How many decisions do you make in a day? 50? 100?
Researchers estimate that we make around 266 decisions each day on food alone! If that surprises you, then your mind will be blown when you learn how many decisions we make in total each day.
35,000.
That’s right. The average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day.
Research shows that the more decisions we have to make, the poorer our choices become. This is known as decision fatigue.
What is decision fatigue?
Quite simply, decision fatigue is the deterioration of our ability to make good decisions. Needing to make endless decisions throughout the day leaves you feeling stressed, burned out and incapable of making educated, rational or research-backed decisions.
The longer you have to make decisions, or the more decisions you have to make, the more fatigued you become. And every decision you’re required to make eats into your willpower. Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you’ll be making poor decisions or avoid making them altogether, because your brain will take illogical shortcuts to help you make them — even if these decisions result in bad choices. This is because the brain’s overriding goal is to cope with the number of decisions you have to make.
One of the biggest things that contributes to decision fatigue is following diets. The extensive food rules and lists of food that you’re ‘not allowed’ to have mean that you’re always trying to make decisions about what to eat. This impacts your willpower even further and causes you to make decisions that only sabotage your results. Further information on how diets cause you to gain weight can be found in our blog Why food restriction, food rules and diets are making you overweight.
How do we make decisions?
We make decisions in all kinds of ways, and not all of them are positive.
- Prioritising and reflecting — This is probably the best way to make decisions because it involves putting the most energy, thought and effort into the decisions that have the greatest impact on your life.
- Balancing — This involves weighing up all options, carefully considering them, and then deciding on the best course of action. However, there is always a risk that this way of decision-making will lead to overthinking, overwhelm and procrastination.
- Delegating — Delegating decisions means you get someone else to make a decision for you.
- Complying — This is when you choose the most popular opinion, even if it’s not something you want for yourself
- Impulsive — Making impulsive decisions involves choosing the first option you’re presented with and not giving it a second thought.
- Avoidance — This occurs when you don’t want to, or you’re too overwhelmed to make a decision, so you avoid making one. The trouble is, avoiding a decision still results in you making a choice of sorts.
To understand how these decision-making strategies work, let’s look at a decision that all Australians make every day — what to have for dinner.
Prioritising and reflecting — You make a decision based on your health and fitness goals, the health needs of your family, and the time you have to prepare a meal. The decision is made ahead of time and when you are able to think clearly. This will usually result in you cooking a simple, family-friendly, healthy meal that takes no more than 30 minutes to prepare.
Balancing — This may involve thinking about dozens of options throughout your day, but not being able to make a solid decision because you’re worried that someone in the family won’t be happy with the meal you cook, or you become overwhelmed with all the choices available.
Delegating — You ask your partner to organise dinner, even though they are likely to organise something that may not fully align with your health and fitness goals.
Complying — You haven’t organised dinner and you’re really too tired to be bothered. The kids decide they want pizza so you agree, even though it’s not something you want to eat yourself.
Impulsive — You decide on the way home that you really feel like a burger, so you head to the nearest drive-thru and buy burgers, fries and drinks for the whole family.
Avoidance — It’s been a long day and you’re tired and cranky and you have no idea what you want for dinner. You pour yourself a wine and then spend the night snacking on whatever you can find in the house.
As you can see, the decision about what to eat for dinner can lead down many paths, and not all of them support your goal of long-term weight loss.
What decisions do we make?
Deciding what to eat each day doesn’t just involve dinner. We eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks in between meals and sometimes dessert. We wonder whether we should have wine or water, beer or soft drink, or nothing at all. We question whether we should have dessert, and if so, what. And then there’s the decision about what time to eat.
