Ep #49: Break Through Decision Fatigue
episode summary
Has your computer ever been running really slowly, and you can't figure out why, and then you look and realize you have 28 tabs open? Your computer can't run well with too many things draining its processing power, and neither can you.
When you have too many things taking up space in your brain, you can feel overwhelmed and start making low-quality decisions. Some decision-making in life is inevitable, but I can help you streamline your day and make the most of your mental energy.
Featured on the Show
Ep #2: Control What You Can
Ep #8: Clear the Clutter
Ep #48: How Your Closet Shapes Your Day
For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
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CHAPTERS:
2:26 - Quantity Up, Quality Down
7:21 - Reducing Decisions Through Routines
10:59 - Know Your Brain
12:55 - Take a Break
listen to the episode:
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Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hey, friends, get this: the American Medical Association says we make 35,000 decisions in a single day. If that's the average for all humans, I'm going to go ahead and double that for women. T here. That's my unofficial study; done and done. Today, I'm going to tell you about how to reduce the fatigue and decision fatigue. First, I'm going to help you figure out if you're suffering from decision fatigue and if you are - and sorry, but you probably are - I'll give you three tips to deal with it, including having routines so you can make less decisions, timing your decisions in a way that works for your brain, and taking breaks from decision making entirely. By the end of this episode, you'll have a plan for handling all the decisions that come your way in the average day. I just made a big decision myself, which is to take my kids to Europe this summer for a couple of weeks. I've been wanting to do this for a long time and I know for sure we're going to Paris and Italy, but I don't know exactly what we'll do in each one of those places. But I'm not so worried about that yet, because I pulled the trigger and bought the tickets and got our Global Entry situation all worked out. That was quite a deal, but we got that all worked out. So I'm going to take a little break on trip planning until it sounds like fun again, but those are fun decisions. When I think of decision fatigue, I think mostly about it in the context of people constantly asking us questions via email, via text, in person. Sometimes my kids talk to me and ask me things at the same time. I think that's one of my biggest pet peeves ever. It's like I already have too much stimuli coming in and then there are two people talking to me and asking me a question at the same time, and it makes me feel like I'm going to lose my mind, and I think - you can clearly hear that the other one is already talking! What about that makes you want to start talking? And I can't answer you both or listen to you both at the same time. Sometimes I also just need to put my phone in the bedroom on the charger when I feel like I'm getting just fatigued, basically, from looking at my phone and answering texts and answering emails and responding to things. It just gets overwhelming and exhausting. So when we're talking about decisions these 35,000 plus that you're making every day. There is the quantity, so how many decisions you make, and then the quality, which is how good these decisions are. And research shows that as the quantity goes up, the quality of the decisions goes down, which makes total sense to me. I'll tell you, in my experience, that by the end of any given day, I'm like, "no one ask me anything," or I'll literally say ask me tomorrow. Let's just think about the example of deciding what to eat. Let's say you're trying to eat pretty healthy and you start off in the morning with breakfast: no sweat, you got a plan, you're gonna eat well. You get to lunch, you're still going strong, but by dinner you're tired, you don't feel like it, you don't want to decide, you don't feel like making anything. And that's when you just make the decision (the non-quality decision) to just eat whatever crap you can find, whatever is easy. That's a great example of how, after the number of decisions gets too high, the quality of your decisions gets low. The other thing that can happen when you're in decision fatigue is you just don't decide anything at all. So we don't have the capacity to think through the best options, so you just table the decision, and that's not always bad. Sometimes, I mean even just a few minutes ago, I said that I will tell my kids, "ask me again in the morning," if they want something that my brain doesn't have the capacity to process. So it's not always bad. But when you consistently do this, if you're so overwhelmed and fatigued by making decisions that you constantly are tabling things or just putting things off to decide them later, then the problems just stack up and wait for you. And I think in the case of work, in my experience, what this usually means is that you're the bottleneck for something, so then you'll just get more emails, and you'll get the question again. So that can happen. The other thing that can happen is you can just end up sticking with the status quo. So let's say there's something about your life you want to change like. Let's say, you want to think about, "what