Below is my attempt to summarize patterns across many anecdotal reports. I’d be curious to hear what you think, especially if you currently or have ever suffered from a painful or unpleasant chronic condition that modern medicine doesn’t have good solutions for.

While the evidence on this topic is extremely preliminary, what I say here could turn out to be wrong, and high-quality randomized controlled trials are desperately needed before we can be confident in these approaches being useful, anecdotally, there appears to be a pattern where people with these conditions are reporting substantial benefits (and sometimes even full recovery) from a combination of psychological and behavioral strategies – sometimes even people who have suffered for a decade or longer.

For those who have already tried all the obvious things, ruled out dangerous medical conditions, exhausted all the options presented by knowledgeable doctors, and don’t know what to do next, these ideas may be worth a try.

Important Note: none of what’s below implies that the person in question was never suffering from a disease, or that their pain is any less “real” than any other pain. Additionally, even if this approach works for some people, it will, of course, not work for everyone, and it may even make some people worse, so please explore with caution.

—

From what I can tell, the often-repeated common threads reported in anecdotal accounts of those who recover from these conditions (that they attribute their recovery to) appear to have three major elements:

—

Element 1: Foundation (this part is boring but important)

A focus on getting the healthy life basics in place, to set yourself up for potential recovery and to help you feel as good as you can (despite the pain). This often includes elements like:

• cutting out junk food and excessive sugar and replacing them with healthy, whole foods, and drinking sufficient water

• focusing on getting enough, high-quality sleep

• daily stress reduction, such as through a daily meditation practice, progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, a yoga routine, or massage

• reduce or cut out drugs and alcohol

• daily sunlight through some spent outdoors, ideally in the morning

• whatever daily movement or exercise feels manageable (even if just a short, slow walk outside)

• scheduling enjoyable activities regularly and aiming to find joy in ordinary pleasurable moments

• regular social connection with people you care about or find interesting

• If you are dealing with a mental health challenge (such as depression or anxiety, which are both common for people suffering from painful chronic conditions), seeking treatment from an expert (e.g., a well-trained therapist who specializes in the condition you’re grappling with)

• find ways to explore and process your difficult emotions, whether it be talking with a therapist, a daily journaling habit, just taking a few minutes daily to sit and let yourself fully feel your emotions, or speaking regularly to a trusted friend who is happy to listen

• if you tend to be hard on yourself or engage in a lot of negative self-talk, explore developing self-compassion (treating yourself at least as kindly as you’d treat a friend, and showing yourself compassion like you would to someone you care about)

• getting yourself out of psychologically unhealthy situations to the best of your ability (whether it be an unreasonably demanding work situation, a person in their life who treats you very badly or makes you feel bad all the time, or a people-pleasing mentality of never saying ‘no’ even though you are carrying a huge burden already)

These items in 1, above, are not designed to cure your chronic pain or even to reduce the pain; they aim to set you up for the maximum chance of feeling better, and so are important. Also note that 1 doesn’t involve taking a boatload of supplements or eating a highly unusual diet.

It’s 2 that is the more novel, potentially critical piece:

—

Element 2: Reframing and Reprocessing

Completely reframing your perception of the painful and unpleasant bodily sensations. The goal is to:

i) See these sensations as your body attempting to send you a helpful signal (e.g., some people like to start thanking their body for giving them this signal because they know it’s trying to protect them)

ii) Perceive these sensations as a false alarm. The idea is that the symptoms do not actually mean you are in any danger, nor do they indicate a life-threatening disease (since we’re assuming that has already been ruled out). The symptoms also don’t mean that you are destined to feel bad all day, or that the activity you’re doing when the symptoms emerge is going to cause any lasting harm to you.

The attitude to bring here is not one of bracing against the pain, and not one of trying to fix the feeling.

The concept is that these unpleasant bodily signals (which probably began as signals connected to an injury or disease) have somehow become detached from any injury or disease. Unfortunately, the signals persist – whether due to misfiring in your nerves, your brain misinterpreting benign signals as being dangerous, associative learning (X has preceded Y enough that now X causes Y), or some kind of accidental signal reinforcement (e.g., by responding to the signal as if it’s a sign of danger, the signal gets perpetuated).

