The Roots of Decision Fatigue
I have 30 minutes to write.
Should I work on that blog post I’ve been thinking about?
Do I even want to blog?
Oh wait, I should probably draft a newsletter because I can’t remember the last time I sent one out.
But should I start a Substack?
I really need to work on the fourth draft of my memoir.
Maybe I should just read a book. Or take a nap. I’d really love a nap.
I did write a few sentences of a short story in my notebook last week… maybe I should see where that goes.
Today we’re exploring a reader question about decision-making:
“I recently excavated a big barrier to my creative work with my therapist: decision fatigue. My life contains so many choices, by the time I sit down to my writing, I’m spent. Even having to choose a book to read or a rare show to watch turns me off from enjoying those things. One of the solutions to saving more of that energy for my writing would be to streamline other areas of my life, so I am moving in that direction while also recognizing that my life circumstance and personality rarely adhere to anything fixed or “disciplined” for long. The heart-rending piece of this for me is that always, always when there is something I can’t carry, the writing is what I let go of first. Your podcast and resources are comforting and encouraging to me, because you aren’t one more voice suggesting that my struggles with these things mean I’m not a real writer. You clearly get things done! Can you share about decision fatigue and how to be flexible and responsive to your life and energy without undermining the work you hope to do?”
What is Decision Fatigue?
This is an incredibly relatable question and one that’s worth looking at from a few different angles. First, let’s define decision fatigue.
The American Medical Association describes simply as “the mental exhaustion someone experiences after making a lot of decisions.” Pretty straightforward there, but worth noting that this is understood to have a cumulative effect, so the more decisions you make, the harder it becomes to make additional decisions. And no wonder it feels challenging because, according to a study conducted at Cornell University, it’s estimated that we make approximately 226 decisions every day on food alone, and the average adult is said to make about 35,000 decisions daily, which I admit is a pretty staggering amount to wrap your head around.
The point, I think, is that your mind is always sorting information and making choices and weighing pros and cons, consciously and unconsciously, so it completely makes sense that all this brain power would eventually turn into feelings of languishing or being tired and just wanting to plop in front of the tv, but then also not knowing what to watch.
In addition to making one decision after another and having that process create a sense of fatigue, you can also experience decision fatigue when you have an abundance of options. Clinical psychologist Carla Marie Manly says that “although humans tend to enjoy having a variety of choices, too many choices can lead to mental and emotional exhaustion. For example, having too many options—whether in the grocery store, catalog, or online retailer—can lead to feelings of confusion and dissatisfaction.” … and I think you could easily add “your writing life” to this list.
Prefer to listen? Tune in below to this episode on the Wild Words Podcast
Step 1: Streamline Other Areas of Your Life
The idea laid out in the question of ‘streamlining other areas of life’ can absolutely help as a first step.
For example, if you choose what you’re going to wear the day before and set the hangers in a designated spot in the closet, if you meal plan for the week, if you pack school lunches after dinner so they’re ready to go in the morning, if you make tomorrow’s to-do list for work when you’re finishing up for the day—all these kinds of systems can free up space, which is really helpful.
But in terms of staying ‘flexible and responsive,’ this becomes a question about clarity. While streamlining is great, we can’t just do it in our closet or with our dinners and expect the clarity to come in our writing life without effort (although wouldn’t that be nice!).
For this, I suggest the exercise of 1) dropping into our current circumstances and look around from that reality, not what we wish our schedule looked like and 2) getting clear on what our priorities are creatively. Because if we haven’t done that, even if we’ve saved mental energy by making fewer decisions in our personal life, when we come into a pocket of space and then think ‘oh wait, what should I be doing right now?’ we’re just creating another opportunity to spiral into that decision fatigue mindset and feel burnt out instead of energized.
James Clear writes about behavioral psychology and he says: “If something isn’t important to you, eliminate it. Making decisions about unimportant things, even if you have the time to do so, isn’t a benign task. It’s pulling precious energy from the things that matter.”
It can feel harsh on a first read, but then I read it again. “It’s pulling precious energy from the things that matter.”
That feels very, very true, especially when you layer on the truth that time is finite. We always wish we had more of it, and the fact of the matter is, we likely will always have more ideas than we’re able to pursue at one time.
That’s just the nature of things. So what I take from this quote isn’t to suggest that the three ideas for your novel or your stack of poems or your blog posts or your Instagram account or your notebook full of scribbles isn’t important, but something has to become the priority otherwise you won’t actually make progress.