would I do if I got a different job than the one that I have now?" What if I want to switch careers? Or what if I want to take a big vacation with my family? But you're so exhausted from all the decisions that you're making on a daily basis that you just can't even do it. So you just stick with the status quo. You stick with the job that you kind of like, kind of hate. You know, just don't take a vacation again this summer or whatever - whatever it is that is your usual standard. You just keep doing that same thing. The last thing that can happen when you're in decision fatigue is you overreact or you pick a fight with the person who's asking you the question or asking for the decision, and I think in families your kids are often the brunt of this one. So this definitely happens to me at home, where when I'm fatigued and tired from a day and someone asks me a question, I just don't have the patience to even answer it. And I just had a client tell me the other day that she says yes to her kids all the time when she kind of wants to say no because she just doesn't have the energy to say no and to kind of fight the good fight that it takes to stick with no sometimes. I completely, completely understand that. Another thing that happens when you are in decision fatigue is you make impulsive decisions. So you make a decision, just any decision, quickly. This is kind of the opposite of tabling it. It's like I'm just going to make the decision so that I can quickly get it off my plate, like, for me, my version of this - I am much more likely to do this version than tabling something. I want to just make the decision and move on. So, for example, if I'm looking for a new outfit, I'm not really sure that I love this one, I'm certainly not going to try it on, I'm just going to buy it and I'll take it home and I'll figure it out later. Not a great decision, because then when it doesn't fit and you don't like it, you just give yourself another to- do to take it back. So what should we do? What we've just talked about is that decision fatigue causes us to make poor decisions because we make too many. It makes us not decide anything at all. It keeps us stuck sometimes doing what we've always been doing. It makes us overreact to people we love and it makes us impulsive. So what do we do to kind of rein this back in and be able to make decisions without having all of those effects that we just talked about? I've got three easy things you can do to stop decision fatigue and have decision - I don't know, what's the opposite of fatigue? Energy, decision energy, big decision energy? I don't know. Decision, just like, tiredness, instead of fatigue? Let's just say we're going to take it from fatigue, which is pretty miserable, to something better than that. Maybe it's a tiredness. Maybe you even get to being energetic about the decisions that you make. Okay, so here are the three things. Number one is to reduce the number of decisions that you need to make by having routines. Now, we've talked about this in a couple other ways on the podcast, I know specifically we talked about this in the Clean Out Your Closet decluttering episode, and I talk about it all the time as a way to really prevent yourself from having to get overwhelmed because you're not making a million decisions at the same time. So, for example, I don't work out every day and I don't work out the same days every week. So, in order to reduce the number of decisions that I have to make, every Sunday, I look at my schedule, I choose the classes that I'm going to go to, I sign up for them. That automatically puts them on my calendar done. I don't have to wake up in the morning and think, "do I feel like working out today? I'm pretty tired. I'd really rather just sleep in. Today there's no decision. The decision is gone. I signed up. Decided the day, signed up. That's it. You can also do this with what to eat. I just was making a reel for Instagram last Sunday and I was showing like part of my Sunday routine. One of them is I do like a 15 minute clean out of my refrigerator and then I put all the new groceries in there and get them all organized in the way that I like them, and there are like three giant things of Greek yogurt, which is what I eat for breakfast every single day. So that is the decision that I don't have to make. I know exactly what goes in it. I know exactly what I put on top of it. I know I always have the groceries because I order them every Sunday. It's just a non-event for me. I don't have to think about it at all. What you're going to wear. This is such a good, easy way, - and I think on the decluttering podcast I talked about this as well when I was saying a lot of really brilliant people wear the same outfit every day. I totally get that. Like I'm thinking of Michael Kors with his black t-shirt and a blazer that he wears all the time and Mark Zuckerberg with his hoodie. And they have been interviewed and say, I make a lot of decisions in a day and this is just one that I don't want to make. If eating the same thing or wearing the same thing all the time sounds boring to you and that's not right up your alley, you can still take this advice and you can make your wardrobe just reduced down to things that you really like or even love and just want to put on. If you need more on that, listen to the episode from March 4th where I interview a stylist who gives us tips to make our