Imagine having a mental battery that drains with every decision you make. How would you feel if you were constantly running on empty? Today, we're diving into the phenomenon of decision fatigue and exploring how it's silently sapping your energy.

We explore what decision fatigue is, how it impacts your daily life and decision-making abilities, and most importantly, provide practical strategies to overcome it. Discover the science behind decision fatigue and learn actionable tips to keep your mental energy high throughout the day. We'll cover how simplifying choices, creating routines, and other techniques can help you avoid mental burnout and maintain clarity and focus.

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• What doctors wish patients knew about decision fatigue | AMA

Do you ever feel like you can't quite possibly make any more decisions by the end of the day? Like, if you had to decide what's for dinner, it would actually make your head hurt. Today we're talking about something we all struggle with, but you might not actually be aware when it happens or what it is. There is a term for it. It's called decision fatigue.

I'm breaking down what it really is, how it affects us, and most importantly, how we can combat it and reclaim our mental energy. So what exactly is it? At its core, it's mental and emotional fatigue. The idea is that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of the day becomes drastically worse. So, first things first.

Let's break down the science. Decision fatigue happens when your brain gets tired from making too many decisions. Simple enough. If your brain was like a battery, it would only have so much charge in it to get you through the day. So every decision that you make, whether it's what you wear or how you respond to an email, it drains your brain power just a little bit more.

So studies show that after making a bunch of different choices, your ability to make good decisions gets worse. And the more choices you have to make, the more it wears on your brain, and it can actually cause your brain to look for shortcuts. And all of this might lead to difficulty making the right decisions. For example, a study found that judges were more likely to give favorable rulings earlier in the day. And as the day went on, they started leaning towards the easier no decisions because decision fatigue set in.

So here's a simple example that we can all relate to. Let's start with breakfast as your first decision for the day. Could be easy. Maybe not. You can have eggs or oatmeal or cereal, maybe a smoothie.

You decide on eggs, so you can boil them, fry them, scramble them. All right, so you decide to scramble your eggs. Do you want cheese in your eggs? That's another decision. So how about what to eat with them?

You're not just going to have eggs, right? So here's another decision. You want bacon or sausage? Maybe some avocado or toast? It's just breakfast, and you've already made five decisions already.

And you didn't even choose whether or not you wanted coffee or orange juice with it. Okay, so that might be a little bit of an exaggeration, because you probably don't have that many choices for breakfast on a given morning. But you get the point. Now let's look at a few more real life examples. What do you go through every morning when you get ready for work?

You're probably trying to figure out the best outfit to wear. And likely it's something that you haven't worn in the past few weeks because you don't want to wear the same thing over and over again. Right? But is that the best idea? As you probably know, some of the wealthiest people in the world remove that decision altogether from their day.

Like Mark Zuckerberg. Hes known to wear essentially the same thing every day, either a gray or blue t shirt and jeans. Steve Jobs, another example, always wearing black turtlenecks. Even Barack Obama mentioned that he only wore gray or blue suits during his presidency. Why?

They all knew that it was one less decision to make. So if they took that simple decision of what to wear out of their day, it would leave more brain power for bigger decisions throughout the day. On a simpler level, think about when you want to play a video game or a board game with your family and you want to pick the same character or playing piece every single time. You want to be the symbol when you play monopoly because you don't want to have to make the decision between all the other five or six playing pieces. And you know that certain people like certain characters or playing pieces, so it makes it super simple.

You already know the decision going into it, so you don't have to make that decision. Choices like this, we already know what we want to do, and we choose them on autopilot. So how do you know if you've hit decision fatigue? During the day, there are some symptoms that you'll see when you get fatigued. Procrastination, which means you're putting off the decision until later.

Impulsivity, which means you're making a rash decision based on little or no evidence. Avoidance. You're avoiding the decision altogether. There's indecision or paralysis, which means you're battling back and forth between various choices. Lack of willpower, which means that all the decisions you make seem hard and you just decide to give in.

Or you might experience brain fog, which means you lose your mental clarity and you lack concentration. So now that you know what to look for, how do you avoid the mental burnout?

