Uncertainty and Decision-Making: Why We Ask for Guidance
Understanding why we seek guidance reveals something profound about human nature—and helps us seek more wisely.
You’re facing a decision. The pros and cons are balanced. The stakes feel high. You’ve thought about it endlessly but still don’t know. So you reach out—to a friend, a mentor, a therapist, perhaps a tarot reader. Why?
The impulse to seek guidance during uncertainty is one of the most universal human behaviors. Every culture, every era has had its oracles, elders, and advisors. This isn’t superstition or weakness—it’s a sophisticated response to a genuine cognitive problem. Understanding why we seek guidance helps us use it more effectively.
The Nature of Uncertainty
The Problem of Not Knowing
Uncertainty is not merely the absence of information—it’s a specific cognitive state with distinct psychological effects. When we don’t know what will happen, the brain enters a heightened alert mode. Stress hormones increase. Attention narrows. We become hypervigilant, scanning for threats.
This response evolved for good reason. In ancestral environments, uncertainty often signaled danger. The rustle in the grass could be wind or predator. Not knowing demanded readiness. The discomfort of uncertainty motivated us to resolve it—to gather information, to prepare, to act.
The problem is that modern life is saturated with unresolvable uncertainty. Will this relationship work? Will this career pan out? Will the economy hold? These questions have no definitive answers, yet our brains respond as if a predator lurks in the grass.
The Anxiety of Choice
Psychologist Barry Schwartz documented the “paradox of choice”: more options create more anxiety, not less. Each possibility we don’t choose becomes a path not taken, a potential regret. The freedom to choose becomes the burden of choosing.
Modern humans face unprecedented choice volume. Where to live. What career to pursue. Who to date among endless options. Whether to have children, how many, when. Each domain offers dozens of viable paths—and no clear way to know which is “right.”
This anxiety of choice drives much guidance-seeking. We’re not looking for someone to decide for us. We’re looking for a way out of the paralysis that too many good options creates.
“Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.”
— Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of ChoiceIrreversibility and Stakes
Not all decisions trouble us equally. We agonize over choices that feel irreversible and high-stakes: marriage, children, major moves, career pivots. These decisions shape life trajectories. Get them wrong, and years—decades—unfold differently than they might have.
The irony is that these highest-stakes decisions are precisely the ones where certainty is impossible. No amount of analysis can tell you whether you’ll still love this person in twenty years, or whether this career will bring fulfillment. The decisions that matter most are the ones we can never fully know.
This fundamental mismatch—maximum uncertainty at maximum stakes—is why humans have always sought guidance for life’s big questions.
How the Brain Handles (and Fails to Handle) Uncertainty
The Limits of Rational Analysis
We like to think we make important decisions through careful analysis: list the options, weigh the factors, calculate the optimal choice. This works for simple decisions with clear criteria. It fails spectacularly for complex life choices.
Rational analysis requires defined options, measurable outcomes, and stable preferences. But life’s biggest decisions involve options you haven’t imagined, outcomes you can’t predict, and preferences that change based on what you choose. The spreadsheet approach breaks down precisely when you need it most.
Studies by Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues found that for complex decisions, people who were distracted—prevented from conscious deliberation—actually made better choices than those who analyzed carefully. The conscious mind gets overwhelmed; the unconscious mind integrates information more holistically.
Analysis Paralysis
When facing complex uncertainty, the rational mind often loops endlessly: consider this factor, but what about that one, and what if this happens, but then again… Each consideration spawns more considerations. The decision never gets made.
This paralysis isn’t laziness or incompetence—it’s the rational mind doing exactly what it’s designed to do: consider all angles. For problems with finite angles, this works. For problems with infinite angles, it produces infinite deliberation.
Seeking guidance breaks this loop. An external perspective introduces a constraint—someone else’s view—that limits the infinite possibilities to something actionable. Even if the guidance is imperfect, it provides what pure analysis cannot: a path out of paralysis.
Emotional Flooding
High-stakes decisions trigger emotional responses that can overwhelm cognitive function. Fear of the wrong choice, grief over options not taken, anxiety about the unknown—these feelings don’t aid decision-making. They cloud it.
When emotionally flooded, we lose access to our wisest thinking. We become reactive, defensive, prone to either impulsive action or frozen inaction. The prefrontal cortex—our center of reasoned judgment—goes offline when stress hormones surge.
External guidance provides emotional regulation. Talking to someone calms the nervous system. Being heard reduces overwhelm. The guidance itself may matter less than the calming effect of seeking it.
