Co-Founder
amelliora
‘I just can’t seem to make decisions anymore’. It’s a common admission from women navigating separation. Not just the big decisions, where to live, how to divide the finances, what to tell the children. Just ordinary ones. What to have for dinner. Whether to reply to a message. What to wear.
It turns out this isn’t weakness or confusion. It’s biology.
When we’re under sustained stress, our bodies release cortisol, which directly affects the part of the brain responsible for analytical thinking and weighing up options. Research shows that elevated cortisol biases the brain away from careful, deliberate reasoning and toward instinct and habit. We become, quite literally, less able to think things through. Even minor decisions drain cognitive resources that are already depleted. As Art Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, puts it:
‘Stress decreases our working memory capacity, so we have fewer cognitive resources to wrap our heads around all the different options, even for things that are relatively inconsequential.’
There’s another layer to it. Rumination. The circular thinking that kicks in when we’re under stress. The questions that go around without resolution. What if I’d done things differently? What does this mean for the children? What if I can’t manage financially? What will people think? Unlike reflection, which moves us toward clarity, rumination keeps us stuck in the same loop focusing on the causes and consequences of our distress rather than solutions to it. It feels productive, like we’re working through something. But research shows it impairs our ability to make good decisions and can lead to analysis paralysis, becoming so caught in the loop that we can’t decide anything at all. At a moment when decisions feel important, urgent and unavoidable, this is perhaps the cruellest part of the experience.
This happens in other high-stress periods too, serious illness, bereavement, job loss, new parenthood. Any time life asks too much of us at once, decision-making suffers. The difference with separation is that it doesn’t just ask too much of us emotionally. It asks us to make some of the most consequential decisions of our lives, legal, financial, practical, parental, at precisely the moment we are least equipped to make them well.
The worst time to make big decisions
Under stress, we tend to make decisions quickly because they bring temporary relief. The decision is made, the anxiety lifts, and we can breathe for a moment. Research bears this out: the feeling of being rushed is itself one of the strongest predictors of later regret. And most divorce regret doesn’t centre on the decision to separate, it centres on how decisions were made during the process.
The pressure to decide quickly rarely comes from nowhere. It can come from the other party or their solicitor moving fast. From well-meaning family and friends who want things resolved. Or from inside, from exhaustion, from the completely understandable wish to make the pain stop. All of it can push you toward decisions made for the wrong reasons.
Not all decisions are equal
One of the most useful things you can do in the early stages of separation is to stop treating all decisions as equally urgent, because they aren’t.
Some decisions can’t wait. Your immediate safety and housing. Protecting joint finances from unilateral action. Basic arrangements for your children in the short term. These need attention, and getting early legal advice on them is important.
Some decisions can wait and should. Final financial settlements, decisions about selling the family home, formalising long-term arrangements beyond immediate needs. These are precisely the decisions most likely to be made badly under pressure and regretted later. They deserve time, proper advice, and a clearer head than the early weeks of separation usually allow.
If a decision truly cannot wait, you need to know why and that reason should come from your solicitor, not from pressure.
The sequence matters
The antidote to overwhelm isn’t making decisions faster. It’s understanding which decisions to make first, in what order, and with what support around you.
A useful first step is simply to separate the urgent from the important. What needs to happen in the next few weeks is different from what needs to happen over the next few months and writing those two lists, even roughly, can bring surprising clarity.
Gathering information before making decisions is just as important as making the decisions themselves. Start with what you know or can find out. Bank and savings statements. Mortgage documents. Pension statements for both of you. Credit card and loan balances. Tax returns. What does your income look like as a single household? What would your outgoings be? You don’t need exact figures to begin with; a rough picture is enough to start understanding your position. Here’s the crucial thing: you cannot negotiate what you don’t yet understand. Understanding your financial and legal picture, even imperfectly, puts you in a significantly stronger position before any formal conversations begin.
You don’t have to have all the answers yet
The goal in the early stages of separation isn’t to resolve everything. It’s to make sure that the decisions you do make are the right ones made at the right time, with the right information, and the right support around you.
The decisions that shape your life for the next decade deserve more than a moment of overwhelm and a pressure to agree. They deserve time, clarity, and the space to think.
When everything feels equally urgent and equally unclear, the mind struggles to find a way in. The cortisol that clouds your thinking and fuels the rumination begins to recede when we feel even a small sense of control. Identifying what you know, what you need to find out, and what can wait, quietens the noise. And in a quieter mind, decisions become better.
You don’t have to decide everything now. You just have to decide what comes first.
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