Here’s my metaphor for this way of seeing things:

Imagine that your pain or unpleasant bodily sensations are like the barking of a very loyal guard dog. You brought this dog into your home to protect you back when you used to be in a very dangerous area, and the dog was very helpful at that time, barking at the very real danger that was frequently around you.

Now you live in a safe area, with nothing important for the dog to bark at. But the dog desperately wants to be helpful, and only knows one way to do so. Due to his extreme overeagerness and an unrelenting focus on potential danger, the dog ends up barking constantly. Whenever it barks, despite the now safe environment, you subconsciously still interpret this as a sign of genuine danger (since that’s always what it used to mean). This constant barking leaves you constantly anxious, on edge, or in a heightened state, and may have downstream consequences on your body (such as impacting your ability to sleep well or digest food), and generally makes you miserable. Due to the well-meaning dog’s misguided attempt to keep you safe, the barking is ruining your life.

The idea, therefore, is to retrain yourself to view the chronic pain and unpleasant bodily sensations as completely safe. You can facilitate this by noticing when you’re having negative thoughts about the pain and gently letting them go, and by practicing observing the sensations neutrally, without judgment. You can even practice accepting the painful feelings exactly as they are (and when your brain jumps in to label the feeling as “awful” or tells you “you can’t handle it” you can acknowledge those thoughts, gently let go of them, and return to observing the feeling non-judgmentally. As many people (including myself) have experienced exploring this way of viewing pain during meditation, shifting our attitude toward pain can immediately reduce the suffering the pain causes us.

Redirecting to something positive after doing so is also something that people report as a useful addition (whether that’s some other part of your body that feels good right now, a humorous re-interpretation of the event, a pleasing visualization, or an activity that’s pleasant that you’d like to do now instead of focusing on the pain, etc.)

Importantly, for many people, their bodily signals really ARE indicating imminent bodily danger (e.g., if you have a broken bone in your foot, you may actually need to stay off it for a while to let it heal) – that’s typically how pain works. So if you’re considering trying these techniques, it’s important to first rule out that you’re in that group.

Additionally, it’s important to distinguish a bodily signal indicating true danger vs. one merely indicating “you need to rest”, which is not inherently dangerous, but is important to heed and not ignore. It’s not that you should learn to ignore bodily signals – many such signals provide us valuable information, and ignoring our bodies is a recipe for potential problems down the road. It’s instead about changing the relationship to our chronic painful bodily signals, such as experiencing them non-judgmentally with peace and acceptance, viewing them as our bodies attempting to give us useful information, and not responding to them as though they are dangerous.

For those interested in trying this approach, here’s the final piece of the puzzle:

—

Element 3: Practicing and Expanding

• While adopting the points from 2, above, gently and at a manageable pace, challenge yourself with whatever triggers your immediate (acute) symptoms. That is, test the waters with things that would normally make your symptoms immediately feel worse. Do so while maintaining the perspective that the symptoms are safe, they are there in an attempt to help you, and that they do not indicate any actual harm to you. Aim to view the symptoms neutrally and objectively without judgment and keep trying to accept them as they are, without needing them to be different. Then, once that becomes a bit easier, gently push the limits further toward somewhat more intense potential triggers and toward things you’ve been avoiding out of the fear of their impact on your symptoms. An important note: the idea here is NOT to push yourself more and more in an attempt to build up tolerance, strength, fitness, or resistance to fatigue (as one might try to do in Graded Exercise Therapy) – the idea, instead, is to practice reframing and reprocessing symptoms in progressively more challenging situations, while being careful to avoid overdoing it (which can lead to crashes). Many report that pushing yourself too hard, too fast, can backfire. So go slow, be gentle with yourself, and treat yourself with self-compassion.

Expect some setbacks along the way – progress is not likely to be linear, with lots of random daily variation. Be consistent, working at this daily but at a pace that feels comfortable, and track symptoms at the end of each day (e.g., pain level, fatigue level, stress level), which you can check over time to see whether there is a longer-term trend towards progress.

Part of the long-term goal with this is to end up paying less and less attention to your symptoms – since (in this case) they are not indicative of any actual problem, eventually you can learn to ignore them.

