Decision Fatigue

How many decisions do you make in a day? 50? 100?

Research estimates that we make nearly 270 decisions every day on food alone! If that is a surprise to you, then your mind will be blown when you learn how many decisions we make in total each day.

35,000 times

That’s right. The average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day. 

Research shows that the more decisions we have to make, the poorer our choices become. 

This is known as decision fatigue.

What is decision fatigue?

In simple terms, it refers to the decline in our ability to make sound decisions. The constant need to make countless choices throughout the day leads to feelings of stress, exhaustion, and an inability to make well-informed, logical, or well-researched decisions.

The more decisions you’re faced with, and the longer the decision-making process goes on, the more drained you become. Each decision you’re tasked with chips away at your self-control. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where your decision-making abilities falter, and you might even start avoiding decisions altogether.

This is because your brain will resort to taking shortcuts, even if they lead to poor choices, just to cope with the sheer volume of decisions you’re confronted with. This happens because your brain’s primary objective is to manage the overwhelming number of decisions on your plate.

One of the biggest things that contribute to decision fatigue is following diets. The extensive food rules and lists of food that you’re ‘not allowed’ to have, mean that you’re always trying to make decisions about what to eat. This impacts your willpower even further and causes you to make decisions that only sabotage results. 

How do we make decisions?

We use various methods of decision-making, and not all of them are necessarily beneficial.

Prioritizing and Reflecting: This method stands as one of the most effective ways to make decisions. It involves dedicating substantial energy, thought, and effort to choices that hold the greatest significance in your life.

Balancing: This approach entails carefully evaluating all available options before arriving at the best course of action. However, there’s a potential downside to this method, as it can sometimes lead to excessive contemplation, feeling overwhelmed, and even procrastination.

Delegating: When you delegate decisions, you entrust someone else with the task of choosing on your behalf.

Complying: This strategy involves opting for the most popular opinion, even if it doesn’t necessarily align with your desires.

Impulsive: Making impulsive decisions means choosing the initial option presented to you without giving it thorough consideration.

Avoidance: This occurs when you’re either unwilling or too burdened to make a decision, resulting in you avoiding the choice altogether. However, it’s important to recognize that avoiding a decision still amounts to choosing some manner.

To understand how these decision-making strategies work, let’s look at a decision that we all make every day — what to have for dinner.

Prioritising and reflecting — You make a decision based on your health and fitness goals, the health needs of your family, and the time you have to prepare a meal. The decision is made ahead of time and when you can think clearly. This will usually result in you cooking a simple, family-friendly, healthy meal that takes no more than 30 minutes to prepare.

Balancing — This may involve thinking about dozens of options throughout your day, but not being able to make a solid decision because you’re worried that someone in the family won’t be happy with the meal you cook, or you become overwhelmed with all the choices available.

Delegating — You ask your partner to organize dinner, even though they are likely to organise something that may not fully align with your health and fitness goals.

Complying — You haven’t organised dinner and you’re really too tired to be bothered. The kids decide they want pizza so you agree, even though it’s not something you want to eat yourself.

Impulsive — You decide on the way home that you really feel like a burger, so you head to the nearest drive-thru and buy burgers, fries and drinks for the whole family.

Avoidance — It’s been a long day and you’re tired and cranky and you have no idea what you want for dinner. You pour yourself a glass of wine and then spend the night snacking on whatever you can find in the house.

As you can see, the decision about what to eat for dinner can lead down many paths, and not all of them support your goal of long-term weight loss.

What decisions do we make?

Deciding what to eat each day doesn’t just involve dinner. We eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks in between meals and sometimes dessert. We wonder whether we should have wine or water, beer or soft drink, or nothing at all. We question whether we should have dessert, and if so, what. And then there’s the decision about what time to eat.

But our lives are not only concerned with making decisions about food. Other important common decisions we make include:

• Where to live
• Where to send the kids to school
• What to wear each day
• What to watch on TV
• Which route to take to work
• What you’ll listen to on the way to work
• When to exercise
• When to do the grocery shopping
• What to buy at the shops
• When to clean the house
• When you wash the car
• What your plans are for the weekend
• Who you spend time with
• Who will drive the kids to their events
• Whether you’ll let your kids go to that party
• What movie you’ll watch
• What time you’ll take your lunch break
• Where you’ll eat lunch
• What time do you go to bed
• When you’ll get up the next day
• Whether you talk to your boss about a difficult client
• Whether you should apply for a new job
• Whether you should start your own business
• Where you’ll take a holiday
• Whether you should buy an investment property.

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of the decisions we make all the time, but it gives you some idea of why we can easily become fatigued when it comes to decision-making.

How it affects your weight

Decision fatigue will have a significant impact on your weight because you’ll end up making decisions that won’t necessarily line up with your weight loss goals.

Food and nutrition

In the above example when we looked at decisions involved in what to eat for dinner, you can see how not being able to make a well-considered, rational decision leads you to make poor choices. You can imagine how the effect of doing this every day, or even several times a week will compound over time. Yet this is a very common scenario for many people who struggle with their weight.

Exercise

We all know that regular exercise is important in order to lose weight. However, waking up every day and trying to decide when you’re going to fit it in will make it very difficult for you to be consistent with it. But this is what a lot of people do. They wake up and look at their schedule to see where they can squeeze in their workout, only to realise that they are too busy to get it done. Or if they pencil in a session at the end of the day, they usually decide they don’t feel like exercising and don’t do it. And so regular exercise never becomes a habit.