Types of Decisions That Drive Us to Seek Help
The Four Categories
Not all guidance-seeking is the same. Different types of uncertainty create different needs. Understanding your category helps you seek appropriate support.
Information Gaps
You don’t know enough facts. The solution is research, expert consultation, or data gathering.
Values Conflicts
You want incompatible things. The solution is clarifying priorities and accepting trade-offs.
Prediction Impossible
The future is genuinely unknowable. The solution is accepting uncertainty and choosing anyway.
Self-Knowledge Lacking
You don’t know what you actually want. The solution is introspection and self-discovery.
Information Gaps: The Solvable Problem
Sometimes you’re uncertain because you lack relevant information. Should I invest in this company? What are the side effects of this medication? How does this immigration process work? These questions have answers—you just don’t have them yet.
For information gaps, seek experts: financial advisors, doctors, lawyers. Their knowledge resolves your uncertainty directly. This is guidance at its simplest—you don’t know something, someone else does, they tell you.
The mistake is treating other types of uncertainty as information gaps. “Should I marry this person?” is not an information gap problem, but people often seek more data—more time dating, more relationship history—hoping information will resolve what is actually a different kind of uncertainty.
Values Conflicts: The Trade-off Problem
Often, uncertainty arises because you want things that can’t coexist. Career advancement and present parenting. Adventure and stability. Independence and partnership. No amount of information resolves these tensions—they require choosing what matters most.
Values conflicts feel like not knowing what to do. Actually, you don’t know what you value most—or you know but don’t want to accept the trade-off. Guidance here means clarifying priorities, not providing answers.
A client asks: “Should I take the job in New York?” Investigation reveals she wants the career growth (New York) AND wants to stay near aging parents (current city). More information won’t help. She needs to decide what matters more—or find a creative third option.
Prediction Impossible: The Unknowable Future
Some uncertainty can’t be resolved because the future is genuinely unpredictable. Will this relationship last? Will this business succeed? Will I be happy with this choice in ten years? No one knows. No amount of guidance can tell you.
What guidance can do is help you choose well despite uncertainty. It can clarify your options, identify your fears, surface your intuitions, and help you make peace with not knowing. The decision must still be yours, made without certainty.
People often seek guidance hoping for prediction—”Will this work out?”—when what they actually need is help choosing courageously without knowing the outcome.
Self-Knowledge Lacking: The Inner Mystery
Sometimes the uncertainty is internal. What do I actually want? What would make me happy? What am I afraid of? These questions have answers, but they’re hidden inside you—not accessible through ordinary thinking.
This is where reflective guidance shines. A skilled counselor, therapist, or reader helps you access parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding or couldn’t articulate. They don’t tell you what to do; they help you discover what you already know.
What We Actually Need from Guidance
Not Answers—Clarity
We often approach guidance seeking answers: “Tell me what to do.” But answers from outside rarely stick. You’ve experienced this—someone gives you advice, you nod, then don’t follow it. External answers lack the authority of internal knowing.
What we actually need is clarity: a clearer view of the situation, our options, our feelings, our values. Clarity doesn’t remove the need to choose—it makes choosing possible. It cuts through the fog without forcing a particular direction.
The best guidance clarifies without prescribing. It illuminates the landscape and trusts you to find your path.
Permission and Validation
Often, we already know what we want to do. We seek guidance hoping someone will validate that choice—give us permission to do what we’re already leaning toward.
This isn’t weakness. Major life choices often conflict with expectations: parents’ hopes, society’s norms, our own self-image. We need someone to say, “Yes, you can choose that. Yes, it’s okay. Yes, you’re not crazy.”
Permission-seeking is often dismissed as just wanting to hear what you want to hear. But permission serves a real psychological function. It helps us overcome the internal resistance that keeps us stuck even when we know what’s right.
Watch for this in yourself: you ask for guidance, someone confirms your inclination, and you feel relief—not surprise. That relief reveals you already knew. The guidance didn’t inform you; it permitted you.
A Container for Overwhelm
Sometimes we seek guidance not for answers or permission but simply to have our overwhelm held by another person. The thoughts spinning in our head externalize; someone else witnesses them; the burden becomes shared.
This is the therapeutic function of guidance. The content matters less than the containing. You leave not with better answers but with better capacity to face your situation—because you’re no longer carrying it entirely alone.
This explains why people often feel better after guidance sessions even when nothing concrete was resolved. The resolution was relational, not informational.
