Decision fatigue. Doesn’t it sound like the sort of thing a nineteen-year-old humanities might reference at Thanksgiving dinner to the annoyance of her conservative uncle? “These classes have me so overwhelmed—I’m exhausted from decision fatigue.”
This hypothetical young woman isn’t being overly fragile. She’s describing a real phenomenon. The more choices you make, the more exhausted your brain becomes.
Not only can that add stress and complications to your life but it will also reduce the quality of your decision-making over time.
That can create problems for your personal life, and maybe even disasters within your career. How can you make work choices without the weariness of decision fatigue?
Decision Fatigue
Decision fatigue occurs when your brain depletes its mental energy from making too many choices.
Your brain has limited decision-making resources each day. These resources gradually diminish with each choice you make.
As your mental energy decreases, your decision quality suffers. You begin taking shortcuts. You might make impulsive choices. You might avoid decisions entirely.
Many successful people minimize trivial daily decisions. They wear similar clothes each day. They eat consistent meals. They save their mental bandwidth for important matters.
Decision fatigue affects more than just choices. It reduces self-control. It weakens willpower. It makes you more susceptible to manipulation and influence.
The average person makes thousands of decisions daily. This explains why evening decisions often lack the quality of morning choices.
Combat decision fatigue through simple strategies. Create routines for minor decisions. Schedule important choices for your peak mental hours. Take regular breaks to recharge your cognitive resources.
Recognizing this limitation helps you structure your day more effectively. You’ll preserve mental energy for decisions that truly matter.
Choices that Bear Greater Consideration
Let’s say you are a nurse. Every day you face taking vital signs, administering medications on schedule, and completing routine documentation.
These choices are simple if only because your response to them is more or less standardized. You can be confident in how you make them without putting in too much thought or energy.
But you also want to go back to school. That is a big choice. You know you are interested in advanced practice nursing but that’s about as far as you’ve gotten so far.
To make this choice with confidence, you need to weigh many smaller choices. The big question—what do I want to do with the rest of my life—can feel overwhelming in its own right.
What makes the decision harder still is all of the smaller but still impactful choices that also need your attention.
Do I want an online or in-person nursing program? How will I finance the degree? Do I want to be full-time, or pick at it gradually? You can’t possibly tackle all of these choices at one go.
You can pick off the easiest ones first. I’m not near a major university so online learning is the best route. I don’t want to take out a loan. Maybe I can see what sort of continuing education incentives my employer offers.
They get back to you and you learn that they will cover six credit hours a semester. Do you stick with that or pay out of pocket to complete the program faster?
These are big choices still, but they aren’t as big as the larger question: what specialty do I want?
You tackle that choice at your absolute peak focus because it has not just a bearing on short-term comfort, but quite possibly the way you experience the rest of your working life.
Below, we look at ways to increase your overall decision-making endurance, and how to optimize your routine for life’s biggest moments.
Take Comfort in Repetition
Have you noticed that billionaire thing where folks at the financial summit wear something incredibly casual every day?
Jeans and a single-color t-shirt. Steve Jobs was famous for his jeans, sneakers, and turtlenecks. Zuckerberg has done it. Elon Musk has been known to do it.
From the outside, it sounds pretty irritating. “My time is so precious, I can’t waste it worrying about what to wear.”
There might be an element of personal branding thrown into the mix as well. Steve Jobs has been dead for almost fifteen years and we are still talking about his jeans, so it worked, right?
But the science behind this quirk is legitimate. The less energy you put into trivial choices, the more gas you will have in the tank for bigger ones.
You don’t need to go the billionaire route if you don’t want to but look for ways to cut unnecessary choices out of your life.
Consider standardizing lunches, snacks, etc. The more you simplify easy choices, the more time and attention you will be able to direct toward bigger ones.
If you need extra convincing, consider this: Research in psychology shows that the average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions daily.
By creating consistent routines for small decisions, you can reduce decision fatigue significantly. Studies have found that willpower and decision-making ability noticeably decline throughout the day as mental resources are depleted.
Be An Early Bird
Have you ever noticed your productivity lag in the afternoon? It’s not just that your coffee has worn off. It’s that you are depleting your brain’s resources with every choice you make and task you complete.
That doesn’t mean you can’t get anything done in the afternoon. It just means that your peak productivity period has its limits.
Studies have shown—for various reasons—that people are only at their best for about four hours at a time. After that, work can still be done, obviously, but it’s a matter of diminishing returns.
Decision fatigue isn’t the only culprit behind this but it plays a part. You can help avoid the negative impacts of decision fatigue by making the most important choices of your day in the early morning.
Take Brain Breaks
If you feel like you are running on fumes, pushing through the pain is not the right path if you don’t have to. It’s easy to panic.
My productivity is falling behind. I’m feeling tired. I need to dig deep and push through. Maybe sometimes, but often this choice will be counterproductive in the long run.
Instead, step aside for a moment. Calm your mind. Reset and come back stronger. The Marines have a saying: Slow is steady. Steady is fast. In other words, working well is in every way better than simply working fast.
It doesn’t have to be a long break. Even 10 minutes can be enough to reset and push forward in better shape.
Use the time wisely. Step outside if you can, or maybe do a mindfulness activity. This will help you tackle the rest of your day with better productivity and mental clarity.
Can It Wait?
If the choice you are supposed to be making comes up at a bad time, consider putting it off if you can.
This isn’t procrastination, it’s strategy. You don’t want to make major choices when you aren’t at your best.
While delaying a choice may feel counterproductive in our fast-paced world, it may again be a way to improve long-term productivity.