How does decision fatigue affect your diet?

What exactly is decision fatigue and how your impaired decision-making can influence your food choices and your eating habits.

Our daily eating habits are affected in a number of ways by several not food-related factors. We already know that our feelings, moods, thoughts and our circadian rhythm play a very important role. Some of these factors are taken into consideration in well-known diets and dietary regimes. While researching one such regime, and reading tons of studies, book excerpts and articles, I repeatedly came across the term “Decision Fatigue”. It triggered my curiosity. It sounded like a mental hurdle, and I had to find out more about it.

Have you ever thought about the number of decisions you have to make every single day? From the moment you open your eyes and your mind is awake, you constantly decide one thing after the other. To snooze or not to snooze? What shall I wear at work today? Do I have time for breakfast or should I skip it? Do I need to dress up for that meeting today or should I keep it casual? What should I pack for lunch?

And the day has barely begun…

What is Decision Fatigue?

For psychologists, decision fatigue refers to the depletion of self-control caused by a continuous active process of making decisions. Roy F. Baumeister is one of the psychologists who first talked about “ego depletion” – the exhaustion of self-control or willpower – and researched the idea of decision fatigue. His findings suggest that our self-regulatory abilities and our decision-making ones are governed by the same mental resources. Continuous hard choices deplete these resources and our capacity for self-control gradually weakens. Many other abilities suffer as a result, including persistence to avoid failure, quality and quantity of numerical calculations, even pain tolerance and physical stamina. We become prone to procrastination, wrong decisions and mistakes, even physical fatigue.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with muscle fatigue. During strength training, if you train a muscle for too long with many consecutive repetitions, the muscle reaches fatigue and it refuses to make even one more tiny move. It reaches an inability to perform. The same thing happens with your ability to decide among different choices. If you make too many hard decisions during a specific time period, your cognitive abilities deteriorate, and the mind has trouble reaching a decision. At least not one that is appropriate to your logical skills and your usual process of decision making. The more difficult decisions you make in a day, the harder it will be for you to make even the simplest choice at the end of it.

Personal trainers consider muscle fatigue to be a good thing for overall fitness.

Unfortunately, it’s not the same with decision making abilities.

How does decision fatigue affect your diet? | offadiet.com

What happens when Decision Fatigue hits?

When we get tired of making decision after decision, we usually react in one of two different ways:

We act impulsively. And we often make the decision most alienated to our character and our logical thinking. In short, the one we wouldn’t make under normal circumstances.
We don’t decide at all. If we can, we prefer to procrastinate and leave the decision for some other time or we let someone else decide for us.

How does it affect our eating habits?

If you haven’t figured this out already, let me make it clear for you.

How many times have you started your day with a firm decision to eat healthy only to find yourself messing it all up in the evening? After a hectic day at work or at home with the kids, where you had to make hard choice after hard choice, comes dinner time. And you just don’t want to make any more decisions! Your mind refuses to put in the effort. It doesn’t even want to think! And you act on an impulse. You order that pizza or gulp down the bag of chips that you find at home. Or you leave the hard decision to someone else not caring if it is the right one for you.

But there’s more. I’m sure you’ve heard the common nutritionists’ advice “Eat little and often” or “Small and frequent meals”. This way of eating supposedly boosts your metabolism and helps you lose weight. Even though there is a speck of truth in this speculation, when it comes to decision-making, too many meals in a day can become problematic. Too many decisions to make! Unless you follow a detailed personalized plan from a dietitian, making healthy choices for six different meals in a day can be really daunting, especially if your day is filled with lots of other hard choices.

Last but not least, there’s variety. Consumer behavior studies have proven that shoppers who are given too many choices are less likely to buy anything at all. In weight management and healthy eating decisions the same kind of indecisiveness can occur. Believe it or not, I’ve seen people struggling with healthy choices only because… they’ve got too many of them! They decide to change their nutrition habits, fill up their fridge and pantries with healthy food and end up ordering pizza because they just can’t decide. Of course, in this case it’s not just decision fatigue that causes wrong choices but also unsuccessful planning or misjudged readiness. But that’s another story.

How to avoid decision fatigue

Thankfully, there are things we can do to keep our decision-making abilities in good condition most of the times. Practicing the following strategies will help you not only to be able to make better healthy eating choices but also to retain your focus and mindfulness for the biggest part of your day.

Try to minimize the number of “mundane” everyday decisions you have to make. The things that can be kept simple should be kept simple. You’ll decide which ones these are. For example, successful people like former U.S. President Barack Obama or Steve Jobs have repeatedly admitted in interviews that they wore clothes of the same colors to do away with this kind of decisions so that they can focus on more important ones. Maybe this kind of color monotony is not for you but surely there must be things in your everyday life that you can do without variety.
Prepare the things that can be prepared from the night before. Clothes, lunch pack, coffee cup on the kitchen counter, anything that you need to do in the morning before you start your day. The less decisions you have to make in the morning the better your chances are to start the day with a clear head.
To the degree that you can, plan your day ahead. If possible, arrange to make all your important decisions early in the morning when your decision-making abilities are at their peak.
Keep your to-do list short. I know that crossing items off your to-do list can be so satisfying and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with it can be really motivational. But a long list of tasks can be daunting, and it usually carries a vast number of decisions with it. There are many strategies to keeping your daily task list short. You can focus on only 5 important things per day or you can divide them in priority groups of three.
Keep your blood sugar levels as stable as possible. Your brain works best when it has a constant flow of fuel. And it only works on glucose! Opt for complex carbohydrates at every meal, like whole grains and pulses, which have a slower digestion process and don’t cause sudden spikes and dips to your blood glucose levels. Have ready-made snacks at hand for times when you feel your brain getting foggy.
Try not to make any decisions when you’re hungry. I’m sure you’ve heard this advice before in terms of shopping for food. Never go to the supermarket on an empty stomach because you’ll end up buying much more food and not the right kind. There is a scientific explanation for this. When we are hungry, the body secretes ghrelin, an orexigenic hormone which increases hunger and appetite. This hormone interacts with the central nervous system in various ways and it affects many processes like that of reward. That’s why we are more prone to buying rewarding, unhealthy foods when we’re hungry. Ghrelin also affects the centers that regulate sleep, mood and memory which can be crucial for our choice-making abilities. So, go ahead and have a snack break before you make that important decision.
Simplify your life as much as you can. Clear your surroundings. Get rid of things that you don’t need Declutter your working space and your home. Use only one of the social media available instead of all of them. Keep one email address or the smallest number necessary. The list can go on and on. We live in a consumer’s world where “more” is constantly advertised as one of the keys to happiness. But psychology research has proven that this is far from the truth. Less can actually be more. More freedom from choices.

Did you notice anything about the above list? It’s also choices you have to make! Choose the things that don’t matter, choose how to create your daily to-do list, choose healthy go-to snacks, and more. We can’t escape decisions. But we can become smart about them. Minimizing our options can maximize our abilities to make the right choice.

Have you recognized any of the signs of decision fatigue in your own everyday life? Are you planning to do something about it? What kind of strategies would you use? Let me know in the comments below.