Avoiding Decision Fatigue
It was 12th of November 2013 — my birthday has started. I was in Brussels visiting a friend. I distinctly remember waking up alone in the apartment and thinking: “There will be no more delay”.
I opened the door to the backyard so that some fresh air comes in and washed my face with cold water. After that I proceeded to take out my oddly box out of my backpack and swallow about 12 pills with a glass of water and later on a table spoon of coconut butter and some other fats. I placed myself comfortably on the ground, meditated and did some exercises. After the religious routine that was part of my waking up ritual for the last 6 months I put on a pair of headphones, checked my Lift app (now called Coach.me) and smiled.
After that sacred ritual I took a cold shower and stood by the door next to the small backyard garden planing my day. It was cloudy outside and sprinkled a bit. It was the longest rest I’ve had in my past 7 years of workaholism.
I went out to explore the lovely city of Brussels and ended up spending almost the whole day listening to my iTunes collection thinking: “God this music is so good! Why haven’t I played those songs before?”
It wasn’t that I never played those songs before, but that there was something odd about them. It was as if my brain was adjusting itself to the music and I can hear the melody, the rhythm, the tunes on a far deeper level than usual.
I remember listening to one particular song and thinking how good that song is and feeling a sense of fulfillment, power and determination. Determination that will later on turn into some of the most important decisions of my life.
My brain was somehow freed from all the distraction of my own inner world and I was able to appreciate and feel what I was actually listening to.
Have you experienced such moments? Moments of passion yet also calmness.
Most people think that they feel good or fine but they don’t realize they have been feeling so bad most of the time that the average bad condition has become their good or normal. Some people go through life in this auto-pilot mode never to wake up realizing they can have more from life.
The problem is that they are suffering from what we call Decision Fatigue.
Decision fatigue can make you procrastinate important decisions that will affect your life today. Decision fatigue can make you take emotional decisions that are not in your best interest. It can make you impulsively purchase things you don’t want or need in order to think you are temporarily happy. It can make you loose your ego (ego in a good way) to a point of self destruction. Sort of an ego depletion.
Have you been there? I’m sure many have and some are thinking they aren’t but are actually suffering from it. Hell, I thought I’ve had everything figured out in life, until I wake up one day and found out, I’m miserable as hell, and the decisions I’ve took, instead of giving me the freedom I wanted, actually did the opposite.
You see we all deal with decisions every single day of our life, but some people do it better. As it turns out they aren’t doing it better per say, they just utilize a simple trick/concept about not making as much decisions as you do. That’s right! They simply make fewer decisions even if it looks the opposite.
Automation, routines and consistency are few of the tools/tricks we will utilize to prevent decision fatigue…
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Read the rest of the article at my blog at upliftedself.com
