35,000 Decisions a day. I'm Exhausted.
What to do when you can't imagine making another decision.
As someone who is always telling you that the key to moving forwards is making decisions, I think it’s really important to acknowledge decision fatigue. It can be so exhausting. As a single woman who has a business I make ALL the decisions and it can often feel overwhelming and paralysing.
An article from the AMA by Lisa McLeod MD discusses Decision Fatigue and posits that the average human makes about 35,000 decisions a day. Some conscious, some not. Each of which can take time and energy.
She offers:
“A person with decision fatigue may feel tired, have brain fog or experience other signs and symptoms of physical or mental fatigue,” Dr. MacLean explained. “The phenomenon is cumulative so that as the person makes more decisions, they may feel worse or more drained as the day progresses.
“The more choices you have to make, the more it can wear on your brain, and it may cause your brain to look for short cuts,” she added, noting that “there are four main symptoms: procrastination, impulsivity, avoidance and indecision.”
Dr. McLeod has lots of good advice about how to lessen the number of decisions you make in a day:
Steamline your choices like making lists before you go to the grocery store so you aren’t deciding what to get. Simply your clothes choices. etc.
Try to delegate decisions. Allow other people to help. Help choose restaurants. The playlist on the road trip, delegate to staff, etc. It demonstrates trust and gives you a break.
Make bid decisions in the morning. Apparently research indicates that we make the most accurate and thoughtful decisions in the morning and are much more impulsive in the evening. This explains a lot of plane tickets in my past.
Stop second guessing yourself. Rehashing the decisions you’ve actually made and not trusting that you did it “right.” You made the best decision you could in that moment. Circling back adds to the fatigue.
Use daily routines that decrease making decisions. I eat fruit with breakfast versus should I have fruit with breakfast. A habit versus a daily choice.
And also, I think this can go further if you want the bandwidth to make decisions that lead to the changes or outcomes you desire:
Know what you want. When you are clear about what you want you can hold any decision against it and ask if this choice contributing to that? Yes or no. There’s your answer. If it isn’t that clear you can ask yourself why? Do I not actually want it? Am I afraid have it? Is this something that is also important to me and I am willing to invest my energy in it and recognise that might slow me down in other ways? None of which is a problem if you are doing it consciously with choice!
Prioritise your decision making. Don’t let the little “have to’s” add up to take all the bandwidth that you might have for decisions and action that day, week, etc. Prioritise deciding to take action on one thing that’s important to you first. Then fill in the remaining time with the usual 34,999 decisions.
Apply kindness. And if you can’t do much at the moment, apply kindness. It’s hard to de-prioritise all the things we have been told over and over again are the only things that make us valuable. Things like our taking care of others beyond our own well-being, the way we’ve been socialised to groom or eat to appear a specific way (young and thin), etc. Some days you won’t be able to make decisions and take actions even when you know exactly what you want. It’s ok. Be kind. Enjoy your clarity and get excited about what you will do later when you can.