And when we don’t make progress, that’s when the frustration sets in, the lethargy, the fatigue, and what I call, the season of discontent.
Step 2: Build Rituals & Reflection Time
After you’ve eliminated things and decided where to put your energy, it’s also important to build in rituals and reflection time to see if it’s still working. You can do this seasonally, or even monthly if that feels good to you, but it’s an opportunity to check in and see if what you’re doing still feels aligned. If you want to shift gears and do something else for a while, you can create space to do that with a lot of intention behind it.
Over many years having gone through this exercise myself, I’ve reluctantly come to terms with the fact that I can’t do as much as I once did, which is the product of time and experience. One of the ways I meet this reality with acceptance is by asking the central question of what is most urgent right now. And not in a hyper-productivity sense of urgency, but just, what’s pressing on my heart? What story is rising to the surface?
It’s a really simple question, but one that can help clarify where you’d like to put the energy that matters, and that will move the needle in terms of the direction you’d like your writing life to go..
It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll only be doing that one thing and one thing only, but if your dream is to write a book, and you’re also spending time doing all the things like I listed at the top of the episode, it will feel exhausting and frustrating because that fire you have for this particular project won’t have an opportunity to burn when you keep drifting back and forth between a half-hearted blog, for example.
In my experience, something always needs to be deprioritized temporarily.
The decision fatigue coin has two sides. There’s the intuitive side of listening to your longings, journaling about what you really want, and believing that what rises up is right for you right now. Then there’s the practical bit where, as I mentioned, you have to look around at your circumstances and get clear on where those pockets of time are how much time you can devote to your writing and and what’s feasible for you in this season of life.
The first time I really did this was back in 2014 or 2015—at that time I was working on my manuscript for the Eat This Poem cookbook, but I was also freelancing for a local magazine, working full-time, getting ready to have a baby, blogging, sending a newsletter, and running a food activism website for bloggers. Even just typing all that, I’m reminded of how overstretched I was, and that’s when I knew something needed to change.
I shared this exercise on the essentialism for writers podcast episode, but I got a stack of post-it notes and wrote down everything I was doing and stuck them to the wall and rearranged them before realizing that focusing on my newsletter and my manuscript were the two most important things. Everything else had to go. It wasn’t easy, but it’s why I love the exercise because you can stand back, walk away, consider, and process the decisions slowly, which can be an important part of integrating the change and knowing that it’s the right choice for you.
Fast-forward to 2020 and when I did a version of this exercise again, it became crystal clear what needed to go and what needed to stay, both personally and creatively. My memoir was it. I kept my newsletter because that’s a core part of connecting with readers and building relationships, and I had to de-prioritize social media and basically everything else. And you know what? I wrote a whole draft because I let (almost) everything else go for a while.
Step 3: Prioritize Your Creativity
I also want to address the part of the question relating to writing being the first thing to go. I understand the impulse to put it aside at the first sign of overwhelm because it’s true that if writing isn’t your full-time job (which, for most of us, it’s not) or if it doesn’t provide income to support yourself or your family, in may appear frivolous and easy to let go of, and yet, writing is essential to who you are.
It’s life-giving, and nourishing, and helps you process the world, and is a source of encouragement for others, and truly, truly essential.
Sometimes it’s a matter of not feeling like you have the support to prioritize it, or self-doubt is playing a role. This is when I usually recommend having conversations with your family or the people you share space with to get them on board. That way when it’s writing time it’s writing time, or they can step in and help out with something around the house, or watch the kids, or whatever it is to protect that time for you. Sometimes that needs to be a mutually agreed upon decision in order for that time to happen.
In this case too, I’m also a big fan of getting back to basics. Pen and paper. 10-15 minutes in the evening before bed. Just get to the page and don’t overthink it. Write a haiku—that’s 17 syllables. I did this early on in the pandemic because it’s all I could do, but I was still writing. Sometimes that’s enough to sustain us for a while, especially if life is really happening and quality writing time feels out of reach or unpredictable. Writing without the expectations of what it needs to become can be a really nourishing choice.
Step 4: Remember It’s Not You, It’s the System
Decision fatigue is often lumped in with indecisiveness, which is the inability to make a decision, and I was recently listening to a podcast episode of We Can Do Hard Things where Dr. Becky discussed Internal Family Systems. She brought up a really interesting theory suggesting that the inability to make a decision isn’t a personality trait or a flaw of some kind, but a result of not being able to fully express your emotions in childhood.
