave, magnificent decisions.
You are looking for evidence that you have already behaved differently under some conditions.
5. Find one decision that gives you new information
This is the part I think matters most.
Do not immediately ask:
What should I do with the rest of my life?
Ask:
What is the smallest action I can take that would tell me something I don't currently know?
Send the proposal.
Test the new price with five clients.
Block one morning for the project instead of rebuilding your entire weekly schedule.
Speak to the person.
Publish one version.
Cancel one commitment.
Run the experiment for seven days.
A small, reversible decision lowers the cost of changing course and, crucially, gives you evidence about whether your action influences the outcome.
That begins rebuilding controllability.
6. Decide the action before the old decision arrives
Finally, make the next behaviour concrete.
For example:
If I notice myself opening another article instead of making the decision, then I will close the browser and spend ten minutes on the test I wrote above.
You are removing a decision from the exact moment in which uncertainty, avoidance and habit usually win.
Then observe what happens.
You are not trying to prove that your new decision is perfect.
You are collecting data.
And if the experiment tells you that the old choice actually was better, wonderful. You have learned something.
But if you keep saying that you want something different while repeatedly selecting the option that preserves the existing situation, stop asking only whether you are sufficiently motivated to change.
Look at the decision system.
What discomfort does staying remove?
What previous investment are you protecting?
What outcome are you afraid of?
Where have you stopped expecting your actions to matter?
And what small decision could give you genuinely new evidence?
That is often where movement starts.
References
Akaishi, R., Umeda, K., Nagase, A., & Sakai, K. (2014). Autonomous mechanism of internal choice estimate underlies decision inertia. Neuron, 81(1), 195–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.10.018
Alós-Ferrer, C., Hügelschäfer, S., & Li, J. (2016). Inertia and decision making. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 169. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00169
Ball, T. M., & Gunaydin, L. A. (2022). Measuring maladaptive avoidance: From animal models to clinical anxiety. Neuropsychopharmacology, 47, 978–986. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01263-4
Baratta, M. V., Seligman, M. E. P., & Maier, S. F. (2023). From helplessness to controllability: Toward a neuroscience of resilience. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1170417. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1170417
Bogdanov, M., Devine, S., Fu, Z., et al. (2026). Throwing good effort after bad: Evidence for a sunk-cost effect in cognitive effort-based decision-making. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106628
Braun, A., Urai, A. E., & Donner, T. H. (2018). Adaptive history biases result from confidence-weighted accumulation of past choices. The Journal of Neuroscience, 38(10), 2418–2429. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2189-17.2017
Dijkstra, K. A., & Hong, Y.-Y. (2019). The feeling of throwing good money after bad: The role of affective reaction in the sunk-cost fallacy. PLOS ONE, 14(1), e0209900. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209900
Eidelman, S., & Crandall, C. S. (2012). Bias in favor of the status quo. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(3), 270–281. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00427.x
Franklin, C., Ding, X., Kim, J., et al. (2024). Solution-Focused Brief Therapy in community-based services: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies. Research on Social Work Practice. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497315231162611
Magalhães, P., & White, K. G. (2016). The sunk cost effect across species: A review of persistence in a course of action due to prior investment. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 105(3), 339–361. https://doi.org/10.1002/jeab.202
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000033
Maier, S. U., Makwana, A. B., & Hare, T. A. (2015). Acute stress impairs self-control in goal-directed choice by altering multiple functional connections within the brain's decision circuits. Neuron, 87(3), 621–631. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.07.005
Miceli, A. C., & Suri, G. R. (2023). The role of attention in status quo bias. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76, 2434–2446. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221136827
Nicolle, A., Fleming, S. M., Bach, D. R., Driver, J., & Dolan, R. J. (2011). A regret-induced status quo bias. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(9), 3320–3327. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5615-10.2011
Ohlert, C. R., & Weissenberger, B. E. (2020). Debiasing escalation of commitment: The effectiveness of decision aids to enhance de-escalation. Journal of Management Control, 31, 405–438. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00187-019-00290-z
Sautua, S. I. (2017). Does uncertainty cause inertia in decision making? An experimental study of the role of regret aversion and indecisiveness. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 136, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.02.003
Schuenemann, L., Scherenberg, V., von Salisch, M., & Eckert, M. (2022). “I’ll worry about it tomorrow” – Fostering emotion regulation skills to overcome procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 780675. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.780675
van Herk, L., Schilder, F. P. M., de Weijer, A. D., et al. (2024). Heightened SAM- and HPA-axis activity during acute stress impairs decision-making: A systematic review on underlying neuropharmacological mechanisms. Neurobiology of Stress, 30, 100659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynstr.2024.100659
