Five Ways to Avoid Decision Fatigue

We face hundreds of choices everyday. Your ability to make the best choices can eventually run out due to decision fatigue.  Learning how to manage your decision-making can help you avoid feeling drained and conserve your mental energy. Here are five ways to avoid decision fatigue.

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Are you looking for a space where you will learn to improve your mental strength, emotional health, and heal your insecurities from the inside out? Take the first step to living a more meaningful life with the better me with Body Five Breeze podcast. I'm your host, Bree. I'm a certified personal trainer, entrepreneur, and mother of three. I've helped empower thousands of women to take action through fitness, nutrition, meditation, personal development, and aligning thoughts with action. This podcast is for those who are ready to feel inspired and motivated to live a more purposeful life. Let's grow together. If you don't take any action when you begin to not care or you hit decision fatigue about small things, it might end up affecting your health, your goals, and your productivity. The inability of making decisions or often taking the wrong ones or making the easiest choice can have a dramatic impact over your entire life. This podcast is dedicated to decision fatigue and how you can not fall into that trap. Let's get started. Welcome to the podcast. How are you? I hope you're having an amazing day. We are actually talking about decision fatigue. And this might be a foreign concept to you, but I talk about this a lot with my clients because a lot of times when you experience decision fatigue, you don't realize that you're experiencing it until someone points it out to you. So I'm here to teach you all about what it is, how you can avoid decision fatigue, and how you can overcome it so that you can reach your goals. So, first off, I want to start with a quote that I love from James Clear out of the book Atomic Habits. If you haven't read it, it's amazing. I talk about it in like four podcasts because it's that good. Um, but here's the quote: he says, as it turns out, your willpower is like a muscle. And similar to your muscles in the body, your willpower can get fatigued when you use it over and over again. Every time you make a decision, it's like doing another rep in the gym. Similar to how your muscles get tired at the end of a workout, the strength of your willpower fades as you make more decisions. End quote. So I love this analogy because it's very visual. Like you, you know, as a trainer and as you know, you're probably working out if you're a client. Um, when you use a muscle over and over and over, it does get fatigued, right? And that is the same with your willpower. And it's very visual. So the interesting part is yes, when you work your muscle, you are fatigued, but then when you rest, the next day you wake up and you feel refreshed again. Decision making is the same. So when you make too many decisions during the day, it can drain your energy and your mental brain power. And then you go into the mode where you're just like, oh, I don't care, I don't care. Or you will actually make the easiest decision possible because you're tired. So when the energy to make the decision is low, your willpower will also be low. And so here's the interesting part there are ways that you can actually help yourself so that you're not draining that energy. Because everyone has a reserve of mental energy, and every decision we make draws from that energy. Whether it's like what I'm gonna wear today or choosing not to eat that candy, it requires mental resources. So if you're depleted, all of a sudden you just don't care. And that's what we're talking about. So you end up caving and you do eat the dessert because you know didn't plan well or you're just tired. You made too many decisions during the day. So, how do you beat decision fatigue? If you don't take any action when you begin not caring about small things, it might end up affecting your work life, your productivity, your health goals. So the inability of making decisions or often taking the wrong ones can have a really dramatic impact over your, you know, your fitness, your personal life, your goals. So let's talk about this. Here are the five ways that you can avoid decision fatigue. Number one is establishing routines. Routines help you get rid of small decisions by turning them into habits. So by setting small decisions on autopilot, you'll have more time and energy for important decisions. So, for the sake of argument, let's say that your brain is capable of making a hundred decisions a day, which in reality we actually make thousands of decisions a day. But once that limit is reached, it simply refuses to work. Like, why is our why is our decision making capacity so limited? It's because those simple choices, like what are you eating for breakfast, what are you wearing to work, what kind of exercises should you do? All of these things add up. And all these things, well, most of them, can be decided beforehand. And so that is the key. Like, why do you think that Steve Jobs always wears the same outfit every day? Right? Or, for example, this is interesting, Barack Obama has someone else pick out his clothes and lay them out the night before. So it's one less decision that he has to make. So the goal here is to be proactive in your life. So set your clothes out the night before when you have your workout, have your water bottle ready, meal prep your food. For me, I don't know why, but lunch is so hard for me. I'm just always working and it's really hard for me to take a break and then go decide what I want to eat. Like I don't want to sit and make it, I don't want to make the decision. I'm tired. I make decisions all day. I'm delegating all day long. The last thing I want is to think about what I'm gonna eat for lunch. So sometimes if I'm not prepared, it won't be the best option. It might be, you know, whatever is quickest, and that might not be the healthiest. So I've learned about myself, I