Do you ever find yourself standing in the kitchen at dinner time totally paralyzed and unable to think of what to eat or feed your hungry family?
Do you ever flip through the 57 stations on your television unable to find anything to watch so you just settle for Rich and Ridiculously Tacky Housewives of Nowhere in Particular?
Have you ever said something bitchy to a co-worker in your last meeting of the day because you just couldn’t take it any more?
And when shopping online at 3pm as a break from work, have you ever thought that buying 6-inch Jimmy Choos was a fantastic idea, “Heck yeah I’ll have a reason to wear them in my life as worker bee and mom in suburbia Colorado!”?
Well, turns out it is not just Stressed Induced Senility (SIS). There is a (another) scientific reason for all of these totally hypothetical scenarios. Yay science! Yay logic! It makes it so much easier to alleviate guilt when you can point to a scientific reason for a lack of decision making skills (and not just a personal competence deficit).
The other day I came across this New York Times article on decision fatigue and there was suddenly sun shining and birds chirping outside my window. It isn’t just me!! Yippee!
And now I”m going to completely oversimplify a very complex mental phenomenon for you.
The more decisions we make the more we zap our mental energy. Black pants or jeans? Zap. Start work on that presentation or check in on Facebook? Zap. Intervene in the kids’ argument or let them work it out themselves? Zap.
Add willpower into the mix and we drain our mental energy even more. Resist the donuts sitting in front of you in your first meeting of the day and decide whether to hire a new assistant or reallocate internal resources…double zap.
Here’s the (again oversimplified) gist: decisions drain us. According to the study, people start out making careful decisions, weighing the pros and cons, logically deciding which choice is best. But faced with too many decisions and we tend to roll over, going with the path of least resistance and the default option.
And today we are faced with more decisions than ever. Netflix, YouTube, Starbucks, Rue la la, Facebook. We are no longer constrained by time or environment. We can shop anywhere, anytime. We can decide from hundreds of different coffee drink orders. We go to places with 10 page menus. We don’t have to watch what’s on TV right this minute, we can watch last Tuesday’s drama or a sitcom from the ’80s whenever we want.
We are busy running households, relationships, and businesses. We are mentally tired. And who can blame us?
So when faced with a decision, big or small, keep some things in mind. And, if you ever have a parole board hearing (I’m not here to judge), try to make sure you get the early morning slot (or the one after lunch). Really. Other decision-making tips include:
- Be well rested
- Eat something
- Not everything has to be a decision–don’t waste your energy on little things
- Decision making and dieting don’t mix–your mental stores are depleted from all that willpower
- Take a break–don’t schedule back to back meetings, allow a change of scenery or time for fresh air
- Don’t make big decisions at the end of the day–or the end of the work week. After a full week of decisions and acts of willpower, we really are just working for the weekend.
By Thursday I always find it hard to pick out clothes for work, going through different options, tossing all the discarded sweaters in a heap on the bed. My husband likes to make fun of me, asserting that I never learned how to dress myself after 12 formative years wearing uniforms to school. This might be true but it also makes a strong case for uniforms. I didn’t zap any mental energy deciding what to wear in high school so I was better equipped to take multiple choice tests in European History. See how that works?
So, from now on, I’m going to save my intellectual power for really important decisions. If we go out, you can pick where we go to dinner, who drives and what time to go. I’m saving my energy for the dessert menu.
