Get Rid of Decision Fatigue in 8 Steps
Decision fatigue, the inability to make a choice that narrows you, is a situation many people are in. Is it blue or yellow? Should I wear navy blue? Should I wear stripes? Heels? Undercooked or overcooked? Should I take a taxi or walk? However, people who read and apply the Brain User Manual do not suffer from decision fatigue.
Did you know that an adult person makes an average of 40,000 decisions every day? If seeing one more question mark makes your heart beat faster, you are not alone. Decision fatigue is one of the mental health problems that is becoming more common worldwide, especially with differing needs and lifestyle changes.
Decision fatigue, also known as ego depletion, is defined as difficulty in making new decisions after too many short choices and the inability to make healthy decisions after a while. In a world where options are plentiful, and even a simple coffee order can become overwhelming enough, it’s hardly surprising that decision-making can cause fatigue.
As we create new routines involving many decision processes, such as deciding which activities to start again, who to meet, and where to travel, we feel even more overwhelmed and exhausted. So let’s take a closer look at what we can do to deal with decision fatigue from the brainusermanual window.
What is Decision Fatigue?
Decision fatigue, as we mentioned above, is a situation that occurs when we are tired of making too many choices. Although the election processes, which are an area where we can use our free will, do not burden us, they can cause the choices we make and the decisions we make to be unhealthy after having to make too many decisions in a short time. For example, imagine you’re at the grocery store and trying quickly to grab a few things for dinner that day. Would you instead choose from limited options for each ingredient in the meal or have more than one option for each?
How would you feel when choosing a university to have plenty of options? Most of us probably think we would be happier with more choices in this and similar scenarios. However, research shows that in some cases, having limited options makes decision-making much more straightforward and enables us to make better decisions. So why do we sometimes find it surprisingly difficult to choose and feel tired after making a choice?
How Does Decision Fatigue Occur?
According to a theory that tries to answer this question, making a choice causes us to experience the ego depletion we mentioned above. Since our willpower and mental energy are limited resources, just like our bodily energy, consuming this energy while making decisions about our responsibilities, tasks, and activities during the day makes it even more challenging to decide on the following functions.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, testing the validity of this theory, examined how making choices can affect people’s actions in subsequent tasks that require self-control. In this study, a group of university students was asked to choose courses from among different course options, while other students were given ready-made curriculums.
In the next part of the study, all participants were asked to solve a math problem in a room with magazines and video games. During this task, the researchers observed whether students would spend their time studying the self-disciplined activity or postpone this task and prefer to read magazines and play games. As a result of the research, it was found that the participants who chose the course spent less time working on the math problem and postponed the task that required self-control compared to those who did not choose.
Ways to Cope with Decision Fatigue
We all want to act with our free will, to have a say over our options, and to keep control of our lives. However, sometimes we are left with so many options that the unlimited possibilities we evaluate while choosing among them can consume our mental energy and cause us to become tired. Therefore, it is possible to combat decision fatigue only by changing belief patterns, behaviors, and habits that affect our willpower and consume our mental energy. Instead of going through the same decision-making processes from scratch every day, it is vital to turn the already good choices into a routine and habit, to give ourselves time to rest and focus, to use our mental energy efficiently when we need to make crucial decisions, and to pay attention to our self-care for renewal. There may be steps. Don’t Let Unnecessary
Some negative thoughts prevent you from making decisions. If you are focusing on negative thinking because of past traumas, you must do something to reset your mind. After resetting your mind and relaxing yourself with positive thinking techniques, you start to make better decisions. Click if you want to combine mind resetting with the power of positive thinking.
1-Don’t Care Details to Get Rid of Decision Fatigue
One of the most critical components of the decision-making process is the ability to focus. For this reason, people who can concentrate well and stay away from distractions as much as possible in the decision-making process can make healthier decisions. So, how can you improve your attention span to make better choices and avoid decision fatigue? The most effective way to increase your attention span is to avoid social media and notifications, one of today’s most essential distractions.
Distractions can be small or big, but the problem is how often you are exposed to these distractions. While trying to make the right decision, constantly shifting your focus to other things can drain your mental energy faster. Limit your time by scheduling email, instant messages, push notifications from mobile apps, and social media. Turning off all your information when you need to make crucial decisions can allow you to think more deeply and focus for a long time, allowing you to use your mental energy more efficiently and make better decisions.
2-Limit Your Decision-Making Time to Discard Decision Fatigue
Trying to make significant and vital daily decisions will also increase the risk of rapid depletion of your mental energy. Especially if you are afraid that you will make the wrong decision and think that the decision you will take will affect other areas of your life, the doubt and anxiety accumulated in you can cause you to become overwhelmed and tired over time. Therefore, it would be best if you controlled intense emotions such as fear and anxiety to make the right decision and take action to make the right decision.