This means that as an adult, when you’re presented with a series of choices, you may be less practiced with tuning in and feeling what you truly need, which presents as indecisiveness. I haven’t done enough research on this personally, but wanted to offer this perspective because when we encounter decision fatigue, it’s really easy to blame ourselves in situations where we feel like we should be doing better or being more productive or having more energy, but the truth is, there are systems that are bigger than us or circumstances not entirely within our control that inform our lives in subtle and not so subtle ways—a global pandemic being one example, or models of productivity leftover from the industrial revolution that seep into our consciousness even if it doesn’t feel good to us—so we’re not doing anything wrong and feeling this way isn’t a character flaw.
Decision fatigue can also be viewed as a response to burnout, but again, there’s likely more going on than just your willpower or ability to be focused and disciplined. We live in a complex, modern world and are constantly needing to refine and redefine how we work and what’s important to us, and there can be a lot of friction that makes it difficult to do that.
Step 5: Rethink Your Relationship With Time
Another way to think about the topic of decision fatigue is through our relationship with time. Time is the resource we want more of, and can often feel like an adversary, especially in our creativity. Through the recommendation of a former podcast guest, Heidi Fiedler, I recently read the book Beloved Economies: Transforming How we Work, and it gave me a lot to think about and some insights that I feel are relevant to this conversation.
“One of the most loveless aspects of business as usual is the expectation of efficiency and overwork to get the job done. This way of work takes a tremendous toll on physical, mental, and emotional well-being… It also affects the ability to be wise. In a state of overwhelm, it is harder to tap into the wisdom within and around us.”
To give a real-life example, my memoir manuscript has been a priority for a long time now. That means things like the podcast, which is also important, have needed to slot in around it. A couple of weekends ago, I felt the familiar decision fatigue energy and looking at my planner to try and figure it all out. I was also in the middle of talking with my husband about some upcoming travel plans, so a lot of life decisions were also happening—pretty quickly I noticed my anxiety was increasing and I was feeling a bit dysregulated and needed to take time to care for myself before I did anything else.
After that, I could anchor back to the fact that I knew my my priority was in my writing life, and I had to start there.
Now with this season of the podcast, my loose plan was to release episodes every two weeks, which felt manageable with my current set of circumstances, but then I ended up coming to the close on a final round of book revisions—right around the time that my anxiety was flaring—and even though this episode was “supposed” to be published on the 14th, I realized that was a self-imposed deadline.
I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do last week, in part because I spent a day and a half really needing to tend to my nervous system, so I had to do the thing that I tell everyone to do, and also need to remind myself of on many occasions, which is to practice self-compassion.
I took care of myself. I looked at my to-do list, and then I crossed a lot of things off and decided to let it go. Was I giving up on the podcast entirely? Nope. I was just pushing the episode back a week. And it made space for me to make progress and finish something that’s really, really important. After that, I showed up for the episode feeling more refreshed and intentional, rather than trying to squeeze it in and having the whole experience be more frantic.
And that brings me to the second quote I wanted to share from Beloved Economies:
“Trusting there is time means believing there is always time available to prioritize engagement and care in how we work. This practice invites us to question the assumed urgency that is so pervasive in business as usual and to be critical of the frazzled state which so many of us frequently operate. This practice applies the paradox of going slow to go fast. It means strategically investing time at the front end of a process—and at points along the way—to nourish the solid foundations necessary for lasting transformation.”
I love this quote, and I also want to acknowledge that operating in this way, where we are in alignment with self-trust and understand that time is expansive and renewable is not always easy. It’s a practice we need to cultivate.
It comes down to looking at your life circumstances and the ways you can streamline, while simultaneously getting clear on what takes priority in your creative life right now. Then, if necessary, advocating for yourself in ways that can help get you some of the support you might need. All while offering compassion for the fact that we live in systems that want us to keep feeling unproductive and unworthy as a means to work harder and deplete our resources. It’s a lot.
I wish I had a more magical answer or a more direct route to truly overcoming decision fatigue but, ultimately, I’ve found all of this really comes down to that practice. And reframing. And trusting. And being kind to ourselves. And noticing what works and doesn’t work and making adjustments.
