Sometimes it’s not the big decisions that wear us down. It’s all the small ones we make each day. Learn how simplifying choices can help reduce stress. Part of the “Wellness Matters” blog series.
Have you ever noticed that deciding what to eat for dinner can feel harder than making an important work decision?
Perhaps these scenarios also feel familiar: You open the refrigerator door. You’re hungry and there are lots of choices, but you can’t decide what to eat. You turn on Netflix to wind down but spend half an hour trying to figure out what to watch. Your trip to the drugstore to grab toothpaste and deodorant turned into an hour of wasted time because you couldn’t decide which products would be best. You opened your inbox and immediately felt overwhelmed because you didn’t know where to start.
My hunch is you saw yourself in at least one of the examples above, especially if it was the end of the day and you were tired. The smallest of decisions often feel hardest when we’re depleted.
The problem isn’t that we’re lazy or that we’re fundamentally bad at making decisions. The problem is something called cognitive load.
Your Brain Has Limited Bandwidth
Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort your brain is using at any given moment. As demands increase, the brain has fewer resources available for thinking clearly, remembering information, solving problems, and making decisions. Our cognitive load shifts over the course of time and is influenced by things like stress, sleep, hormones, and how much is on our plate.
Imagine your brain as a computer with dozens of tabs open. Each tab uses a little memory. One or two tabs aren't a problem, but eventually everything slows down. The computer isn't broken. It's simply trying to manage too much at once.
The Science of Decision Fatigue
The brain has a lot to do at any given moment to keep us alive and functional. Thus, it must carefully allocate and limit what resources it devotes to certain activities. It devotes a certain amount of energy and capacity to things like working memory (which allows us to temporarily hold and manipulate a very small amount of information), attentional bandwidth (how many things you can focus on at once), and executive function (how many cognitive tasks you can do at one time).
Every decision — from what toothpaste to buy to what partner to marry — requires your brain to pay attention, compare options, inhibit competing choices, and commit to a course of action. Individually these tasks require very little effort. Repeated hundreds of times throughout the day, they become surprisingly costly.
As decisions accumulate, we enter a state of decision fatigue. Just as your muscles fatigue after repeated repetitions, your brain becomes less efficient after making decision after decision. As decision fatigue sets in, we become more impulsive, procrastinate more, lose patience more easily, and often default to the simplest rather than the best option.
The Hidden Decisions We Don't Notice
Every day, we are asked to make countless decisions: what to eat, what to wear, whether to answer this email now or later, which task to tackle first, whether to work out, what to watch, what to buy, how often to check our phones, and on and on it goes.
Individually, each decision seems insignificant. Collectively, they become exhausting. It's usually not one big decision that's draining you. It's dozens of small ones before lunch, and hundreds more by the end of the day.
Simplify to Create Capacity
The key to dealing with decision fatigue is making a shift. Rather than asking, “How can I become more productive?” ask, “What decisions deserve my attention, and which ones can I simplify?”
For example, plan all of your meals at the beginning of the week, so that you only have to decide what you’re going to eat for dinner one time. Create a recurring grocery order, so that you don’t have to decide what food to buy each week. Create a morning routine, allowing your brain to run on autopilot each morning. Have a weekly exercise schedule, so that you don’t have to decide each day if you’re going to work out and what you’re going to do. Choose blocks during your day to read and send emails. Automate paying your bills. Create standard work routines. Use calendar templates.
The point in simplifying is not to create rigidity or to forgo variety or creativity. It’s to preserve cognitive energy for what matters most to you. Think of it as having a decision budget. Imagine waking up each morning with a limited budget of high-quality decisions. You can spend that budget on things that matter most to you, or gradually use it up on countless small choices that could have been simplified.
So, for example, if you love to cook, you wouldn’t necessarily automate your grocery order or meal planning. But if cooking is low on your priority list, the fewer repetitive decisions you have to make in this area of life, the better.
Try It: Protect Your Decision Bucket Exercise
This week, choose one category of your life in which you could simplify decisions. It might be clothing, meals, scheduling, morning routine, exercise, work tasks, emails, or something else.
Then, automate the decisions in this area. You might do this by making the decisions about this category of your life one time rather than many times over the course of the week; for example, making a weekly meal plan over the weekend; choosing the days you’ll exercise and what you will do and putting these in your calendar; or plugging a week’s worth of work tasks into your calendar on Monday morning.
Observe:
- Did you think about the area of life less?
- Did you have more mental energy?
- Did you feel calmer?
- Did you have greater capacity for work or relationships?
The Takeaway
Remember, simplicity is not about doing less because you're incapable. It's about protecting your attention for what matters most. Every unnecessary decision you remove frees up mental space for the decisions that truly deserve your attention: how you care for your health, connect with the people you love, solve meaningful problems, and live according to your values.
Sometimes reducing stress isn't about adding another wellness practice. Sometimes it's about giving your brain fewer decisions to make.
This article is part of “Wellness Matters,” a blog series created to explore health and wellness issues and share evidence-based tools you can use to strengthen your well-being.
Found it helpful? Subscribe to the “Wellness Matters” newsletter to receive new posts directly in your inbox.
About the Author
Michelle Pearce, PhD, is professor and director of the Integrative Health and Wellness certificate program at the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies.
Dr. Pearce is a clinical psychologist who researches the relationship between religion/spirituality, coping, and health, as well as the integration of spirituality into the practice of psychotherapy. Her areas of clinical expertise include cognitive behavioral therapy, mind-body stress reduction methods, existential issues, and behavioral medicine to address the intersection of mental and physical illness. Read her full biography.