Decision-Making Fatigue

Welcome to adulthood, where no one makes decisions for your life but you. Full accountability and responsibility can be daunting when you couple it with anxiety and depressive feelings. Deciding where to live, what to do for your birthday or whether or not you will attend an event can take over your mind when you constantly second guess yourself. We will break this down as we go so we don’t get overwhelmed with information but there is a reason why you clicked on this post. It is either because you know someone who deals with this, our this is the reality you are living in now. Well, good news. You are not alone, let’s get through this together.

First thing’s first, we want to identify what it is we are facing here. Decision fatigue is a distinct psychological phenomenon where the act of making numerous or difficult choices depletes an individual’s mental resources, leading to a measurable decline in the quality of subsequent decisions (Quattash 2025). Okay, dont be alarmed because we love to find solutions here but let’s take a moment to unpack what is the definition of our topic. Depending if you are already depleted and tired (whether that is emotionally or physically), this will have various affects on how you approach decisions in you life. If you are feeling depleted mentally, ask yourself why. There can be so many reasons:

1. You have more than you can handle on your plate

2. You are feeling sad or depressed

3. You have feelings of anxiety

4. You don’t know how to ask for help

5. You feel like you don’t have anyone to help

These are just a few reasons why we might feel depleted and all of these things can hold you back from making even the smallest decisions. In fact, the more small decisions you make during the day in this state of mind, the more amplified these feelings will be for larger decisions. It could become debilitating. The reason why we’re here is because we want to avoid the worst case scenario because it is avoidable. So now, let’s talk solutions or at least some helpful tips.

1) Making fewer daily decisions: Tackling your To-Do list over Multiple days

2) Imagine your decisions as someone else's, before considering how those consequences impact you specifically

3) Remember that not every choice is equally important

Ruth Chang so eloquently highlights how making big life choices is the activity of weighing alternatives. This can also be described as overthinking, which is linked to having anxiety around these decisions. Well, philosopher Ruth Chang explains that you should choose the option that leads you to become the person you would most like to become; don't fall back on social pressures or personal fears. We often let so many others into our thought processes, especially in a time of intense influence on social media and our heightened exposure to reality TV-like media showcasing others' (our peers') lives in ways that make it hard to detach our personal identity.

Overall, working to trust yourself and your instinctual choices is imperative to combat fatigue. This will provide confidence in future choices, and once it is easier for you to make smaller choices like what to have for breakfast, it will be less daunting to tackle the larger life-changing choices. Become more excited that we have the opportunity to choose as adults. Putting perspective on the fact that in our younger years, we had less autonomy, and now we have a voice in how we would like to live. Be bold in that and courageous.

Thank you!

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