“Don’t make decisions at night.” We may have heard this advice from many places. This may be the experience of some seniors, but today let’s talk about the scientific reason behind this advice.

First, try to think about whether you have ever experienced the following:

• I woke up early and wanted to choose a perfect outfit for myself. I became entangled in the process of repeatedly choosing. Seeing that it was almost time to go out, I hurriedly grabbed an ordinary sweatshirt/T-shirt and sighed, “I don’t have any.” Now that you’ve worn your clothes, it’s time to buy clothes…”
• When I walked into the restaurant and looked at the dazzling array of dishes, I felt that I was not satisfied with anything less. In the end, I ordered too many dishes. I felt my heart bleed when I looked at my wallet after the checkout.
• Before going to bed at night, I passionately decided to make a fulfilling plan for a better tomorrow. But how do you allocate time and priority to tasks? I lost myself in this difficult process and finally gave up and decided to make plans for tomorrow…

In these situations, we often start with high emotions and end with “tired”. Although there are obviously many choices, we feel that there is “no choice”. This is because we experience “decision fatigue.”

What Is Decision Fatigue?

As the name suggests, “decision fatigue” is the “exhaustion state” that people encounter in the process of making decisions. In psychological research, “decision fatigue” is regarded as a symptom or manifestation of self-depletion.

Freud believed that the human spirit is divided into three parts – the ego (consciousness), the id (the pursuit of happiness), and the superego (the most moral self). The ego requires some form of energy to complete its task of mediating the conflicts between the id and superego.

Canadian psychologist Baumeister proposed the concept of “ego depletion” inspired by this theory: Human willpower is limited, and we are consuming our willpower all the time. It is self-depletion. For example, when we stay focused on doing something, we consume our willpower and engage in “self-depletion.”

When in a state of self-depletion, people will face risks such as reduced cognitive ability, and weakened psychological control, and are more likely to engage in irrational behavior.

When Does Decision Fatigue Occur?

In our lives, there are two common situations that can lead to decision fatigue:

Diverse choices lead to fatigue

• In common sense, people may tend to think that “more choices are better than fewer choices”, but this is not the case. On the one hand, diverse choices can cause decision fatigue, greatly increasing the likelihood that we make irrational choices.
• For example, I planned to go into the store and buy a pack of snacks to satisfy my craving. When I walked into the store, the dazzling shelves were filled with my favorite junk food. Each bag looked delicious, so I bought more.
• On the other hand, unlimited choices can lead people to become dissatisfied when choices are discouraging.
• For example, I plan to go into the store and buy a pack of snacks to satisfy my craving. When I go into the store, the dazzling shelves are full of my favorite junk food. Each bag looks delicious, but I don’t know what to buy, so I simply don’t buy it.
• Some merchants take advantage of this to create consumption traps: at the beginning, they enthusiastically introduce a large number of products to us and give us a large number of choices. After we are spoiled for choice, the possibility of making irrational consumption is greatly increased.
• However, merchants should also be careful: if this psychological mechanism is overused, it can be counterproductive and make people annoyed, thereby inhibiting consumption behavior.

Repeated decisions lead to fatigue

• Employees in some occupations may experience repetitive decision-making daily—making repeated, similar task choices every day, which can lead to decision fatigue.
• In Israel, parole boards regularly make decisions on a prisoner’s parole. The presiding judge will “interview” the prisoner and decide whether to parole the prisoner after the interview. Day after day, people find that a prisoner’s probability of being paroled has nothing to do with the crime he committed or his moral performance during his sentence, but with the time he went to the interview. Generally speaking, prisoners who go for interviews in the morning have a higher probability of being paroled. At high times, it reached 70%, but by the afternoon, this ratio dropped sharply to only 10%. This is because the presiding judge, in a state of exhaustion caused by repeated decision-making, will tend to choose an easier verdict – denying parole. After all, granting parole to prisoners is risky, and denying parole means reducing one’s own career risks.
• For patients with chronic diseases, doctors’ decisions play an important role in the patient’s treatment outcome. Choosing whether to perform surgery on a patient requires the doctor’s precise judgment, otherwise, it may affect the patient’s subsequent living conditions. Because doctors consult with a large number of patients every day, they also experience repetitive decision-making scenarios similar to those of a presiding judge. The study found that the last patient during a doctor’s shift was 33 percent less likely to be scheduled for surgery than the first patient.