Note: gently pushing your boundary on symptoms doesn’t mean blowing past your limits. For instance, if you know that a 15-minute walk will leave you feeling fine at the time but cause you to crash for the next 2 days, then walking for 15 minutes would not be an example of what I’m describing.

—

What’s the point of this whole process? It’s really two-fold:

A) It can simply make it substantially easier to deal with the chronic condition, and mean that you suffer less despite all the pain, and live a happier life even as you have the pain. It may cause the pain itself to feel less bad (through a reframing of the pain), cause you to have less intense negative emotions about the pain (which means reducing the second-order pain and other consequences caused by these negative emotions), and expand the range of activities you engage in that make your life worth living.

This could be a good enough reason to try this approach. And that’s part of why I like this approach. While there’s always a risk of it backfiring, even if it doesn’t cause any huge change, I think it has a pretty good chance of making life more manageable and leading you to suffering less from the pain (i.e., even if the pain is not itself lessened, changing your perception of the pain can mean you suffer less from it).

But, here’s where things get weird and much more speculative:

B ) Some people find that after weeks or a few months of following processes similar to what’s described here, they are completely or nearly completely cured. These reports are still very much anecdotal, and much more rigorous research is needed to be confident in the cause of improvement for such folks (so this should all be taken with a big grain of salt), but it’s quite striking how many people who were sick for years or longer have reported rapid progress with approaches similar to what I’ve described here. Though the exact approaches they use differ, and have a variety of names, and a variety of distinct elements, I’ve included here aspects common to many of them.

Many people will only get benefit A) from this approach, and that alone may make it worth it. So it may be best to think of B) more like a speculative bonus that (based on many anecdotal reports) seems to happen for some people.

—

Obviously, there are other major caveats here: people could be wrong about this being the cause of their improvements, and even if this approach does cure some people, it’s unclear what percentage of people would be cured if they were to fully take on such an approach. Additionally, there are lots of people this is not appropriate for, such as people who have a life-threatening medical condition, people who have not yet had a thorough medical workup, people experiencing rapid weight loss or fevers, and so on. The evidence here is not strong, and could turn out to be wrong. Just because modern medicine doesn’t have a good understanding of a disorder doesn’t mean that it’s connected to psychology and behavior. And some people even report having tried this approach and had it backfire, where it left them worse off, so please be careful.

If this method does work, though, why does it work? It seems like one or more of the following explanations may be at play (which may vary depending on the individual):

• Pain signals and negative bodily sensations can occur in the absence of injury or disease (for instance, due to misfiring in the nerve, the brain misinterpreting signals, or other causes). A proof of concept where we know this happens is Phantom Pain Syndrome, where a person who has had a limb amputated may experience intense chronic pain that feels to them to be coming from that (now absent) limb, which, of course, it can’t actually be coming from.

• It may be that pain signals or unpleasant bodily sensations can become reinforced by our reactions to them (though this is not well understood). If so, the way we react may inadvertently cause pain signals to persist even past the point of the injury or disease that originally caused them to start. Perhaps somehow our attention to the signals, or our viewing them as dangerous, convinces our brain that the signals are worth sending.

• Or, a subtly but importantly different mechanism may be at play: our negative reactions to pain signals or unpleasant bodily sensations may leave us in a highly elevated state (e.g., anxiety or cortisol), and this elevated state may generate new pain signals or exacerbate existing signals (e.g., increase tightness in the stomach or an inflamed feeling in joints) or new unpleasant bodily sensations (e.g., trouble with digestion, difficulty breathing) which then generate more negative reactions, in a self-perpetuating cycle

• Or, a related possibility, is that your brain has somehow learned associations that are now triggering reactions. Perhaps your brain learned that when X happens, then the proper response is Y, and your brain is now triggering Y in response to X, despite that reaction being useless now and generating negative side effects for you.

• In some cases, behaviors we engage in to avoid pain may actually increase or perpetuate it – e.g., avoiding using a joint because it hurts may actually cause it to be stiff and painful from lack of use, which may cause us to continue to avoid its use.

Pain can be completely real, disabling, and have a biological origin, even in the absence of damaged or diseased tissue.

