(#311): What is Decision Fatigue?

Scientifically speaking, decision fatigue is the diminishing amount / quality of energy someone has after either an overwhelming number or weight of decisions over a specific period of time.

While scientists are unsure of the exact brain chemistry, psychological processes, or long-term ramifications ... the data clearly shows that decision fatigue not only exists, but can in fact cause other health issues.

In this episode, we cover how to identify decision fatigue, the difference between indecisiveness and fatigue, and how to ultimately train your way out of both.  Solving for this fatigue can lead to a more positive outlook and less frustrating environment in both work and play.

If this episode was interesting / educational, we would love for you to share it with you friends and family either directly or on social media. Also please feel free to get in touch with Coach Shaun or the Live Unbreakable coaching staff by visiting LiveUnbreakable.com

Transcript

01:32 Coach Shaun: It is estimated that an American adult makes about 35,000 decisions a day, and some research suggests that the typical person makes about 2,000 decisions every waking hour. That's insane. Think about maybe something as your morning beverage: when I was growing up, you just had coffee, there was coffee, a little bit of flavor maybe, but then you just had to decide whether to add cream and sugar and that was pretty much the easiest decision, because you probably made it the same way every single day, right. There's this emerging body of science indicating that making some of the day-to-day decisions that we deal with now, even though they are seemingly benign, may possess negative ramifications for controlling your behavior and the quality of your subsequent decisions. This phenomenon, which you might be pretty familiar with, is known as decision fatigue, and it basically describes the impaired ability to make decisions and control your behavior as a consequence of the repeated acts of decision-making. Evidence now suggests that individuals experiencing decision fatigue demonstrate an impaired ability to make trade-offs and prefer a passive role in the decision.

This is not based on your archetype, whatever personality quiz, your astrological signs, or whatever it is, this is real science. But the decision-making process can often become either this impulsive sort of decision or make you feel irrational or make your choices to feel irrational or whatever, simply put this decision-making day in and day out that we have to do all the time, whether they are as easy as picking a route from home to work or work to home, or navigating this pandemic that we're still dealing with, or all this other stuff, right. That can be super exhausting and cause people to feel very overwhelmed, anxious and stressed, and that causes all these other ramifications, including but not limited: to you how often you are exercising, where you're exercising, the type of exercise, whether or not you're getting your movement in throughout the day, how many steps you're taking, how much cortisol is released into your system, how many nutrients you can take in from the food that you're eating due to the level of stress hormones in your system.  It’s not just your decision-making and maybe the fatigue throughout your day or your week, but this actually has a very real connection to the way that your body is processing the nutrition that you're taking in, and also how your body is reacting to your environment as well.

4:13 Coach Shaun: Decision fatigue is essentially this mental exhaustion that you experience from making too many decisions.  It essentially boils down to the idea that the more decisions you make, the harder it becomes to make additional decisions.  Every single decision is depleting from this overarching score, let's say you started at 100 for every decision you make, knock it down by 1-5 points, depending on how urgent or how important it is, and if there's any ramifications that you have to think through after that.  More often than not, it really leads to 1 of 2 end points: you either give up completely and stop making decisions, or you'll make impulsive irrational choices at the end because you just don't want to make that decision anymore; you don't have anything left in the tank to make that decision.  In addition to facing periods of making decisions one after another, this decision fatigue can also set in if you have an abundance of options; so instead of just thinking about from the beginning to your end of your day, making all of these decisions one at a time, if you have too many options in front of you, it's going to lead to mental and emotional exhaustion.  Whether you're in the grocery store, looking at a catalog or maybe an online retailer, that can lead to being overwhelmed and confused and dissatisfied, not only with the choices in front of you, but with whatever choice you end up making from there, because there were just too many choices for you at the beginning, and while decision fatigue is a mental energy depletion that sets in after making a series of decisions in a fixed time, I want to make the very distinct difference here between decision fatigue and indecisiveness.  Indecisiveness is much more of a character trait that results from the chronic inability to make decisions, which theoretically stems from low self-confidence or self-awareness, because it usually is evident from the beginning of your day.  Something that's always present for you, whereas decision fatigue usually sets in after a series of decisions are made without any issues, so your first 2,000 decisions might seem very easy, and then your second 2,000 a little bit harder; and your last 2,000 are really the hardest. 

