Fighting Decision Fatigue

Fighting Decision Fatigue to help achieve your resolutions and goals.

Many of us will open up a new browser to google something random. We will mindlessly check our emails or quickly scroll through Instagram and twitter.

The average user switches between tasks over 300 times a day and this is just during working hours. Each of those decisions has been proven to eat away at our willpower. Eventually we feel decision fatigue.

The president of the USA, Barack Obama had to make some of the biggest decisions on a day to day basis. Running the most powerful country in the world comes with a certain degree of responsibility. Obama explained to Vanity Fair in 2012 that as a president he cut away any frustrating or less important decisions to make, such as deciding what to wear (something everyone across the world worries about).

Obama explains, “You’ll see I wear only grey or blue suits, I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to routinize yourself.”

His thinking was based on psychologist Roy F. Baumeister’s work on “Decision Fatigue.” The more decisions we have to make throughout the day, it becomes harder for the brain to make them. This leads to making poorer quality of decisions if the individual has had a long session of decision making. It has been stated as one of the reasons for irrational trade-offs when making decisions.