—

One important thing you may wonder: Is there actually evidence that psychological and behavioral approaches can improve the lives of people with these conditions? Well, while this field is, overall, woefully under-researched, there’s quite a bit of evidence that psychological and behavioral strategies can help (even though the nature of these strategies differs, and may only be partially overlapping with what I’m describing in this post). Here is a quick recap of some of that evidence:

(1) IBS: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of psychological treatments for Irritable Bowel Syndrome looked at 15 studies. It found greater improvement in the psychological treatment groups compared to the control group on symptom severity, quality of life, and abdominal pain, but no difference in diarrhea or constipation. Another meta-analysis on psychological therapies for IBS looked at 41 randomized controlled trials and found that CBT and gut-directed hypnotherapy outperformed education and routine care.

(2) Functional Dyspepsia: A meta-analysis of psychotherapy treatments for people with Functional Dyspepsia. It looked at 5 studies and found that those receiving psychotherapy improved in gastrointestinal symptoms.

(3) ME/CFS: A 2011 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome looked at 16 studies on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and concluded overall that those receiving CBT had greater symptom improvement than control groups. As a commenter pointed out, those studies used an earlier definition of ME/CFS that didn’t require post-exertional fatigue. A later 2020 Systematic review of randomized controlled trials looked at 12 studies on CBT, and found that 4 showed it to be effective, 2 ‘Partially significant’, and 6 found no effect.

(4) Chronic pain: a Cochrane meta-analysis looked at 75 studies on psychological treatments for chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia and chronic low back pain. A number of types of psychological treatment were included, such as CBT, behavioral therapy, and ACT. They conclude: “On average, compared to people who receive no treatment for their pain, people treated with CBT probably experience slightly less pain and distress by the end of the treatment and six to 12 months later (moderate-quality evidence). They may also experience slightly less disability on average (low-quality evidence).”

So the evidence overall quite strongly indicates that psychological and behavioral strategies can help people with these conditions (though, unfortunately, there is little research that has been done directly testing the specific strategies I’m describing here, and there is a lot of heterogeneity in results, especially with ME/CFS).

The most direct evidence of a technique very similar to what I’m describing (that I’m aware of) comes from just one randomized controlled trial on a method known as “Pain Reprocessing Therapy” (PRT) for chronic back pain. It showed promising results (though more studies are very much needed). PRT has many common elements with what I’ve described in this post.

Of course, if you’re suffering from one of these chronic conditions, you may simply want to try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy if it seems promising to you or (if it’s a gut disorder) gut-directed hypnotherapy as there’s reasonable evidence (as described above) that they improve many people’s quality of life who suffer from chronic conditions, even if they don’t provide a cure for most people.

—

The best source I know of to learn about these many anecdotal accounts of people improving from these conditions is the YouTube channel of Raelan Agle. She had ME/CFS for 10 years and eventually recovered, and on her channel, she interviews people who have recovered from ME/CFS and Long Covid. These three videos in particular were very influential for what I wrote in this post:

• What Raelan says she learned from conducting 75 interviews with people who recovered from Long COVID or ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

• Raelan’s recovery themes from 200 Interviews:

• What Raelan says about why recovery experts disagree and what they agree on.

There are also interesting books related to this topic, such as “The Way Out” by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv (which teaches a specific method known as “Somatic Tracking” that’s very related to, but not identical to, what I discussed in this post).

This piece was first written on October 30, 2025 and first appeared on my website on November 10, 2025.

Here are some possible examples of positive traits that may be associated with low (pre-clinical) levels of commonly diagnosed disorders, and the flip side costs that seem to go with these benefits.