A Different Perspective
When you’re inside a problem, you can only see it from inside. You have blind spots created by proximity, emotion, habit. An outside perspective sees what you can’t—not because it’s smarter, but because it’s outside.
Good guidance provides this shift in viewpoint. “Have you considered…?” “What if you looked at it this way…?” “From where I sit, it seems like…” These reframings don’t add information—they change the angle, revealing what was always there but invisible from your position.
Different Sources of Guidance
The Guidance Spectrum
Where you seek guidance shapes what you receive. Each source has strengths and limitations.
On one end: expert consultation (lawyers, doctors, financial advisors). Clear information, specific domains, rational framework. On the other end: symbolic systems (tarot, astrology, divination). Intuitive, holistic, meaning-oriented. In between: therapy, coaching, mentorship—integrating multiple dimensions.
No source is universally best. The question is which serves your particular uncertainty.
Friends and Family
The most common guidance source. Accessible, caring, knows your history. But friends and family have their own stakes in your decisions. They may advise based on their comfort, not your growth. Their knowledge of you can be a bias as much as an asset.
Best for: Emotional support, historical perspective, reality-checking.
Limitations: Biased by relationship, may tell you what you want to hear, may impose their values.
Therapists and Coaches
Professional guidance trained in how minds work. Can access patterns invisible to you. Provides structured support over time. The relationship itself can be healing.
Best for: Self-knowledge gaps, recurring patterns, emotional processing, long-term development.
Limitations: Expensive, time-intensive, rarely prescriptive, may not address practical questions directly.
Experts and Consultants
Specialized knowledge in specific domains. Can resolve information gaps definitively. Provides clear, actionable advice.
Best for: Technical questions, legal/financial/medical matters, skill-specific guidance.
Limitations: Narrow focus, may miss broader life context, can’t tell you what you value or want.
Symbolic Systems (Tarot, Astrology, etc.)
Engages intuition and meaning-making. Provides archetypal perspective. Accesses dimensions rational analysis misses. Creates space for reflection.
Best for: Values conflicts, self-knowledge gaps, meaning questions, integration of intuition.
Limitations: Requires interpretation, can be misused for prediction, effectiveness depends heavily on practitioner.
Despite scientific worldview dominance, symbolic guidance systems remain popular—across cultures, education levels, and eras. This persistence suggests they meet a genuine need that rational approaches don’t fully address: the human need for meaning, symbol, and intuitive knowing.
Why External Perspective Works
Breaking Cognitive Loops
When you think about a problem alone, you use the same neural pathways repeatedly. The same thoughts lead to the same considerations lead to the same thoughts. You’re trapped in your own architecture.
External input introduces novelty. A question you hadn’t considered. A frame you hadn’t tried. This disruption can break the loop, allowing new patterns to emerge. The content of the input matters less than its foreignness—its ability to interrupt your usual circuit.
This is why even random inputs—like shuffled cards or tossed coins—can help decision-making. They force you to engage with possibilities you wouldn’t have chosen, revealing reactions and preferences you didn’t know you had.
Externalizing the Internal
Thoughts inside your head remain vague, overlapping, infinite. When you speak them aloud—or see them reflected in symbols—they become external objects you can examine. The act of externalization itself clarifies.
This is why journaling helps, why talking through problems helps, why seeing your situation reflected in cards or stories helps. Internal chaos becomes external order—or at least external visibility. You can finally see what you’re dealing with.
Studies on “affect labeling” show that naming emotions reduces their intensity. The act of articulating—making external what was internal—engages the prefrontal cortex and reduces amygdala activation. Externalization isn’t just clarifying; it’s regulating.
Social Regulation
Humans are social animals. Our nervous systems are designed to regulate through connection. When distressed, contact with a calm, caring other activates our parasympathetic nervous system—literally calming us physiologically.
This is why guidance-seeking reduces anxiety even before guidance is given. The seeking itself—the connection with another person—provides regulation. The content is almost secondary to the contact.
Guidance from a warm, present human does something information alone cannot. It meets us as whole beings, not just question-answering machines.
The Wisdom of Not-Self
Your self-concept filters everything you perceive. You see situations through the lens of who you think you are, what you think you’re capable of, what you think you deserve. These filters are invisible to you but obvious to others.
External guidance comes from outside your self-concept. It can see possibilities you’ve ruled out, strengths you’ve dismissed, patterns you’ve normalized. The guidance isn’t smarter than you—it’s just not constrained by the same filters.
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Seeking
The Guidance Dependency Trap
Guidance-seeking can become unhealthy when it replaces rather than supports your own decision-making capacity. The sign: you cannot act without external validation. Every decision requires consultation. Your authority has been entirely outsourced.
