You have thought about this decision from every angle. Twice. You are not stuck for lack of thinking, you are stuck because of it. So the last thing you need is more analysis. What follows is a practical sequence designed to get you to an actual choice, built for people who have already done more than enough deliberating.
Start by sizing the decision honestly. Is this big and hard to reverse, or small and easily undone? This matters because the two deserve completely different amounts of effort, and overthinkers habitually pour equal agony into both. If it is small and reversible, give yourself a strict two-minute limit, pick a good-enough option, and stop. The cost of a slightly worse small choice is tiny. The cost of the deliberation is your afternoon.
For anything bigger, set your good-enough criteria before you compare. Decide what an option actually needs to do to be acceptable, in advance, so you have a finish line. Without one, the search expands forever, because there is always another option to consider. A study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making found that this open-ended, best-hunting style is linked to more regret and lower satisfaction, so aiming for good enough is not a compromise, it is the smarter target.
Then shrink the field. Use your criteria to cut the options down to the two or three that genuinely qualify, and drop the rest without guilt. Comparing three real contenders is manageable. Comparing twelve is a recipe for paralysis, because the comparisons multiply and every discarded option becomes a possible regret.
Now try the coin-flip trick, which is not about obeying the coin. Assign your top options to heads and tails, flip, and notice your gut reaction to the result. That flash of relief or disappointment the instant it lands reveals a preference your endless deliberating had buried. If the coin says option A and your stomach sinks, you have your answer, and it is B.
Another useful tool is the friend test. Ask what you would advise a friend facing this exact choice. We are almost always clearer and wiser about other people's decisions than our own, because we are not tangled in the anxiety, and the advice you would give a friend is usually the balanced answer you cannot see for yourself.
For the biggest decisions, the ten-ten-ten question adds perspective: will this matter in ten days, ten months, ten years? For the overwhelming majority of choices that torment overthinkers, the honest answer is that it will barely matter at all, which is permission to just choose. We go deeper into that one in the ten-ten-ten rule.
Set a deadline and treat it as real. Pick a specific time by which you will decide, and when it arrives, choose, even if you do not feel fully certain, because you never will. Certainty is not a thing decisions hand you in advance. Waiting for it means waiting forever, and a decision made and committed to almost always beats a better one endlessly deferred.
Finally, and this is the part overthinkers skip, close the decision once you make it. Reopening a made choice changes nothing and only poisons the outcome you did pick. Make a firm rule: once decided, it is closed, and I will not reopen it without significant new information, and I will not compare it against the imaginary, always-flattering roads not taken. We cover that discipline in how to stop second-guessing.
Stop waiting to feel sure
The single biggest thing keeping overthinkers stuck is waiting for certainty to arrive before they choose. It never arrives, because decisions do not hand you certainty in advance. This is where it helps to remember the core idea from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), described on the NCBI Bookshelf: the anxious thought I cannot decide until I am sure feels compelling, but it is a thought to be questioned, not a rule to obey. You are allowed to act while a little unsure. In fact, acting while unsure is what every decision actually requires, because the alternative, waiting for a certainty that does not come, is just a slower way of not deciding.
If decisions consistently freeze you to the point of real distress, that can be worth talking to a professional about, since chronic indecision can be tied up with anxiety. For the everyday stuck decision, though, this sequence, size it, set criteria, shrink the field, check your gut, set a deadline, and close it, reliably gets you unstuck. We walk through the whole thing, with worksheets, in The Overthinker's Manual.