Bipolar Disorder: euphoria, enthusiasm, confidence, feelings of invincibility, or enhanced charisma during manic episodes (flip side cost: overly optimistic or rash decision-making)

Paranoid Schizophrenia: noticing connections between things, or patterns that other people don’t generally notice (flip side cost: believing in false connections)

Depression: seeing certain aspects of the world more realistically, especially the dark side of things (flip side cost: less optimism)

Generalized Anxiety Disorder: a greater likelihood of detecting, pre-empting and avoiding dangerous situations (flip side cost: rumination on possible dangers that are unlikely to manifest, reduced ability to “live in the moment”)

Social Anxiety Disorder: a greater focus on potentially useful social information (flip side cost: avoidance of, or unpleasant stress during, social situations, and excessive social compliance)

OCD: increased carefulness or conscientiousness in certain domains, such as when reading a contract (flip side cost: excessive checking, doubting, or redoing)

Autism: perceiving useful or beautiful details that others miss (flip side cost: information overload, missing some details that matter to others)

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: appearing to some types of people as highly impressive, important, confident, or charismatic (flip side cost: appearing to other types of people as conceited, arrogant or self-aggrandizing)

Borderline Personality Disorder: greater reactivity to positive stimuli with intensely felt emotions (flip side cost: greater reactivity to negative stimuli with intensely felt emotions)

• decide whether to marry your boyfriend or girlfriend
• choose between two job offers in different fields
• decide whether to finish your PhD program or drop out
• pick between two cities that you’re thinking of moving to

These kinds of decisions can be excruciatingly hard, and people often waffle in an unpleasant state for months trying to choose what to do. But fortunately, there are some strategies one can apply to help make the decision process shorter, and increase the chance that your ultimate decision does the best job of promoting what you value.

First, it’s important to know what not to do, as there are many pitfalls that arise in complicated decision-making situations.

Trap 1: Don’t just select the default. With some choices, there is a default that will occur if no choice is actively made. It is easy to select this default merely because you become paralyzed by the difficulty of the decision-making, or because you deliberate until the time runs out. Examples of this happening include: staying in your current city, merely because you couldn’t decide whether to move to another one, or maintaining your company’s existing business strategy merely because you couldn’t make the decision of which strategy to switch to. The default option is of course not always a bad one, but it is important to make sure not to choose it merely because it is the default.

One possible strategy for avoiding this default bias is to pre-commit to making a thought out decision by a specific date. You can recruit a friend or business colleague to hold you accountable. The deal will be that you have to send him a 400 word explanation of what you chose and why by the specified date, and if you don’t, you owe a certain amount of money for every day that you go over this deadline. Write a check and give it to that friend now, which he will cash and begin to spend on himself if you don’t meet the cutoff date. Just be sure to set the deadline far enough away to give yourself plenty of time to think about and research the problem thoroughly (keeping in mind that the human tendency is to underestimate how long projects will take).

Trap 2: Don’t just select whatever benefits you most right now. Frequently choices pit near term benefits against longer term ones. You could avoid talking to your friend who is angry at you, which benefits you short-term, or try to understand why he is angry, which will involve an awkward conversation and possibly getting yelled at. You could stay at your current job which you don’t like but don’t hate, or go through the frustrating and time-consuming process of cover letters, interviews and rejections, in the hope of landing a job you love.

Since we tend to be biased towards doing what is pleasant now, it’s important to correct for this when considering our choices. Near term benefits ideally should count for something, but how good you feel today from a decision, or even how good you feel for the rest of this month, is often of little consequence compared to how good your life will be for years to come as a result of your choice. So, for life changing decisions that are likely to have strong long-term effects on your happiness or other values, near term benefit shouldn’t factor into the decision-making process much. In these cases, it may be helpful to frame the decision mentally as “which of these choices will be best for me long-term”, rather than “which of these choices is best for me”. By specifically ignoring short-term benefit, the former phrasing of the question may help you be less biased by what is convenient or pleasant right now. Of course, in cases where the near term effects of a decision are a substantial part of the total effects, this method isn’t appropriate, and short-term benefits or losses need to be explicitly considered.

Trap 3: Don’t focus only on a few noticeable details. Sometimes the aspects of a situation that come to mind most easily or most vividly are not representative of the situation as a whole. For instance, if you are trying to decide whether to have children, what may come to mind is the image of reading a story to your children while they listen attentively with smiles on their faces. But someone else might get the image of changing a diaper while their child screams. While both of these images represent aspects of raising children, neither comes close to capturing the experience comprehensively. But depending on which of the two images comes to mind when you reflect on having children, you might end up making a different decision.