Whereas indecisiveness is something that you would notice right from the beginning, right off the bat, from your very first decision of your day, every day.  More specifically, someone who is habitually indecisive, they often fear making the wrong decision, which kind of keeps them in this middle ground “If I make this decision, what do I do? If I make this decision, what do I do?” And it kind of keeps them in this ongoing avoidance of decision making, which is also known as routine procrastination, and even though a person who can be indecisive can also have decision fatigue, it is the fearful avoidance that's generally at the root of most decision-making issues for that indecisive person.  It’s a little bit easier to train yourself out of this indecisive moment, whereas if you are dealing with decision fatigue, that's a little bit more challenging to train yourself out of.  Both of them, you can work mentally to prepare your system a little bit better to decrease the stress hormones in your system when decisions are present and also train yourself to make decisions that are going to make you happy in the long run, and we'll talk about all of that as we go. Honestly, it's not really fully understood why this decision fatigue exists and it’s something that we started really looking into in the field of psychology.  Pretty recently in the late 90s, basically, where this doctor named Roy Baumeister put forward a theory called ego depletion, together with a social psychologist John Tierney, and it basically states that humans possess the independence and free will to make choices, but we're constantly challenged with balancing more responsible and beneficial choices with decisions that may fulfill our urgent needs. So let's take an example of what to eat if you're still hungry after dinner, this is something I deal with with my clients all the time, so you might have some leftover cookies from the weekend or cake from a birthday party; you also have fresh fruit because you just went to the store, you have fresh vegetables, because you went to the Farmer's Market, you just did all of your grocery shopping, so you have a full refrigerator. It's a sophisticated process to make a seemingly simple choice because it's a process of weighing your motivations and your priorities, you can just as easily cut your fruit as you can cut the piece of cake.

9:21 Coach Shaun: It can be an overwhelming decision depending on what you have readily available and how much of your ego and your decision-ability is left at the end of the day.  For humans, this ego-depletion theory that these two psychologists were working through, tells us that it depletes our energy, whenever we go through this decision-making exercise.  When the energy starts to shrink, our executive function, which resides in the prefrontal cortex of our brain, starts to diminish and it operates under the assumption that will power and free will is limited. As a result, our decisions suffer, but some more recent science published in the National Academy of Science actually disputes this theory: psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues published a study that challenges the ego depletion theory to its core. Basically, she concluded that the ego depletion theory was only observed in subjects who believed from the start that will power was a limited resource. Very interesting. Another study in the journal, Frontiers in Psychology, knows that the lack of specific definition for decision fatigue isn’t easy to categorize and test, so that may be one of the reasons that researchers are still debating the effect because decision fatigue is also difficult to quantify and actually test for.

Researchers have observed a different phenomenon: in a study conducted by health psychology, nurses tended to make less efficient and more expensive clinical decisions about patient care the longer they went on without a break. Very interesting, right? So it's not just something that we are all dealing with, but certain subsets of our population are dealing with it in different ways.  It really does depend on what is weighing on your mind, that individual person that those groups of people that we are studying, etc, etc. And so these studies that we're conducting on decision fatigue really need to be very niche so that we understand not only how decision fatigue is affecting these people and these different populations, but also if there are any pieces of data that we can glean from these studies.  To start to create an overarching decision as to whether or not decision fatigue is something that we can actually start to define and task on a broader scale.  There also may be an individualized role in this concept, so the more a person feels or believes that decision fatigue is affecting them, the more it actually does, so it's kind of like the placebo effect, if you think something's going to work, it's going to work, if you believe that you have decision fatigue, you will probably have this decision fatigue.

