How can I avoid decision fatigue? Extreme minimalist blogger teaches you an ultimate method.

In this article, we would like to take a look at something called "decision fatigue".

Decision fatigue is a very important notion that all of us want to understand.

Let's dive into it.

What is decision fatigue?

Decision fatigue happens to your brain after making many decisions.

According to Dr.MacLean, “Every day, just in our personal lives, we are making a ton of decisions. And a lot of these decisions you are not consciously making,” and "Decision fatigue is the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over a day becomes worse."

Also, it is said that the decision you can make per day is limited because of your brain's resource capacity, and nowadays people make decisions 35,000 times a day in the century.

When we talk about decision fatigue, the decision includes everything even the unconscious as Dr.Maclean has explained.

Given that you have two types of toothpaste and even though you think you haven’t chosen the one to use for today, your brain actually has used its resource and decided which one to use for today.

The negative effect of decision fatigue is that if you want to decide something very important, your brain is just simply out of energy after thousands of decision making and you will not be able to decide in the way that you satisfy with.

The example of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc., is widely known.

He wears exactly the same outfit every single day and he has revealed that the purpose of wearing the same outfit every day is to avoid decision fatigue from choosing his outfit.

He had many tasks to do and he knew that decision fatigue occurs after conducting many decisions, he didn’t want to use his brain resource to the decision which is not important to him such as choosing clothes.

As a true minimalist, I do the same.

After living for 30 years, now I know what I want to focus on and what I don’t want to focus on.

Why avoiding decision fatigue is minimalism?

In my opinion, avoiding decision fatigue is a completely minimalistic approach to life.

"Minimalist lifestyle tips: How to manage impulsive shopping emotions?"

For instance, I have talked about how to avoid or at least manage impulsive shopping feelings in the above blog posts.

If you don’t have the rule for shopping, it is very easy to be defeated by the impulsive shopping feeling, and what’s worse is that the impulsive shopping feeling whispers to you to spend money and use your brain resource to choose the clothes to buy.

In terms of the financial aspect and brain resource aspects, impulsive shopping is the worst habit that you can do in your life.

"Digital Detox" it’s one of the most common ways to decide what not to do.

If you have a routine of digital detox, it means that you secure the time not to use any of the digital devices.

As you may have realised digital devices are so attractive that once you start using them, you can’t stop them because of the dopamine that your brain produces.

If you open an app for no reason, you will definitely waste several hours using it because the app is well-developed to attract people's attention and make them stay in the app for a long time.

For this reason, it's so important to clear your mind and secure your extra brain resource for a better decision.

How to avoid decision fatigue?

How to avoid decision fatigue is very simple.

I suggest you write down the most important things in your life.

And then, you would like to decide what you don’t do in your life; for example, you drink a cup of coffee every single morning but you are not picky about which beans you buy. 

Deciding not to decide will lead you to secure the extra resource of your brain which you can use for important decision-making.

So in this case, I will recommend you to either make a monthly subscription contract from a small roster or you promised yourself to buy exactly the same coffee beans at exactly the same supermarket on the same day every week; such as “Every Friday, on my way to go back to home, I buy this coffee beans at the store”.

Once you decide where and when you buy the coffee beans, then your brain resource which could have been used for choosing coffee beans is now released.

You can do this kind of approach one by one for each category but of course, don’t pressure yourself too much scheduling your entire day.

If you decide too many things, that will lead you to the other type of stress which I felt in the past like “I haven’t done this today so I don’t feel good.”

Last but not least, digital detox will be a good start to trying out decision fatigue avoidance training.

Please refer to the blog post "Digital detox activities: 5 examples and how to start them"

Thanks for reading.