Stress levels

You can’t avoid making decisions, but having to make too many, or using your energy to make really important ones depletes you and leaves you feeling stressed, overwhelmed and burned out. As we know, stress is a metabolic blocker, which means it makes it incredibly hard to lose weight, even if you’re doing ‘all the right things’. You can read more about metabolic blockers in our blog about Why nutrition and fitness are the last things you should focus on to lose weight.

People-pleasing

As we have seen, one of the ways we make decisions — usually when we suffer from decision fatigue — is to comply. In other words, do what others want us to do, which is people-pleasing. If you happen to want to do what other people do, that’s fine. But if decision fatigue is causing you to ‘go with the flow’ and keep others happy, you have a problem. 

How to avoid decision fatigue

It’s impossible to avoid making decisions, but you can take steps to avoid decision fatigue so you can lose weight and keep it off.

Structure your week

Structuring your week is one of the best things you can do. Not only will it remove stress, but it will also help you find time to do all the things you need to do throughout your week, including things to help you lose weight, without the drama of having to make decisions all the time. Structuring your week means scheduling time:

• regular times for your workout
• to plan your meals for the week
• for your weekly grocery shop
• time for your weekly meal prep
• a regular bedtime routine
• regular times for breakfast, lunch and dinner
• with your partner/family
• for rest
• for relaxation
• for work, school and study
• time for kids’ activities.

Many people think that structure is limiting and prevents them from living freely. However, structuring your week means that you find time to do all you need to do instead of wasting it doing other things, like scrolling mindlessly through social media.

Putting instructions also simplifies your life. When you have set times to do things, there’s no more thinking or decision-making to be made. For example, if you schedule workouts first thing in the morning and stick to this routine, you won’t need to decide when to fit in your exercise. Similarly, if you make a weekly meal plan there are no decisions to be made about what’s for dinner for the rest of the week. Structuring your week will reduce the number of decisions you need to make, and will help you avoid decision fatigue.

Do weekly meal prep

It’s one thing to plan your meals, but if you can spend some time during your week on meal prep, you’ll be saving yourself, even more, time and stress. Meal prep is a structured process to ensure you consistently have healthy meals in order to achieve your weight loss goals. Quite simply, planning and preparing your meals in advance removes the need to decide what you eat each day.

Meal prep also eliminates the likelihood of falling off the wagon with your eating. Human behaviour dictates that we’ll always eat the food that’s readily available, regardless of our intention to lose weight. Having healthy food ready to go, means you won’t run the risk of making poor food choices due to decision fatigue — because you’ll already have your meals ready to eat! 

Set boundaries

Setting boundaries is a simple strategy to help remove the need to make so many decisions all the time.

We’ve already seen how too many decisions lead to poorer choices. However, setting boundaries, or non-negotiable behaviours that you choose, takes away the stress of constantly making decisions. The more you live by your boundaries, the more they will develop into habits — powerful subconscious routines of behaviours that are repeated regularly, which will either support weight loss or sabotage it.

Some examples of boundaries that will help you reduce the decisions in your life include:

• I only eat dessert on the weekend (removes decisions around dessert during the week)
• I eat out twice a week (removes decisions around whether you will eat out)
• I train before breakfast (removes decision around when you exercise)
• I only watch one hour of TV per night (removes decisions around how long you will watch TV)

Prioritise sleep

Research has shown that sleep deprivation can impact your decision-making abilities. Prioritising your sleep and ensuring you are well-rested each night will help you make better decisions the next day, and will help you avoid making impulsive, complicit or poor decisions.

Make important decisions early in the day 

Of course, it’s not possible to avoid all decision-making. But because decision fatigue kicks in the longer you’ve been making decisions, it makes sense to make important decisions early in the day, where possible. If you have several decisions to make, list them in order of priority and importance. The more it will impact your life, the higher on the list it should go.

How our Weight Loss Program Eliminates Decision Fatigue

The good news is that when I work with you get you the necessary structure that eliminates decision fatigue. At any given time, all of my clients know when to follow through with a plan, and how often to do certain activities. They are also clear on the exact habits they need to work on and the right action steps to take. All of this means that they continually progress, without becoming stuck, frustrated or overwhelmed.

When you follow a diet, you’re left to figure all of this out for yourself and often you’ll end up spending your time and energy on the wrong things. For example, if you were to design your training program at the gym chances are you’d choose the exercises you’re good at or familiar with, rather than the ones that will get you results. Furthermore, when left to design your program, you’re likely to do too much exercise and not leave enough time for rest and recovery, which will only result in you becoming injured or burned out

Following diets also means you’re doing a lot of guesswork. For example, if you’re focusing on weight loss by controlling your food it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of worrying that carbs are the problem, or dairy, or gluten. So you constantly second-guess yourself and experiment with different types of food, often mixing and matching different diet programs to find the ‘right one’. However, this approach only creates more problems.

I understand that by eliminating decision fatigue you have clarity over what you need to do. And with clarity comes power — the power to take the right actions. When you are fatigued from making too many decisions, you’ll end up making the wrong choices.

In summary…

• Decision fatigue is the deterioration of our ability to make good decisions. The longer you have to make decisions, or the more decisions you have to make, the more fatigued you become.
• It leads to poor choices or avoiding making decisions (which means you give your power to other people).
• Decision fatigue affects your weight because you either make poor decisions that don’t support your goals, or you avoid making decisions at all, which means you won’t be taking the right actions.
• Reducing the number of decisions you make each day is the best way to avoid decision fatigue.
• You can reduce your decision-making load by adding structure to your week, setting boundaries, doing weekly meal prep, and prioritising your sleep.
• My Weight Loss Program removes the decision fatigue associated with dieting, which helps you make better decisions, and get better results.

Speaking of important decisions, isn’t it time you joined us?