Why Decision Fatigue Occurs

According to a US study, the average adult makes 35,000 decisions every day. (Don’t look at those staggering numbers. People make many decisions unconsciously. At this moment, your brain may be hesitating whether to continue reading this article.) Among the many decision-making options, people will inevitably experience fatigue. Scientists have done a lot of research on this for decades.

“Ego-depletion” model

• Baumeister believes that willpower helps us resist temptation in our daily actions, that is, exercise “self-control.” The process of self-control will cause us to suffer “self-depletion” in the following aspects:
• [Energy Resource Consumption] Our choice-making process consumes willpower resources that should be allocated to self-control, which leads to a reduction in our self-control level, making it easier to give up and make irrational choices.
• [Emotional Control] Under “self-depletion”, our emotions will also change. Emotional changes will cause the “self-regulation system” to adjust our behavior and guide us to make avoidance reactions – if the problem cannot be solved, we will simply stop halfway, and if we cannot decide, then we will simply not make a decision.
• [Physiological factors] Self-control behaviors consume a large amount of glucose. When blood sugar levels are low and cannot be efficiently mobilized to the brain (i.e. when insulin levels are low), self-regulation is more likely to fail.

Research has found that restoring glucose to adequate levels often improves self-control when we feel tired. For example, the probability of chronic patients being scheduled for surgery shows a downward trend from a high rate in the early morning to just before lunch, then returns to a high rate after the doctor performs lunch, and then declines again as time goes by.

However, the theory surrounding glucose remains controversial in academic circles. Skeptics argue that the brain’s overall use of energy is the same no matter what a person is doing, which is at odds with Baumeister’s notion that energy depletion affects willpower. Todd, who worked with Baumeister, was one of the skeptics. Although he believed in the existence of ego depletion, he never understood how this neural process could be caused solely by changes in glucose levels.

Motivational transformation model

• However, some researchers believe that the “sequential task experiment” does not necessarily reflect a lack of self-control resources, but maybe a lack of rationality or self-indulgence. Our sense of “exhaustion” may stem from a shift in our behavioral motivations—a decrease in motivation for “self-control” and an increase in motivation for “self-indulgence.” Rational decision-making requires us to maintain the motivation of “self-control”, and after our motivation changes, we feel tired of the behavior of “self-control”, and then turn to the motivation of “indulgence”, which leads to our decline in rationality and the possibility of making irrational choices.

How to Solve Decision Fatigue?

Narrow your choices

• Clarifying the purpose of our choices and narrowing the scope of choices can help us reduce fatigue when making decisions.
• For example, U.S. President Obama said in an interview: “You will find that every time I appear in front of everyone, I am wearing a gray or blue suit jacket.” When we were students, we were often required to wear school uniforms, which also helped us A way to “save energy” so you don’t have to waste energy on clothing selection.

Make decisions based on the nature of the task

• Simplifying the thinking process of decision-making and arranging plans in an orderly manner can also help us relieve decision-making fatigue.
• Managers need to have a systematic institutionalization for decision-making, because only in this way can they “decide how to make decisions.”
• For individuals, it is also a good idea to develop a “system” for yourself. For example, you can use a four-quadrant table (in order: ① urgent and important, ② urgent but not important, ③ not urgent but important, ④ not urgent and not important) Plan the tasks to be completed and complete the tasks according to the urgency and importance of the matter.

Arrange decision-making time appropriately

• Understand the rest patterns of your body. If when faced with a major choice, it happens to be the time of day when you need to rest, then the best choice is to rest first.
• I believe everyone hates “procrastination”. The thought of piling things up may cause anxiety. But in the state of “decision fatigue”, not only do we not need to feel anxious about the “unresolved” problem, on the contrary, choosing “procrastination” at this time may be a wiser choice.