always have to make extra dinner so that I can like measure it out and have it prepped for lunch the next day. And that's my new routine. That's just what I do out of habit. And every single day I go down, warm it up, eat, go back and finish work. And it's never something that I have to think about. So then I'm always eating a healthy lunch. So have a plan so that you know what you're gonna eat, how much you're gonna eat, when are you gonna work out? What are you gonna wear? All those decisions you've already made before. Um, okay, the next one is learn to prioritize. So it's no news to anyone that not all the decisions that you're making are equal in value and importance. So most of the time our brain needs to decide, like, you know, spontaneously, some of these decisions. And sometimes they can be scheduled. So you have to prioritize your goals. So when you're dealing with the most important goals, if you can, you need to decide those first. So, for example, like schedule your workout in the morning whenever possible, because that's when you're the most productive. Or let's say you work, you want to schedule your most important meetings of the day at the beginning of the day. So those are your most important tasks because you know that's when you're gonna be more on your game than at the end of the day, right? Um, the next one is group together similar tasks. So compartmentalizing allows you to decide on multiple tasks all at one time. So instead of thinking through separately, like, oh, I don't want to spend time on deciding what to eat every single day, then make that decision once for the week. So, what I do is on Sunday night, I will sit down, I'll write out all of the dinners that I'm gonna cook that week. I order my groceries, I have it all done. So it's one less decision that I have to make during the week. I just know what I just look at my schedule. Okay, you know, Mondays is chicken fajitas, I've already gone the grocery shopping. It's just one less thing. So you want to automate as many things as you can. Um, all right, and then the next one is set deadlines for timely decisions. This is actually really hard for me because I'm a seven, so I actually have a hard time making decisions and I will put it off. It's in our human nature to avoid making difficult decisions, and so we postpone them for later. And this is how procrastination was born. So feeling decision fatigue when tough choices are to be made is not at all uncommon. One way to overcome this is to allow yourself some time to think. So set a deadline for when you need to take a decision and then include a break and allocate time for that. So maybe it's five minutes, one hour, the end of the day, the end of the week. Whatever the decision is, set a timeline for it if it's a big one. And then knowing that there's a certain time for your decision will help keep yourself accountable, and then it'll give you the opportunity to pull yourself together and make the right choice. The last one is prioritize self-care. So decision fatigue and burnout are two sides of the same coin. They always follow each other and almost always go together. So, for this reason, the last point of this podcast is dedicated to encouraging you to prioritize self-care. And that might look different for everybody. I think the number one thing to prioritizing self-care is make sure you're getting enough sleep. Because being dedicated to your goals can oftentimes lead to lack of sleep. And even though it might seem like a good idea now, in the long run, the lack of sleep is really usually what makes people make wrong choices. It leads to your health problems, it'll affect your productivity. So do not underestimate getting a good night's sleep. Like you don't need to stay up and scroll Instagram, you don't need to stay up and watch Netflix, prioritize your sleep. And also, I'm gonna put a little plug in there to prioritize your healthy diet. Because when you eat healthy and you're not skipping meals and you're prioritizing, making sure that you get those macronutrients that your brain needs, the energy to function properly, most of that energy is coming from your food, right? So make sure that you're eating healthy, nutritious foods. And that's my little plug because obviously I'm a trainer and a nutrition specialist, and I know directly how food affects your brain fog, your energy levels, your productivity. So make sure that you're making time for that. And um that's it. That is all of the steps that I have for you to avoid decision fatigue. So once you start using the strategies, the strategies that we discussed, your capacity of making decisions should visibly improve. Living a healthy lifestyle with a well-thought-out schedule and with less unimportant decisions will help you in more ways than just beating decision fatigue. So, to recap, your takeaway from this podcast is to avoid decision fatigue, you're going to establish a routine and be productive. So you're trying to autonomize as many habits as possible. Number two, you're learning to prioritize. Three, you're grouping similar tasks together. Four, you're setting deadlines for yourself. And five, you are prioritizing self-care. All right, that's it. That's all I have for you today. Thank you so much. And I will talk to you next time. Thank you for joining us in today's episode. If you liked the content and want to hear more, remember to hit that subscribe button and write a review. As a small business owner, I appreciate it more than you know. If you are looking for a program to help with self-confidence, to lose weight, get in shape, and work on your mental, physical, and emotional health, check out my training programs on www.bodyby.com. My team and I help to hold you accountable through the Body Bibree app, where you log in to see all your workouts, custom meal plan made specifically for you and your needs, and communication through the messenger. You are never alone when you're on the Body Bible training program. Click the link in the show notes to get more information on how to transform your life from the inside out.