So the science, we feel that decision fatigue is confusing and that's something that science is working through, but really regardless of the inner workings of the brain and what chemicals are being released in the ego theory and all these other theories that are out there right now, the one thing that everyone can discuss and actually agree on is that we know that decision fatigue is real. Realistically, the underlying cause of fatigue may have to do with a person's stress level and the number of decisions that they have to make each day, and that's kind of really what it boils down to, and that's where we can always start from. So the weight of these decisions also matters, so for instance, you might automatically assume that there is a very drastic difference between “should I have French Vanilla coffee or my coffee black”, or “Should I take this job, or should I push back on knowing about my salary”. Inherently, we understand there's a difference in the weight between those two decisions, but what we might not understand is "what route we take to avoid traffic when we're heading to work”, where does that decision fall on the scale? Does it matter if we're driving from a different location, if we have to go to a doctor's office first, and then we're going to work, does that matter the time of day, all of those things realistically end up adding up and causing more stress.

13:06 Coach Shaun: The more we talk about or deliberate about it, and the more that we have to go through those emotions, most people have to make a very large number of decisions, around 35,000.  From the moment they wake up, they start making those decisions.  So what? Get up now, can I use my alarm? Do I look at my text messages? Who do I have to respond to? Should I check my email? All of those things immediately, right when you start waking up.  Then from there, you have to decide what you're wearing every day, or what to have for breakfast, or what you want to listen to, or what radio station, etc, etc. Now, business decisions, social interactions and leisure time, all have their own inherent decisions involved that a person has to weigh and make either consciously or subconsciously.  The more complex decisions may deplete your energy levels faster.  When you make those decisions throughout your day, and the longer your day goes on, the heavier decisions you have to make that day; their ability to choose wisely starts to decrease over that time. So what I mentioned before is that the good news is whether you are indecisive as a person and also suffer from decision fatigue or you're just suffering from decision fatigue, you can recover from both.

Decision fatigue can auto correct itself within a span of a few hours to a few days, so if you give yourself some time away, vacation, self-care, all that kind of stuff, you are likely to heal relatively fast.  However, indecisiveness, because that's something that's much more inherent to your personality and your background, and is a little bit more intertwined with your psychological functioning; that's probably going to take longer and have a more significant effort to recover from. If you are sitting here wondering, “Wow, I really never thought about this, and now I'm wondering if I have decision fatigue”, or you're like me, and you already know that you suffer from decision fatigue because the longer and more decisions that you have to make and the heavier the decisions by the end of the day, you really don't care. It's like the easiest decision that I get to make every day is where I want to work from; to me, that's very easy. Do I want to work from home, or do I want to work from a client's house, or do I want to work from a coffee shop. But once I make that decision, those decisions get harder and harder, where do I want to work for my home, which client's home.

Which coffee to have? What kind of coffee? All of these. So you can see how fast that snow balls, as soon as you make one decision, there's another decision following it, all of a sudden you're making 2,000 decisions an hour.  But, if you're listening to this podcast, you're like, “Wow, do you think I have decision fatigue?” Here are a couple of ways that you can start to identify that; is it really decision fatigue or am I just an indecisive person, or maybe I'm just weighing this out incorrectly in my mind. So here are some signs you can look for: the first is the inability to think clearly or focus on the decision.  If you need it to be asked several times, if you keep coming back to it, if it's something you wrote down, if you're kind of having this anxiety over it; that's probably decision fatigue. The second is the procrastination and avoidance of decision-making tasks.  If you're continuously putting it off, if you're continually avoiding a decision, the chances are you have decision fatigue, especially if it's something you say, you can make that decision tomorrow morning and you're happy with being able to procrastinate that; it’s probably decision fatigue, irritability, and short temper caused by the frustration with yourself or the decision that you have to make, or the experience that you're in the situation that is creating this decision for you.

