Decision Fatigue: Why Your Brain Gets Tired

Never schedule your parole hearing right before lunch.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price.

The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing.

Decision fatigue increases when each decision holds high stakes. When you’re poor, EVERY decision about how to deploy your resources has a major trade-off: soap or coffee? Pay your electric bill, or your rent? Go to the hospital, or splint your ankle with an Ace bandage and keep walking?

When your executive function is compromised, decision fatigue can show up as emotional outbursts over seemingly small issues. Once your mental bandwidth is tapped out, your decisions look a lot like ‘poor choices.’

But honest exhaustion is not foolishness. It’s a physical limit.