They are all tired because they have been making decisions. They are experiencing ‘decision fatigue.’
Invisible Work:-
It’s easy and intuitive to understand work in terms of physical labor. Physicists define work as the produce of force and distance covered. So, a man pushing a cart is obviously doing work. A stevedore hoisting sacks at a dock is also doing work. But mental work does not fit this model even though it’s a physical’s stock-in-trade. You would need to visit a psychologist’s lab to give its due.
Evidence that mental work is real and every bit as tiring as physical work emerged from psychological experiments about 25 years ago. Not long after that psychologists suggested that decision-making is an especially tiring type of mental work. To illustrate this point, let us go back 20 years when cameras had not become depressingly “intelligent”.
A WALK IN THE PARK:-
Two men are tracking birds in a park using cameras equipped with telescopic lenses. One of them is merely watching the birds through his camera’s viewfinder. The other is actually shooting photos. He has to be careful about composition and lighting. He has to make trade-offs — shoot from afar or risk scaring away a bird by getting close; grab a noisy photo at high sensitivity, or risk a clean but blurry shot. Which of them is likely to be more tired at the end of the day? The decision-maker. It’s not about photographers — anyone who makes many decisions, like judges, will feel the same way.
GRUMPY IN THE EVENING:-
To show that decision fatigue is real. At first glance, it seemed that one in every three applicants got parole, but a detailed analysis revealed that the probability of getting parole fell sharply from morning to evening. About 70% of prisoners who appeared before these boards early in the day got parole, as against 10% towards closing hours. Why?
“Mental work of ruling on case after case wore the judges down. Decision fatigue routinely wraps the judgment of everyone.” By evening, judges were too tired to go into the merits of each case. They were afraid of making mistakes. So they took the safe way out by declining parole applications.
RUNNING OUT OF FUEL:-
The analysis also showed that justice is blind till it gets hungry. When the parole board judges came to work, they started in a generous mood, but by 10 am they were granting parole to only 20% of the applicants. At 10.30 am, t hey were served, sandwiches and fruit, and the parole approval rate jumped to 65% after that. It steadily declined to 10% towards lunch hour and jumped to 60% after the judges ate.
What was going on? People who had to make decisions without a break were using up their brain’s glucose stock. The fact that judges at Israel’s parole boards would become prisoner-friendly after meals and snacks also seemed to confirm this possibility. The people who got real sugar did perk up for a while. “Again and again, the sugar restored willpower but the artificial sweetener had no effect.” “The restored willpower people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices.”
People experiencing decision fatigue craved sugary treats but not “other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips.” This did seem to settle the point that mental activity, especially when it is intense, can use up glucose faster than you imagine.
TO THE TENNIS PLAYER FRIEND:-
So, mental work is real and exhausting, but has anyone tried to find out how much energy it burns? It turns out sports scientists have studied this subject carefully.
YOU NEED SLEEP TOO:-
If decision fatigue had only dimension glucose depletion — it could be fixed easily. Decision makers would get through their work day by having tiny meals every 15 minutes. People doing highly-demanding mental tasks experience a build-up of a potentially toxic chemical called glutamate.
Glutamate is part of normal brain function because it is used to send signals from nerve cells. But an excess of it, due to too much thinking, can clog the brain’s lateral prefrontal cortex, which plays a key role in planning and decision-making.
To get rid of this glutamate sludge, you need quality sleep like Buffett, who famously sleeps from 10.45 pm to 6.45 am.
BE ON YOUR GUARD:-
Decision fatigue is everybody’s problem, because we are forced to make a lot of more decisions every day than our ancestors. By one estimate, an ordinary American makes 35,000 decisions a day. How? Well, small things like what food to order or cook, and which show to watch can involve eliminating many dozens of options from menus. What you’ll wear, how you will commute, which social media posts you’ll skip and which ones you’ll like.
All these seemingly insignificant actions are decisions and they add up. And the burden they impose on your brain can have real costs. Whether it’s buying shoes or a phone or a house, the tired mind is likely to make costly mistakes. Parole board judges “avoid” these mistakes by denying appeals, but there has to be a better way.
HOW TO AVOID DECISION FATIGUE:-
There are time-tested ways to conserve mental energy for the really important decisions of your day. Here are some:
- Trim the menu:- The late Steve Jobs wore the same kind of clothes every day for a reason. It removed one round of decision-making from his day. If you are shopping for coffee on Amazon, don’t be distracted by the dozens of brands on offer. Just stick to what you like and save time.
- Delegate decisions: Don’t be the office party organizer. Leave hotel reservations to your spouse. Likewise at work, try to delegate all decisions outside your core job.
- Don’t skimp on sleep: If you get back to work without clearing the previous day’s glutamate, you won’t make smart decisions. So be even more particular about sleep than exercise.
- Exercise, of course: Exercise improves your blood circulation and your body’s abilities to process glucose and remove metabolic waste, so it is not negotiable.
- Reduce stress: Stress involves unnecessary and fruitless thinking. The only thing it does is burn your brain’s fuel, like revving up your car engine at a red light.
- Be happy with your choices: Don’t ruminate on your decisions. Most of them are not worth second and third thoughts. By thinking about them, you are setting yourself up to make more sub-par decisions during the day.
