Regarding Obstacles
That shaky, second-guessing feeling usually shows up after someone questions what you're doing. The words themselves are only part of it. Often the tone carries most of the weight. You were moving along, fairly settled on a plan, and then a single comment from another person sends you back to the beginning, wondering whether you ever should have decided in the first place. Imagine trying to drive somewhere with the emergency brake still engaged. The car moves, but it fights you the whole way.
When that doubt takes hold, decisions you believed were finished quietly reopen. They stack up. Each unfinished one becomes its own small roadblock between you and whatever you were trying to reach. And a strange thing happens with how we spend our time: the minutes we pour into re-examining a choice after the fact can easily outlast the minutes it took to arrive at the choice to begin with.
People who keep lists probably recognize the pattern. Look at your own and you may find item after item that is really just a decision you thought you'd settled, now waiting around again because your confidence in it got shaken by somebody's question.
I touched on this in an earlier piece, also about obstacles. Work accumulates precisely because decisions don't get made. A lot of the time the real trouble is overthinking. Say you've got something you no longer want. You resolve to be done with it, then guilt creeps in about tossing it in the garbage rather than recycling. Trouble is, your area has no recycling pickup, and hauling the thing somewhere yourself might burn more fuel and effort than the recycling would ever save. So the object sits. You keep not deciding. Let enough of those objects collect and someone close to you starts gently wondering whether you've got a hoarding problem on your hands.