Some years ago, I had to decide on something that would dramatically change the direction of my life. It would also hugely affect the lives of my family and friends. There was some time available to contemplate the decision but that didn’t necessarily make the deciding any easier. I didn’t want to delay the decision, but I also knew that this was not the kind of decision that could be rolled back with ease.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to make the call. The pros and cons had been weighed up, debated, turned upside down and inside out. The answer was no. It was a short call, I just wanted to deliver the news, give my decision, and move forward.

Flip me but that was not how it worked out. The second I hung up the phone the tears came pouring out of my eyes and my chest exploded. I didn’t have to wonder how I felt or analyse the decision or reflect on the conversation. It was instantly clear to me in that moment that no was not the right answer. And when I say instantly clear, I mean there wasn’t a flicker of doubt or ambiguity.

What Surprised Me About the Reaction

What stayed with me wasn’t just the intensity of the reaction, but how little thinking was involved in it. There was no internal debate, no narration, no attempt to calm myself down or explain it away. The knowing arrived whole, and it was felt in my body rather than worked out in my head.

Up until that point, the decision had lived almost entirely in the thinking realm of the mind. If I do this, then what about that, but if I do that and don’t do this, then what… And so on. I’d tried to work it out, to be fair but also realistic. I’d tried to account for all eventualities, and way into the future. I was being measured, thorough and conscientious.

And yet none of that was present when the call ended.

Careful Thinking

In the weeks that followed that phone call, I began to see that much of the careful thinking I had relied on was fear based.

Not fear in a dramatic sense, with faster breathing and a racing heartbeat. This was more the kind of fear that presents itself as being careful, responsible and considered. It was rooted in self-preservation, fear of disruption and everything that comes with it, and a fear of the unknown.

At the time, my thinking and deliberating felt solid. It sounded reasonable to anyone I share it with. It had good arguments behind it. But it wasn’t neutral and it narrowed the field without me noticing. What the body reacted to so strongly after the call was not the presence of thinking itself, but the way fear had quietly organised it.

That doesn’t mean the thinking was pointless or wrong. It simply wasn’t the whole picture.

When the Job Was Done

Before and during the call itself, I was focused, composed and coherent. I was on a mission to share my decision in a clear, efficient and almost clinical way. There was a determination in me, and outside of that experience, it is easy to see the effort involved especially when the decision carries weight and other people are involved.

Once the call ended, that effort was no longer needed. There was nothing left to contain. The job was done. The body no longer needed to be tense and with that release came the tears. Those tears marked the moment when the answer I had given met the answer I already knew.

After I cried, after that clarity landed, I picked up the phone again. I called the person back and I changed my answer. I said yes.

That didn’t suddenly make the decision easy or free of consequence. It didn’t erase the concerns I’d been carrying or resolve every uncertainty. But it brought the decision back into alignment with what I knew, rather than what I had been trying to manage or contain.

A Few Ways to Understand This

Experiences like this are described in different ways across psychology and somatic work. One common thread is the idea that the body can register a mismatch between what was done and what is known before language or reasoning has time to catch up.

This is sometimes referred to as embodied knowing, or as a form of value-based emotion. From this lens, the response can be seen as a signal that something is off.

Timing tends to be the giveaway. When a response shows up immediately after a decision, once the job is done and the effort of holding everything together has dropped away, it can point to something other than doubt. Often it has more to do with where the decision was made from than with how hard it felt at the time.