16:35 Coach Shaun: The next is impulsivity. This is feeling overwhelmed and possibly even hopeless or maybe spending a lot of time making decisions.  You’re sitting there, you have a lot of options, again, I mentioned this at the beginning, you have all these options in front of you, you're not sure if any of them fit, but maybe all of them fit.  All of a sudden you get very overwhelmed and then you feel very hopeless and then you can catch yourself just spending all this time thinking about this really simple decision. The next is physical symptoms; we're talking fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep, headaches, upset stomach, things where your stress systems are taking over and the stress chemicals are really what your body is functioning off of, instead of being able to function in a normal, calm nervous system kind of way. And then the last one is a strong sense of dissatisfaction with any choice that's ultimately made, so let say you agonize over this decision, you've made other smaller decisions along the way, you're ready to make a big decision, but then you really feel dissatisfied when you finally do make that decision, even though none of the answers would have actually sparked any sort of excitement from you.  If any of those sound familiar, especially if all of them sound familiar, chances are you are suffering from decision fatigue and not indecisiveness.

Now, the real reason that you guys all came to this podcast, which is how to solve decision fatigue.  Once you've identified that this is something that you are stressing about, that is causing you issues in your life, and it's something that you really are looking to create a solution for, I’ve got a couple examples of what we can do and how you can start to train yourself out of it.  Some of these are going to be really obvious, some of them are not going to be. Some of them are going to be a little bit harder and you're going to have to create a habit around them so that you can start to create positivity out of this negative feeling you have towards decisions.

So the first one is limiting yourself to making no more than a few big choices per day, and you can keep track of them somewhere so that it's a visual reminder for you that you've already made your top four today. So for me, when I'm making really big decisions, if I know they're coming, I can start to prepare myself, maybe make fewer decisions in the morning until I have to make that decision later in the day, or just writing down and being prepared with my pro and con list to make the decision.  If I don't know it's coming and I am inundated with big decisions, I then start to prioritize them between how important and urgent they are, and then be able to say to myself, yes, this is something that needs to be handled today, right now, or it needs to be handled today, but later, or this can be put off until tomorrow or whenever.   Then you can start to really settle yourself down, calm the overwhelm and operate from a system of calm rather than a system of stress.

The second is removing distractions, so again, this sounds really easy, but if your decision is between what screen do you look at: whether it's your laptop, iPad, cell phone, or whatever, and you have so many notifications from everywhere, remove the distractions so that you don't have to deal with it.  Frequently when I'm working: I turn my phone upside down so that I cannot see the screen, put my phone on Do Not Disturb so that my watch does not go off, and mute notifications on my desktop so that I don't see anything. I can just focus on the immediate task at hand, and that way I'm not making a decision to focus and just focus, because that's the only thing that I can be doing.

19:55 Coach Shaun: The next one is to make your most important decisions early in your day and make them first.  If you know that you're going to have big decisions that day, ie should you be accepting this job offer, should you be pushing back; should you be traveling for the holidays; whatever it is, those decisions can all be made earlier in the day, and they should be made first.  When you wake up, that's a decision that you're going to make and you're going to have more mental energy at the beginning of your day then you will at the end. So leave your lighter decisions for later in the day; when you're scheduling meetings, socializing, all that kind of stuff, make the decisions early in the day so that you don't have to make them later; you can just rely on the plan later in the day.  One way to do this, or another way that you can solve for decision fatigue, is to plan your agenda in advance, you'll be better prepared to start your day.  If you know a big decision is coming, it's easier to prepare for it, but that's not always how life is: that super predictable. Sometimes it's very impulsive response, and you want to be able to take that as it comes as well.

One of the ways that I can ensure I always have the mental capacity to make decisions is by taking regular work breaks to kind of replenish that mental energy, set my brain up for success for the rest of my day, and then I can arrange the rest of my day around that.  If I know I'm going to need to take a break at 10-11, I plan my clients and my meetings around that.  Take some time away and I know what I'm doing with that time. So it's not that, now you're off. Make a decision about what to do. Now it's time for you to take this specific class on Peloton. You're doing your cycle class, or you're doing your run, are you going to the gym and they'll tell you what to do there. And then along with that, you can start to plan your meals and your snacks and your hydration, so that you don't have to make those decisions. I always have my water bottle at my desk, so when I feel like I'm getting dehydrated, I can reach for my water bottle and it's not a, “Oh, well, now what do I drink? Should I go downstairs and look at my refrigerator?” Then you have ADD brain where you think of all of these other things that you should be doing while you're downstairs.

