Restorative Reminders
What is Decision Fatigue?
- Anugrah
What is Decision fatigue?
Have you ever had those days when you’d sunk into the hunkered hollow of your numbness about tiny things like what to wear for work, no genuine idea what to cook for dinner, yet still what movie to watch, what food to order or bigger decisions like which house to buy? You are aware that you have to make decisions; soon execute the plan, but the deadening effect sucks out all the life’s glory in that very moment.
This is decision fatigue.
Dr. MacLean, a psychiatrist and chief wellness officer at Henry Ford Health System says that decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse. The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult it can become.”
Whatever we do, physical or mental work it requires energy and making endless decisions at work, social dealings, deciding for our children, and even planning a holiday all need energy resources. When you are experiencing decision fatigue, every decision you have to make feels like climbing an Everest cliff without your oxygen mask in place. Exhausting! And even though you may be sapped mentally, your body too freezes doing smaller tasks.
Dr. MacLean says that “by the time the average person goes to bed, they’ve made over 35,000 decisions and all of those decisions take time and energy and certainly can deplete us.”
“Repetitive experience serves to intensify the hopelessness — talents that never lead to achievement, whether because again and again energies are scattered in too many directions or because the difficulties arising in any creative process are enough to deter the person from further pursuit. This may apply as well to love affairs, marriages, friendships, which are shipwrecked one after another. Such repeated failures are as disheartening as is the experience of laboratory rats when, conditioned to jump into a certain opening for food, they jump again and again only to find it barred.”
– Karen Horney
The Social Experiment:
When three Israeli prisoners in 2011, appeared before a panel of three judges to be granted parole, the judges granted freedom to only one of them, even though all three of them had completed a minimum of two-thirds of their sentences and were eligible for parole. The basis was all about timing. Researchers analyzed more than 1,100 judgements over the span of a year, where prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, while those who appeared later in the day were paroled less than 10% of the time. Since this was a study by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University they concluded that the judges were not biased toward some prisoners but like every human being were succumbing to the occupational hazard of doing the ceaseless mental work of judging case after case. Other studies also showed that managers like CFOs are prone to disastrous dawdlings making faulty decisions late in the evening!
Studies have found that individuals have a daily threshold to make decisions and once that threshold depletes it starts to set into fatigue. The process of choosing may itself drain some of our resources.
Maybe for you and me, we don’t have to deal with criminals or juggle daily between life and death emergencies like doctors, yet the act of dealing with life is a stream of ever-demanding decisions to be made. Some are taxing, others are not.
The rapid rate of life, the number of decisions in an hour, the many things to keep account of, in a busy city man’s or woman’s life, seem monstrous…
– William James
Related Article: How to Cope with Decision Fatigue?
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