Choice and Decision Fatigue
Hi! The fact that you have landed here and are reading this means you have actively made a choice — a choice on how you will spend the next 5 minutes of your life. Thanks for that. I do not have any affiliate links here and will not get paid any money from all the hits I get on this blog article. But I am grateful for your time.
I have been doing a little bit of contemplation on choices and decisions, internalizing all the information that’s out there and juxtaposing the theories on my own life. The findings are not surprising. I choose to binge-watch Stranger Things Season 3 when I probably should be working on my portfolio, I chat with three friends at a time, for hours together on WhatsApp when I probably should be brushing up my digital media marketing skills. I definitely know that these are active decisions my brain is making me take. And it took me a few minutes (or lesser) to decide what I ought to be doing with my time to make me momentarily happy. But decision-making in the modern day is not that simple.
QUEST FOR THE BEST
Consider the act of placing a simple lunch order on Swiggy.
I first evaluate how heavy my breakfast was and how hungry I am on a scale of “I could do with a glass of water” to “I will eat anything or anyone or anything and anyone”. Then there is the decision to have something nice and healthy or something heavily indulgent. Should I go with just a salad or a salad with a sea salt brownie cookie as a you-did-good after making the ‘right choice’ with the salad or keep things simple and indulge in a big bowl of Donne Biryani ( a delicious rice preparation native to Karnataka). Then the decision of where should the order be from which involves making multiple small decisions — how hygienic is the place, how their quantity of food is (this is again a resultant of whether I am having the food by myself or sharing it with someone), how quickly can they deliver, what the price of the dishes look like and what their reviews look like.
And this is only one example. We take millions of such calls day-in-day-out, with varied levels of complexity ranging what filter should I use on my Instagram picture to figuring what furniture should sit in the living room for the foreseeable future. But here’s what bothers me. Why is something like ordering food, which should ideally be a relatively low involvement decision (oh wait! I see all the foodies and fitness enthusiasts rising up in arms against me. LOL.) taking so much of my mental bandwidth? Earlier, I had to take a pick between roti or rice, north Indian or south Indian, vegetarian or non-vegetarian food. Now, there’s plenty of choices to sieve out to ultimately chance upon that one thing that is THE BEST given the circumstances and different permutations & combinations of decision-making. We spend so much time taking every little decision with utmost care to get the best results out of them.
DECISION FATIGUE
This quest for the best sometimes leads to an overload of information and unnecessary expenditure of mental energy which could have been better used in making some of the high-involvement decisions. It seems to me that we are not able to separate what actually needs our undivided attention and what can actually be worked on with minimal time and effort spent on it. The brain is constantly seeking more information to make decisions — both futile and important without any discretionary power, evaluating this information in as little time as possible and emerging at the finish line with a solution that’s most conducive at that moment only to be presented with a new set of choices that need a fresh process of, well you guessed it, decision-making. So this in-turn means there is no respite or downtime when the brain can be a little relaxed. Very often, when we complain of not being able to think clearly, it’s the brain’s way of telling you that it’s tired of constantly being bombarded with choices and options and, in other words, it is decision fatigued. It’s begging for help. It’s crying out to not be overloaded.
SO WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
The science and logic part of my brain says you know that the problem is having the luxury of a truckload of choices. This is an external factor and is not really in my control. I mean, can I go out there and tell Swiggy to have only 5 lunch options? Obviously not! So then the solution needs to be more internal, right? IMHO, we need to be able to clearly distinguish what needs smaller number of steps to arrive at the decision and what solicits a fairly more complex process. In simpler terms, separate clearly low and high involvement decisions. The quest for the best is great theoretically and makes you want to constantly upgrade and be better but as is amply evident from cases from our own lives, it’s a heavy price that you’ll end up paying to make it a sustainable practice if you do not know what your brain can handle.