Another way that you can solve for decision fatigue is by asking a friend or partner to weigh in on some of your most difficult choices.  This one, take it with a grain of salt, because when you reach out to someone for assistance in decisions, not only do you want to be able to fully trust their decision-making as well, because they're probably dealing with decision fatigue also, but for you to know that your decision is yours.  You don't want to crowd source, you don't want to be overwhelmed by the number of options, and you also don't want to be overwhelmed by the amount of information you're receiving from other people about this important decision.

Maybe your partner is making your coffee in the morning, that's awesome, that's one less decision that you have to make, but if you are asked by your partner what kind of coffee you want in the morning, that could ultimately lead to less brain power throughout your day.  If you ask them later on what their night cap should be, or maybe what book they want to read before they go to bed, or if they want to travel for the holidays, those decisions ultimately, while they seem light to you, it might be a little heavy for your partner; always keep that in mind too. It's not just your mental energy, but also the other person that you're asking for help, their mental energy has to be important to be able to give you great feedback and help you with that decision.  Ultimately, when you're facing too many options, it's easier to narrow down your selection to 3, do not question yourself and then pick from the final 3. So I use this very frequently when I say, “Oh, I have some time to work on X, what should I work on?” And then I have 97 different inputs and I really need to only pick from 3, so that's where it really helps to have an ongoing priorities list.

24:20 Coach Shaun: Prioritize a list of what needs to be done so that if you have time to do something where you didn't know you would have time, there's no decision, there's no at-fault, you can just do that. So if you have a lot of options facing you narrow it down to 3 and don't question yourself about those final 3.  Go from gut reaction and then be able to decide from those final 3, and in the same breath, you also want to avoid questioning your final decision, just embrace your selection and move forward.  There’s a lot of anxiety around making the decision anyways, and if you hang on to that anxiety moving forward from already having made the decision, you can't go back on that decision now; you're just being anxious about the past, and we all know that lands you in stress hormone control for your body instead of being able to function from a place of calm where you're nervous system is cool, calm, collected and ready to move forward.  If you are stuck on your final decision, whatever it was, positive/negative/in the middle, maybe it doesn't matter at all, but that decision is just really sticking with you, write it down on a piece of paper, and if it's really that important, you can go back to it later.  That’s another decision that you're making, again, if you make the same decision, that's great, but if that's the kind of person you are, you have to start weighing your options about whether or not you're actually being indecisive or you have fatigue, so that's where those two start to overlap.

If you get stuck, what I like to do is create a pro/con list, I don't care how stupid anybody thinks it is, but if you're really struggling with the decision, pros-cons are a great way to start because it forces you to focus and to gain some clarity. Now, if you're in a Rachel and Ross from Friends kind of situation, maybe that's not the best place to start. If you're asking your friends like Chandler or Joey to help you with this, that's totally fine, but again, make sure that they have the mental capacity to be making these decisions with you. Trust them not to print it out in front of whoever it is that you were talking about from the pro/con list. If you guys don't know what I'm talking about from that, I'm a huge Friends fanatic, and I absolutely love that it is out because I think it's hilarious. You do want to be able to make a pro.con list for bigger decisions because I really do think that helps to weigh out and force you to focus on the things that are important to you, and that's going to be different for everybody.

If 5 people are all looking at taking the same job offer, their pros/cons are going to be drastically different because the way that that job impacts them is going to be different.  For you, your pro/con list could be very decisive and might help you a lot, whereas it might for other people be less productive for them, but then once the pros/cons have been created, you can start to prioritize and say, “This is most important, at least important, this one doesn't matter at all.”  I always kind of keep that in my back pocket. 

Guys, the next one is to follow a set of structure or routine, this kind of helps to take away some of the decisions that you have to make at the beginning of your day.  A lot of successful people that I follow, a lot of successful entrepreneurs, say there's they always have a very limited wardrobe, so that their decision isn’t immediately overwhelming of what to wear in the morning.  They don't have to deal with decision fatigue, they can say, “I’ll prepare what I wore yesterday”. This is what I'm going to work in today.

