Decision Fatigue
(why lack of willpower is not your problem)
Decision fatigue (also known as choice overload) is the diversion of your finite mental resources to excessive or non-essential problem solving.
These are the things that push into your mental (and physical) space that force you to weight up options for reallocating your time. You might recognise them by the nagging feeling that you should be doing something else, or be somewhere else!
Spreading your mental energy in this way affects how well you do stuff! Stanford Profession Clifford Nass even went as far as to call multi-taskers “suckers for irrelevancy” and he says “everything distracts them”. His study tried many ways to identify what mulit-taskers did well and came up with.. well, nothing to be fair.
Even seemingly insignificant decisions can have a real effect on productivity – these can be so subtle you might not even realise you are exerting mental effort. A study performed in 2008 by Dr Gary Small at UCLA found that experienced web surfers had increased activity in the pre-frontal areas of the brain associated with problem solving and decision making. Whenever you come across a link, or in the case of social media, every post, you are making a decision whether to read more, to click on the link, to pause scrolling. This redirection of our mental resources (from reading to judgement) is imperceptible. Your brain is quick! But it has been shown to impeded comprehension and retention.
Why is this important to your health and fitness? Once your mental energy is depleted you become reluctant to engage in the thinking required to weigh up options and trade-offs. Then you begin to rely on WILLPOWER.
Not only that but you start to “hoard” your mental energy as your self control is used up. This means that you will start to take the path of least resistance which often means no decision is made – this looks a lot like procrastination!
So, what can we do about it?
Here are 8 things that will help reduce your decision fatigue, your mental overload and combat procrastination. Freeing up that mental bandwidth should also help you with other decisions freeing up the thinking needed to weigh up options.
1. Follow routines – set up new ones, schedule tasks, automate as much as possible, schedule things to happen at the same time every day, link new habits with old, well-established ones
2. Decrease your options – the less choice you have the more decisive you will be. Stick to the vegetarian or vegan options when eating out for example, schedule your time in blocks, bundle your workout clothes together, set certain meals for certain days
3. Set a time limit – get things done, use apps and timers on your phone to help you achieve your goals, use the time to focus on ONE thing
4. Make important decisions early – decision fatigue increases throughout the day as you make more and more of them so if you need to make a difficult one, or prioritise something you struggle to choose, do it first
5. Don’t rehash decisions – make your decision, take a deep breath and move on. Only have ideas once, take action to save you going through the same thought process again and again. Move onto the next thing
6. Don’t make a decision when you are tired or hungry – this one doesn’t even need explaining, we’ve all been there right?!
7. Read books not screens – while we’re not saying no screens at all, if you want to enjoy your reading and use it for relaxation you need to release yourself from the decisions that come from anything with links to other things!
8. Make notes and lists! When you’re learning something new it can seem easy, you’re sure you’ll remember, but save yourself the effort, make notes that will help you, they become a really useful shortcut!
“I’m not writing it down to remember it later,
I’m writing it down to remember it now”
You’re making on average 36,000 decisions a day and each one has an effect on your willpower, your procrastination, your ability to make the next decisions. If writing down every thought you have seems like hard work think of like this, you’re doing the hard work that makes life EASIER. Writing it down isn’t nearly as hard (or exhausting) as having the same thought repeatedly. Create good habits to free up thinking space and if you find yourself slipping into procrastination consider if this is simply an ability to choose to between two (or more) options. In that case Count Backwards from 5, this will reengage your prefrontal cortex and commit you to action, any action, to move you out of the path of least resistance!
This episode links with last week’s “Your Space and Your Motivation” episode , find that here