This often develops gradually. Guidance helps, so you seek more. More helps more, so you seek constantly. Eventually, you’ve lost the ability to trust yourself—which was the thing guidance was supposed to strengthen, not replace.
Seeking guidance daily for the same question. Consulting multiple sources hoping one will say what you want. Inability to make any decision without external input. Feeling more confused after guidance than before. These suggest dependency rather than healthy use.
Healthy Guidance-Seeking
Unhealthy Pattern
- Seeking someone to decide for you
- Asking repeatedly until you hear what you want
- Using guidance to avoid responsibility
- Feeling more dependent over time
- Cannot act without external validation
Healthy Pattern
- Seeking clarity to decide for yourself
- Asking once, then integrating
- Using guidance to inform responsibility
- Feeling more confident over time
- Can act independently, chooses support
The Goal: Enhanced Autonomy
Good guidance should increase your capacity for self-guidance over time. Each consultation should teach you something about how to see your situations more clearly, how to access your own wisdom, how to tolerate uncertainty with more grace.
If you’re becoming more dependent on external guidance, something is wrong—either with how you’re seeking or with the guidance itself. The measure of good guidance isn’t how often you return; it’s how much you’ve grown between visits.
How to Seek Guidance Wisely
Know What Kind of Uncertainty You Face
Before seeking guidance, diagnose your uncertainty type. Information gap? Values conflict? Unknowable future? Self-knowledge lack? Each type needs different support. Seeking expert advice for a values conflict wastes everyone’s time. Seeking symbolic guidance for a technical question misses the point.
Ask yourself: “If I had perfect information, would I know what to do?” If yes, you have an information gap—seek experts. If no, your uncertainty is about values, the unknowable, or self-knowledge—seek accordingly.
Formulate Your Question Clearly
Vague questions produce vague guidance. “What should I do about my life?” can’t be usefully answered. “How should I think about the trade-off between career growth and family time in this specific situation?” can.
The discipline of formulating clear questions is itself clarifying. By the time you’ve articulated exactly what you’re asking, you’ve already done significant work. Sometimes the question-formation process reveals the answer before any guidance is sought.
Vague: “Will things get better?”
Clearer: “What’s blocking my ability to see improvement in my current situation?”
Clearest: “What do I need to understand about my expectations and actions to feel more at peace with where I am while working toward where I want to be?”
Engage, Don’t Consume
Guidance isn’t a product to consume but a dialogue to engage. The insights that transform are those you participate in discovering—not those handed to you passively.
When seeking guidance: ask questions, push back, test against your experience, notice your reactions. Use the guidance as raw material for your own meaning-making, not as a finished product to accept wholesale.
Your job isn’t to find a guide who’s always right. It’s to engage with guidance in ways that help you find your own rightness.
Integrate, Then Act
Guidance without action is entertainment. After receiving insight, give yourself time to integrate—but put a limit on it. Then act. Make a decision. Take a step.
Endless reflection without action is another form of avoidance. At some point, you have to choose with incomplete information, tolerate uncertainty, and move. Guidance should accelerate this movement, not replace it with perpetual contemplation.
The measure of useful guidance: you acted differently than you would have otherwise. If seeking guidance doesn’t change behavior, question whether you’re seeking or hiding.
Build Your Inner Guidance Capacity
External guidance should train your internal guidance. After each consultation, reflect: What did I learn about how to see my situations? What question could I ask myself next time? What wisdom did I access that I could access again?
Over time, you internalize guidance patterns. You learn to ask yourself the questions a good counselor would ask. You develop the capacity to step outside your usual frame, to consider what you’re avoiding, to access your intuition intentionally.
The goal isn’t to never need guidance—connection and outside perspective always have value. The goal is to need it consciously, occasionally, for enhancement rather than as a crutch for basic functioning.
The Wisdom of Seeking
Seeking guidance during uncertainty isn’t weakness—it’s one of humanity’s most sophisticated strategies for navigating an unpredictable world. We’re not designed to face life’s biggest questions alone, and we don’t have to.
The key is seeking wisely: knowing what kind of help you need, choosing appropriate sources, engaging rather than consuming, and always working toward greater autonomy. Guidance at its best doesn’t make decisions for you—it helps you become someone who can make them for yourself.
The next time uncertainty grips you, don’t judge the impulse to seek help. Honor it. Then seek with intention, receive with engagement, and act with courage. That’s the human way through.