27:55 Coach Shaun: It works with everything, it works for every situation I'm going to be in, and when they do it that way, it also eliminates decision-making for your routine tasks such as: when you're going to get up in the morning, what you're going to eat, when are you going to exercise? So this goes back to planning.  You can set these reminders on your phone so you're not making a decision at noon to stop and do something, you're being reminded that now is the time that you're going to go exercise or go for your walk, or it's time for lunch, whatever it is.  The decision is taken away from you, you're just doing it as part of your routine.

The last one is you avoid impulsive decision-making, and that can be totally fun and sometimes it's built into your personality or your habits, and that's totally great, and I love that for you. It is for me sometimes too, but I know myself and being able to make impulsive decisions is not something I can do on a daily basis because that really does drain my energy, and I tend to postpone bigger decisions like that because I'm not sure that I'm making the right decision.  Then all of a sudden I get really anxious and upset and frustrated about it, so if you are ever nervous that you're going to make the wrong move that you're going to regret later, if you can postpone that decision, go ahead and do that instead of making an impulsive decision from the get-go, that's not really going to help you in the long home.

There's a good chance that if you're managing decision fatigue, you've already been pretty stressed, you're probably already really stressed right now.  Reducing the anxiety and frustration caused by your inability to make decisions and starting to identify some of those signs of decision fatigue; those are going to go a long way towards improving your mental health and your mental well-being, and even if you're scheduling in self-care, that can be really helpful in managing your decision fatigue as well throughout your day.  Self-care, is something where you can take break, to take a bath at the end of the day, sometimes self-care is knowing that at 11 o'clock, you've already been working and up for six hours, and it's time for you to take your walk, a time for you to go outside and breathe, it's time to listen to your favorite podcast, it's time to whatever it is that you want to do. And it's going to be easier for you in the long run to just say, “This is what my day looks like.” Plan it in advance, and that way when other things come up, say, “Alright, well, I know my self-care has to happen at this time, I can make an important decision after that time.” If any of this was confusing at all, of course, I want you to go back to the part that was confusing and just listen to it a couple of times.

That's not a decision that you have to make now and telling you to go back and do it because sometimes just being able to understand how your brain functions or how you function in specific situations is enough for you to be able to plan ahead or rely on your own systems to say, “Okay, I know that I'm getting really stressed and getting really frustrated, I'm talking really fast. There's a lot of things in my mind. I'm going to cry.” All these things, they start to build up, you have this tolerance. Well, once you notice that and you say, “Oh, I start to feel my stress hormones taking over right now, I need to go and take a break.” Okay, cool, you know what that break is going to look like, having that routine or that habit, you know what that routine is going to look like, you know what that habit is going to get you, so if you are feeling decision fatigue setting in, I encourage you to prioritize your self-care, so that you have that moving forward, and that's all I have for you. Thank you so much.

I want to take this time to say thank you so much for listening to the crash course podcast.  My business LiveUnbreakable, we are an ad-free podcast.  That is only an option because of all of your awesome reviews and sharing those podcasts and making it available to everybody for free, ultimately my decision to make this podcast was just to be able to provide information on a free platform that helps other people make informed decisions for themselves about what's best for them and their health. I hope that sits well with you, and I hope you're able to share this with friends and family for the same reasons. Thank you so much.

Coach Shaun: Thank you so much for tuning in today. It was such a pleasure having you on the Crash Course podcast, brought to you by the LiveUnbreakable brand. If you enjoyed today's podcast, please some love on iTunes as a review so that I can keep this good stuff coming at you. Or share this podcast with your friends to give them a crash course on something that you're passionate about.  If you're not following me on social media yet, I would be honored to have your follow so search for LiveUnbreakable on any major social media platform and enjoy the extra motivation and knowledge shared over there, and of course, reach out to me at LiveUnbreakable.com with any questions. Until next time, y’all.