But our lives are not only concerned with making decisions about food. Other common decisions we make include:
- Where to live
- Where to send the kids to school
- What to wear each day
- What to watch on TV
- Which route to take to work
- What you’ll listen to on the way to work
- When to exercise
- When to do the grocery shopping
- What to buy at the shops
- When to clean the house
- When you’ll wash the car
- What your plans are for the weekend
- Who you’ll spend time with
- Who will drive the kids to their events
- Whether you’ll let your kids go to that party
- What movie you’ll watch
- What time you’ll take your lunch break
- Where you’ll eat lunch
- What time you’ll go to bed
- When you’ll get up the next day
- Whether you talk to your boss about the difficult client
- Whether you should apply for a new job
- Whether you should start your own business
- Where you’ll take a holiday
- Whether you should buy an investment property.
Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of the decisions we make all the time, but it gives you some idea on why we can easily become fatigued when it comes to decision-making.
How it affects your weight
Decision fatigue will have a significant impact on your weight because you’ll end up making decisions that won’t necessarily line up with your weight loss goals.
Food and nutrition
In the above example when we looked at decisions involved in what to eat for dinner, you can see how not being able to make a well-considered, rational decision leads you to make poor choices. You can imagine how the effect of doing this every day, or even several times a week will compound over time. Yet this is a very common scenario for many people who struggle with their weight.
Exercise
We all know that regular exercise is important in order to lose weight. However, waking up every day and trying to decide when you’re going to fit it in will make it very difficult for you to be consistent with it. But this is what a lot of people do. They wake up, look at their schedule to see where they could squeeze in their workout, only to realise that they are too busy to get it done. Or if they pencil in a session at the end of the day, they usually decide they don’t feel like exercising and don’t do it. And so regular exercise never becomes a habit.
Stress levels
You can’t avoid making decisions, but having to make too many, or using your energy to make really important ones depletes you and leaves you feeling stressed, overwhelmed and burned out. As we know, stress is a metabolic blocker, which means it makes it incredibly hard to lose weight, even if you’re doing ‘all the right things’. You can read more about metabolic blockers in our blog Why nutrition and fitness are the last things you should focus on to lose weight.
People-pleasing
As we have seen, one of the ways we make decisions — usually when we suffer from decision fatigue — is to comply. In other words, do what others want us to do, which is people-pleasing. If you happen to want to do what other people do, that’s fine. But if decision fatigue is causing you to ‘go with the flow’ and keep others happy, you have a problem. You can read more about how people-pleasing affects your weight in our blog Are you too nice? Why people pleasing is making you overweight.
How to avoid decision fatigue
Obviously, it’s impossible to avoid making decisions, but you can take steps to avoid decision fatigue so you can lose weight and keep it off.
Structure your week
Structuring your week is one of the best things you can do. Not only will it remove stress, but it will help you find time to do all the things you need to do throughout your week, including things to help you lose weight, without the drama of having to make decisions all the time. Structuring your week means scheduling:
- regular times for your workouts
- time to plan your meals for the week
- time for your weekly grocery shop
- time for your weekly meal prep
- a regular bedtime routine
- regular times for breakfast, lunch and dinner
- time with your partner
- time for rest and relaxation
- time for work, school and study
- time for kids’ activities.
Many people think that structure is limiting and prevents them from living freely. However, structuring your week means that you find time to do all you need to do instead of wasting it doing other things, like scrolling mindlessly through social media.
Structure also simplifies your life. When you have set times to do things, there’s no more thinking or decision-making to be made. For example, if you schedule workouts first thing in the morning and stick to this routine, you won’t need to make a decision about when to fit in your exercise. Similarly, if you make a weekly meal plan there are no decisions to be made about what’s for dinner for the rest of the week. Structuring your week will reduce the number of decisions you need to make, and will help you avoid decision fatigue.
Do weekly meal prep
It’s one thing to plan your meals in advance, but if you can spend some time during your week on meal prep, you’ll be saving yourself, even more, time and stress. Meal prep is a structured process to ensure you consistently have healthy meals in order to achieve your weight loss goals. Quite simply, planning and preparing your meals in advance removes the need to make a decision about what you eat each day.