To be a good decision maker, it’s important that you not selectively focus on one feature of a situation, but rather view it more broadly. It can help to imagine the various aspects of the situation one by one, trying to mentally weight the frequently occurring and more likely aspects more heavily (for instance, by visualizing them for longer). When you think about having children, you should reflect both on your children smiling, and on them crying. You should also spend lots of  time focusing on the most common moments of child raising.

Trap 4: Don’t exaggerate the importance of a decision. People tend to overestimate the impact of both negative and positive events on their long-term happiness. Keeping this in mind can reduce the chance of obsessing about a decision, and can also help stop decision paralysis caused by the fear that a wrong decision would be devastating to your future. There is a decent chance that whichever option you choose, in the long-term you will be about as happy as you are now. So try not to give a decision more weight that in deserves. It’s especially easy to overestimate the importance of something merely because you happen to be reflecting on it. To help avoid these issues, try imagining what life would be like one year after the decision for each of the possible options you could take. How sure are you that you would feel significantly different on a day-to-day basis if you take option A rather than B?

For decisions that aren’t that important, it’s especially easy to make yourself less happy overall by worrying about them too much. A half hour of frustrated deliberation is probably not worth it when you’re deciding how to spend the $5 coupon you just got. Even if you make the “wrong” choice with the coupon, you’ll probably be happier on net without having wasted the time and given yourself the extra stress. And don’t forget that your time is worth money.

Now that we’ve considered traps to watch out for, let’s take a look at some strategies you can apply to help improve really important decisions in complex situations.

Strategy 1: Think about the advice you would give a friend. Sometimes it is helpful to forget for a moment that it is your own life you are deciding about. Imagine that a friend of yours (who you’d really like to help) is dealing with a decision very much like yours. Visualize her situation vividly, as though it were really occurring. Now imagine that this friend asks you which choice she should pick for herself. What would you tell her?

This method helps us detach ourselves from the emotions of the situation, which can sometimes prevent us from making the right choice. For instance, suppose that you’re trying to decide whether to break up with your boyfriend. Even though you enjoy being with him, you know he isn’t the sort of person you’d like to be with long-term. It can be a lot easier to give good advice to a friend who is in such a situation than to reflect in an unbiased fashion on what will be best for both you and your boyfriend in the long run. Fear of upsetting your boyfriend could stop you from breaking up with him now. But if your friend was in the same situation, you’d realize that this fear of hurting the boyfriend is not a good enough reason not to break up.

Strategy 2: List the pros and cons. Sometimes it takes careful thought to be aware of all the pluses and minuses of taking a particular course of action. Taking time to reflect on these and make a list of them can give you a significantly more complete understanding of the situation. Having a friend help is even better, since they may be able to think of advantages and disadvantages that you wouldn’t have. Once this list is complete, read it over a couple of times to help your brain process the entire list.

Keep in mind that when you come up with the pros and cons of multiple options, you need to have a baseline option to compare against, and this baseline needs to be the same for each of the options. So pick a baseline situation, and then what you will list as a pro and con will be determined with respect to this baseline. If your baseline includes an hour of free time per day, and one of your other options also offers an hour of free time per day, this is neither a pro or a con, it is merely neutral with respect to this baseline. If another option offers an hour and a half of free time a day though, then 30 minutes of extra free time each day would count as a pro for this option, since its offers 30 minutes more free time a day than the baseline.

Strategy 3: Do a full cost benefit analysis. If you want a formal procedure for making a really tough decision, try this one. Again come up with a list of pros and cons for each option, but this time also come up with three numbers for each of these pros and cons. The first number is a probability, which is your rough estimate of how likely this pro or con is to come into play at all if you choose the given option. The second, is an estimate of the benefit (or harm) towards your happiness or other goals this pro or con would cause on average on a weekly basis, assuming that the pro or con does in fact occur. A value of 1 would indicate a slight benefit on a weekly basis, whereas a score of 10 would indicate an extremely large weekly average benefit. A value of -1 would indicate a slight harm on a weekly basis, and a score of -10 wold indicate an extremely large harm weekly. The third and final number to estimate for each pro and con is how many weeks, on average, you can expect this benefit or harm to last, again assuming that the pro or con does occur to begin with. Once you’ve estimated these three numbers for a pro or con, multiply them together to get your total score for that pro or con. Now sum up these scores for all of them associated with a given option to get a total score of how good that option is, on net. Do this for each of the options, and compare the scores. If one of the options has a much higher total score than the other options, that is probably the one you should go with.

