Although attitudinal conflict is a pervasive aspect of everyday decision-making, little is known about the temporal dynamics that characterize how people experience and resolve such conflict. The present research investigated attitudinal conflict by adopting a temporal framework of conflict emergence and resolution. We conducted a preregistered experience sampling study in the domain of meat consumption and employed a novel integrated sampling approach (of a total of 18,586 observations from 462 participants), achieving precise temporal resolution throughout the entire course of natural decision-making processes in daily life. The data revealed an episodic structure of attitudinal conflict, highlighting a complex trajectory across multiple phases. Especially when people engaged in decision-making, the cognitive accessibility of evaluative inconsistency (i.e., attitudinal ambivalence) elicited conflict. Although these experiences emerged situationally, they tended to fade gradually. People downregulated attitudinal conflict more strongly when they ate meat despite previously evaluating it negatively (i.e., cognitive dissonance). However, this decline was only temporary, and the conflict resurged. Furthermore, people engaged in dissonance reduction by initially denying responsibility for eating meat and subsequently aligning their attitudes. The findings elucidate the situational dynamics and sequential processes underlying how people struggle with conflicted choices and rationalize them in everyday life. Furthermore, given that our sampling method offers fine-grained insights into the entire decision-making process, it can be applied to various research questions and applications, such as to inform the optimal timing of behavior change campaigns.