wardrobe as accessible as possible. Okay, and you can think of tons of other places where you can have routines. You can have a morning routine of exactly what you and your family do in the morning. If you have younger kids, you probably have a bedtime routine, a bath, reading books, whatever it is. So wherever in life you can have a routine, make one and just picture that every time you've done that, you have completely taken decisions off your plate forever. And another little tip on this one - the idea of reducing decisions - is, when you make a decision, ask yourself, "do I need to make this one again, or was that it?" Like, did I just make that decision for going forward. My son is 16 and he's just gotten old enough and social enough that he's really going out places at night. And because he really hadn't done that before, I hadn't ever established a curfew for him, and so every time he would go out I'd be like, ooh, what time should I tell him to be home this time, or whatever, and I thought, why am I making this decision multiple times? I'm just going to decide a time, and I'm going to tell him, and that's going to be it, and then neither one of us has to talk about it again. So that's not really a routine, but it's a decision that I can make one time and then just make that the rule. Ok, the second thing to do is to think about the timing of the decisions that you have to make, and make decisions - important ones, especially - at a time that's good for your brain. So everything you read on this topic says make your most important decisions early in the morning. But I'm thinking of two people who are very close to me - my handsome man friend and one of my very best friends - who shouldn't make any important decisions in the morning because they are not morning people. I think that they could probably make their best decisions at like 7 pm because that's when they have energy. So when you need to make an important decision, just have awareness about is this the right time for me to make this decision? For me, I'm just brain dead at nighttime, so if I have to do something that requires a lot of thinking, I'm just going to table it to the morning. I'm going to definitely take that on first thing in the morning. So ask yourself what's the best time for you to make decisions and then use that to structure even your work schedule as you can. So, for example, do you like to have earlier meetings when you have harder meetings? I would much rather get the hardest things that require the most thinking out of the way early in the day and then in the afternoon, leave things that are easier and don't require as much thinking and brain work and decisions. So just think about what's best for you and schedule your decisions where you have control. Again, in vs. out of control, is like episode three - that's a good one to reference for this. But you always have some influence. So if your immediate thought when I say that is, I don't schedule any of my meetings, all my meetings just show up on my calendar, I have late afternoon ones - I'm sure that's true, but there have got to be some things that you have control over that you can schedule your time for. So take control where you can and make things work for you and your brain. And then the very last suggestion that I have to get unfatigued is to just take a break. I mean, really, seriously, just stop what you're doing and take a few minutes to breathe or walk around the block or put on some headphones and listen to music and close your eyes. One of the things that I like to do in my office - in fact, I always laugh, and think if someone was peeking in the window they'd be like, "what is she doing? Especially when the sun's coming in in the afternoon and there's sun I don't know why I love like being in the sunshine, even though I'm inside. I have a pillow in my office and I have a blanket and I will just lay flat out on the hardwood floor in the sun and sometimes I turn on the meditation and sometimes I just lie there and take some deep breaths and take like a 15 or 20 minute brain break, and it's amazing how much better I feel after I do that. So again, if you're like, hey, cool for you, I don't have a pillow and a blanket in my office that I can lay down on the floor, I bet that you can get up and take a little walk. I mean, you could even just walk to the bathroom or get a drink of water or something. Just get up from what you're doing, take a little break, take some deep breaths again, listen to some good music, something. There's got to be something in your control that you can do, and look for that thing that's in your control. Ok, so that is it. Remember, it's just three things to reduce your decision fatigue. First, you're going to reduce the number of decisions that you're making. Period. You're going to do that by making rules and routines that you follow. Then you're going to think about the timing. You're going to set up - as much as possible for you - you're going to set up the timing to make the decisions at the time that works best for your brain. And then number three is you're going to take a break. You're going to lay down on the floor of your office with a pillow and a blanket, in the sunshine, or whatever your version of that is. Ok, have a great week. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier. com. See you next week.
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