Why three numbers for each pro and con? Well, pros ands cons that are likely to occur should count more, ones that have a greater impact should count more, and those that last for longer should count more. So we consider (a) the chance of that pro or con occurs at all, (b) how good it will be on average during periods it does occur, and (c) how long (i.e. how many of those periods) you will get to enjoy that benefit for if it does in fact occur at all. Multiplying these three factors together for each pro and con, and then summing the result for all pros and cons corresponding to an option, is a way of estimating the expected value (i.e. total value, on average) of that option.

Strategy 4: Gather data about others who have made the same choices. Sometimes it is possible to figure out how well your choices worked for other people (or how similar situations worked out for you in the past), which can inform your decision now. If you think there are compelling reasons why your situation is different from these other people’s, you can at least start with the estimates derived from considering the experiences of others, and then adjust up or down based on these differences. For instance, suppose that you are thinking about quitting your steady job and trying to become a Broadway star. It shouldn’t be too difficult to determine that this goes poorly for most people who try it. If, however, you’re unusually good-looking, have objective evidence that you’re a fantastic singer even by Broadway standards, and happen to be friends with a lot of people who run theatre companies with shows on Broadway, this information should cause you to revise your chance of success upwards well above the typical levels. Note though that when considering what to do, people usually underestimate the relevance of how things typically turn out for others confronted with similar options. So it’s important to do this research when possible,  and not overestimate how special or unique your situation is. If things almost always go badly for people that select a certain choice, then they’ll most likely go badly if you make that choice as well.

Strategy 5: Visualize the options. Imagine, as vividly as you can, what life will be like if you choose each of the possible options. Try to make these visualizations as realistic as possible, gathering whatever information you can to make them realistic. Make sure these visualizations cover both the good and bad aspects of each choice. Spend more time focussing on the aspects of the options that will occur the most, since these tend to have a much greater impact on how good or bad a situation is overall. For instance, if you’re thinking about taking a job that is likely to be boring, don’t just visualize this boredom for a second and move on. Repeatedly imagine being bored sitting at your desk, since it is likely to be a major component of the experience, occurring a significance percentage of your days.  Once you’ve completed your visualizations, see which of the options you feel the best about. If there are some major points of uncertainty about what the options will be like, and these points of uncertainty would greatly influence how you feel about the options, visualize each possibility for each option, and write down a score from 1 to 10 representing how good you feel about it. Multiply each of these scores by how likely you estimate that possibility is to occur, and sum up these for each option to produce a total score for how good the option is.

Strategy 6: Persuade yourself with an essay. In important cases where there are only two options, try writing a 400 word essay as to why you should pick the first option rather than the second. Once that is done, write a 400 word essay about why you should choose the second option rather than the first. Read both of these over. This writing process can help you flesh out your thoughts, analyze the situation more completely, and discover more about how you feel about the various options.

Strategy 7: Poll good decision makers. Think of three or four people who are unusually good decision makers, and unusually careful at thinking through challenging problems. Now, explain to each of them the details of your situation, and ask what they think you should do in the circumstance. If they all agree with each other, that may be a compelling justification for going with their preferred option.

How can you choose between these seven methods? Well, if it’s a decision where you think emotion might be clouding your judgement, try thinking about the advice you would give a friend. If it’s a decision where there are many factors to consider, go ahead and list the pros and cons. If after doing that you still don’t know which option is better, do a full cost benefit analysis. If it’s a scenario where you can gather data about others who have made the same choices, try that. If you’d prefer to make an intuitive judgement over using a point system, go ahead and visualize the options. For decisions with just two options where you’re having trouble getting yourself to analyze the problem carefully, try to persuade yourself with an essay. If you know some careful thinkers who would be happy to try to help, then go ahead and poll good decision makers.

While there isn’t a single right answer as to how to approach making important, complex decisions, these strategies can help you formalize the process and avoid pitfalls, boosting the chance that you select the option that’s best overall.