Decision Fatigue: Why You Feel Exhausted Without Having “Done” Anything Physically
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Personal Productivity
Decision Fatigue: Why You Feel Exhausted Without Having “Done” Anything Physically
AUTHOR: María Sáez
Science<br>Decision Making
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It’s seven o’clock in the evening. You haven’t moved a single box, you haven’t run, and you haven’t carried anything heavier than a cell phone. And yet, you feel that heavy, almost physical exhaustion that you normally associate with a day of house moving or a long workout. You sit down on the couch and don’t even have the energy to decide what to have for dinner. Why are you so tired?
The answer has to do with how many times you’ve had to make a decision throughout the day .
The brain is just like any other muscle. It gets tired
In the late 1990s, social psychologist Roy Baumeister proposed an idea that changed much of the subsequent research on self-control: that willpower works like a muscle 1. It can be trained, but it also becomes fatigued with use. In one of his most frequently cited experiments, he asked a group of hungry participants to resist the temptation to eat freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, while another group was allowed to eat them. Afterward, everyone was given an impossible puzzle to solve. Those who had had to resist the cookies gave up much sooner than those who hadn’t had to exercise any self-control beforehand. He dubbed the phenomenon ego depletion : the idea that resisting an impulse, making a difficult decision, or maintaining concentration all draw on the same limited mental resource, and that once that resource is depleted, less of it is available for the next task.
It’s important to note that this theory, despite its enormous influence, isn’t a settled matter. A large-scale replication study published in 2016, involving more than two thousand participants across various laboratories, failed to reproduce Baumeister’s original results, and since then, the academic debate over whether ego depletion exists as initially described has remained open 2. What does seem to hold true, even among the harshest critics of the original model, is the phenomenon itself: that the quality of our decisions deteriorates as we accumulate previous decisions , regardless of the exact mechanism that explains it.
Judges who made decisions based on the time of day
One of the most frequently cited examples of this decline comes from a study published in 2011 in the journal PNAS 3, which analyzed more than 1,000 parole decisions made by Israeli judges over the course of several months. The researchers found a striking pattern: the probability that a judge would grant parole dropped progressively throughout each work session, falling from about 65% at the start to nearly 0% at the end, only to rise sharply back to 65% immediately after each lunch break. It wasn’t the case, the prisoner’s record, or any legal factor that best predicted the decision: it was, quite simply, how many decisions the judge had made since their last break.
The study wasn’t free from criticism. Other researchers pointed out that part of the effect could be explained by a statistical bias related to the order in which the cases were presented, rather than by actual mental fatigue. But regardless of the exact explanation, the general pattern—that the quality of our decisions deteriorates the more we make—has been observed in very different contexts, from medical committees to shopping environments. And it ties in with something that anyone who spends their days making decisions recognizes immediately: deciding something at 9 a.m. is not the same as deciding it at 6 p.m.
Every decision counts, not just the important ones
The brain doesn’t seem to distinguish very well between the magnitude of a decision : deciding whether a task is a priority, whether to reply to that email now or leave it for later, in what order to do the three things you have pending, or whether that meeting could have been handled with a message....