Meal prep also eliminates the likelihood of falling off the wagon with your eating. Human behaviour dictates that we’ll always eat the food that’s readily available, regardless of our intention to lose weight. Having healthy food ready to go, means you won’t run the risk of making poor food choices due to decision fatigue — because you’ll already have your meals ready to eat! You can read more about the benefits of meal prep and how to do it in our blog Family-friendly meal prep secrets.
Set boundaries
Setting boundaries is a simple strategy to help remove the need to make so many decisions all the time.
We’ve already seen how too many decisions leads to poorer choices. However, setting boundaries, or non-negotiable behaviours that you choose, takes away the stress of constantly making decisions. The more you live by your boundaries, the more they will develop into habits — powerful subconscious routines of behaviours that are repeated regularly, which will either support weight loss, or sabotage it.
Some examples of boundaries that will help you reduce the decisions in your life include:
- I only eat dessert on the weekend (removes decisions around dessert during the week)
- I eat out twice a week (removes decisions around whether you will eat out)
- I train before breakfast (removes decision around when you exercise)
- I only watch one hour of TV per night (removes decisions around what you will watch on TV)
You can read more about the boundary strategy, how it helps, and get more examples of boundaries in our blog Forget diets and food rules: Try this weight loss tip instead.
Prioritise sleep
Research has shown that sleep deprivation can impact your decision-making abilities. Prioritising your sleep and ensuring you are well-rested each night will help you make better decisions the next day, and will help you avoid making impulsive, complicit or poor decisions. More information about the importance of sleep and weight loss can be found in our blog Sleep and weight loss: the unexpected connection.
Make important decisions early in the day
Of course, it’s not possible to avoid all decision-making. But because decision fatigue kicks in the longer you’ve been making decisions, it makes sense to make important decisions early in the day, where possible. If you have a number of decisions to make, list them in order of priority and importance. The more it will impact your life, the higher on the list it should go.
How DATSTM Program eliminates decision fatigue
The good news is that our DATSTM Program gives you the necessary structure that eliminates decision fatigue. At any given time, all of our members know when to train, how often to train, what exercises they need to do during their sessions, how many walks they need to do each week and when to take a break from training. They are also clear on the exact habits they need to work on and the right action steps to take. All of this means that they continually progress, without becoming stuck, frustrated or overwhelmed.
When you follow a diet, you’re left to figure all of this out for yourself and often you’ll end up spending your time and energy on the wrong things. For example, if you were to design your own training program at the gym, chances are you’d choose the exercises you’re good at or familiar with, rather than the ones that will get you results. Furthermore, when left to design your own program, you’re likely to do too much exercise and not leave enough time for rest and recovery, which will only result in you becoming injured or burned out.
Following diets also means you’re doing a lot of guesswork. For example, if you’re focusing on weight loss by controlling your food, it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of worrying that carbs are the problem, or dairy, or gluten. So you constantly second-guess yourself and experiment with different types of food, often mixing and matching different diet programs to find the ‘right one’. However, this approach only creates more problems.
Here’s a table that compares the difference between the decisions you need to make while dieting and the decisions you need to make on our DATSTM Program.
We understand that by eliminating decision fatigue you have clarity over what you need to do. And with clarity comes power — the power to take the right actions. Because when you are fatigued from making too many decisions, you’ll end up making the wrong choices.
In summary…
- Decision fatigue is the deterioration of our ability to make good decisions. The longer you have to make decisions, or the more decisions you have to make, the more fatigued you become.
- Decision fatigue leads to poor choices, or avoiding making decisions (which means you give your power to other people).
- Decision fatigue affects your weight because you either make poor decisions that don’t support your goals, or you avoid making decisions at all, which means you won’t be taking the right actions.
- Reducing the amount of decisions you make each day is the best way to avoid decision fatigue.
- You can reduce your decision-making load by adding in structure to your week, setting boundaries, doing weekly meal prep, and prioritising your sleep.
- Our DATSTM Program removes the decision fatigue associated with dieting, which helps you make better decisions, and get better results.
Speaking of important decisions, isn’t it time you joined us?
Just click the links below to see if you qualify. We guarantee it’s a decision you won’t regret!