Setting a time limit on your decision-making process can help you overcome the emotions preventing you from taking action and taking a step, even if it’s forcibly. Although it may seem like a frightening option at first because it will put pressure on you, limiting your decision time will allow you to get rid of the burden of the decision you need to make, reach the result faster, and make healthier decisions in the following stages. Remember, making a decision and taking action, even if it is not right most of the time, will be more comforting than being unable to decide at all and uncertain. It also helps you feel better and increase your self-confidence by seeing if you’re stuck with the options available.
3-Prioritize Your Important Thoughts to Overcome Decision Fatigue
Suppose you have responsibilities requiring you to make many decisions in your business or daily life. In that case, it can become much more overwhelming and exhausting for you to make significant decisions. In this case, first, consider all the situations that require you to make a decision and review the tools and methods you can use to remove those who are mentally burdened from your mind. Then, writing down the issues, you must decide whether using a notebook or a calendar can reduce your mental load.
After listing all the situations that require a decision, carefully select the essential items that need to be finalized as soon as possible. Prioritizing the issues you need to decide on and making important decisions early in the morning when your mind is blank and your mental energy is high will significantly reduce your decision fatigue. It may interest you. Time to prioritize your priorities. Do you have enough room on your plate?
4-Establish a Routine for Your Less Important Decisions
What shall I eat for lunch? What shall I do if I get up early and do sports? What time shall I eat dinner? What shall I wear on my way to work tomorrow? When all these simple decisions are on the same list, with more important decisions every day, they can cause you to postpone your critical decisions and not make the right decision. Small or less essential decisions can cause decision fatigue by consuming a significant portion of your mental energy, time, and productivity.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to avoid this burnout is to reduce the burden on your mind as much as possible by automating repetitive decision processes, that is, by routinizing what you need to do every day and integrating it into your habits. For example, you can use your mental energy for more important decisions by eating at the exact times every day, making your weekly menu on weekends when your cognitive load and essential findings are relatively less, combining your clothes in advance, that is, putting the routine habits that require you to decide on a plan and sticking to this plan every day, You can significantly reduce your decision fatigue.
5-Simplify by Reducing the Number of Options Available to You
You will buy yogurt from the market, and you are faced with more than 20 different types of yogurt on the shelf, from probiotic to lactose-free, organic to fat-free. You have no idea which one to choose, and they all look pretty similar, although there are minor differences. We believe that you must face these and similar situations during the day. In such a situation, which is a classic example of having too many options, you are likely to constantly think about which product to buy without doing anything and wasting time on such a simple decision.
Instead, consider what is essential to you as you review the options available to reduce your chances and simplify your thinking: price, oil content, naturalness, packaging, or a combination of these and similar features. Then, focus on your top priority criterion and eliminate all options that do not meet this criterion. In this way, once your few primary criteria are met, end the decision-making process without thinking about the rest.
6-Say No to Get Rid of Decision Fatigue
While deciding what you want to do is an energy-consuming process, it becomes almost inevitable to experience decision fatigue when you need to consider the wishes and needs of other people in this process. Especially for parents, decision-making processes can become even more difficult by increasing in direct proportion to the number of members in the family.
In addition, methods require planning and considering the wishes and needs of more than one person, such as creating a menu that suits everyone’s taste, keeping track of what each child eats and does not eat, and tracking the due dates of bills, can cause decision fatigue—in such a case, answering ‘no’ to requests that are not very urgent and that you can refuse will also ensure that you are exempt from the following decision processes.
7-Consult Your Relatives to Overcome Decision Fatigue
Of course, you are the person who will best evaluate the decisions that affect your life. However, when deciding on your own becomes exhausting and overwhelming, do not hesitate to ask the opinions of the people you trust, be sincere, and include your loved ones in your decision process.
You can get ideas and significantly reduce your mental load by clearly explaining your situation and why you have difficulty deciding on people with whom you feel safe, whose mind and logic you trust, and whose ideas you value. When faced with a difficult choice, consulting with people you think can help you see details that are easy to miss and make decisions faster.
8-Accept That Sometimes You Can Make the Wrong Decision
The decisions we make can sometimes differ not only from those of others but even from our own decisions that we have made in the past. For example, while one day it may seem like the best option to go out of town for the weekend to see your family you haven’t seen for a long time, the next day you may find this decision ridiculous because of a job you think you can’t handle.
You may think that working at home would be a more suitable option. Therefore, in the decision-making process, accept that it is ‘normal’ that you make the right decision according to the situation and conditions you are in at that moment and that the decisions you have made in the past and the decisions you make now are not always consistent.