I'm going to go through six different ways that you can avoid decision fatigue, but you know, this is just a handful. First, you can simplify your choices. Like we said before, just like our buddy Mark Zuckerberg, you can cut down on the trivial decisions, like planning your meals for the week. Maybe you have three breakfast and lunch options that you cycle through all the time so you don't have to make those choices over and over again. You probably don't want to reduce your wardrobe to a single type of clothing like they do, but you can set your clothes out the night before, or maybe even purchase four or five of the same types of gym outfit.

And then that takes a choice that you don't have to make what you're going to wear to the gym every time. Number two, creating routines. Routines are your friend. Establish daily routines for those repetitive tasks. Mornings are for coffee, news, emails when you start to do the same thing over and over again.

Your brain doesn't have to make those decisions because they're on autopilot. Afternoons or late morning you can do for deep work. It's going to depend on when your energy takes a dip. But you'll know that once you track your energy. And if you want to track your energy or learn how to, you can take a look at episode two.

I have a great workbook in there that you can track your energy to figure out when your peak and dip times are. Your evenings are going to be for winding down, and the more you automate your day, the less you have to think about. So for me, I'm trying to standardize my morning so that I don't have to think too much about what I'm doing in the morning. Or if I know that my morning's going to be a little bit different, I'll think about it the night before during my prep time. So, for example, I work out from home instead of going to the gym.

So what I'll do is I have a set program that I'll use on YouTube and it's basically a different workout every single day. So I just basically go to the program, pick the next day's workout. But if I'm switching it up or if I want to do something different, I'll make sure to look at the YouTube playlists or I look up a different video the night before. I want to work out so that I'm not spending the next morning like for 15 or 20 minutes cycling through videos and trying to figure out what workout I want to do. It just wastes time.

It takes too much to decide and I don't want to do that. And then you also lose your momentum when you have to figure out what decision you're making about the workout. The third thing is to make important decisions early so you want to do your heavy decision making when your brain is fresh, ideally in the morning during that first peak energy time. And those could be things like reviewing your financials or attending your big meetings. Save the easier routine tasks for later in the day, like checking emails or responding to social media comments.

And if you were to, let's say you were a judge in my previous example, hopefully you could schedule your tougher cases like child custody earlier in the mornings and then your traffic stop cases later in the afternoons when those don't take probably too much decision making skills. Number four, you can delegate your decisions. If you know that you have some decisions that can be handed off to someone else, then do it. If you have an assistant, give them those smaller, mundane decisions so you can take that off your plate and worry about the bigger things. You don't have to make all the decisions in your business, especially those small ones.

Number five, you want to be well rested and well fed. This one is self explanatory. Get enough sleep. Sleep is like one of the most important things for brain function. So as long as you have the right amount of sleep, that's going to help your brain be rested and eat correctly.

If you have enough proteins and carbs. Again, carbs are your brain food. So as long as you've got a well rounded diet, that's going to help with your brain function. And lastly, you want to take breaks, take a walk, listen to your favorite music playlist, or just meditate for a few minutes, take a short nap. These little pauses are going to help recharge your decision making battery and help you throughout the day.

So once you start feeling those brain fog moments or decisions start feeling hard, that can be your sign to take a break. All right, so now that you understand decision fatigue, what it is, how to spot it, and also how to combat it or prevent it. Now it's time for a little mini challenge. This week, I want you to implement one new routine that removes a decision from your day. So you can think about all of the decisions and examples that I talked about.

It can be from prepping your lunch the night before or choosing your outfit, or even just setting a specific time to check your emails throughout the day. Keep it simple and keep it consistent. And then I want you to see if it affects your energy throughout the day, if it affects your decision making skills throughout the week, and then share your experience on social media. You can use the hashtag holisticproductivitychallenge and then tag me. I'm @Mirandamerten.

I would love to see what you're doing throughout the week to help fight your decision fatigue. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. It's going to help us out so much in the algorithms. Help other people find us and leave a review and share it with a friend. Until next time, keep it simple, keep it fun, and keep it productive.