It starts before the baby is even born: Where will you give birth? Who will be in attendance? Bottle or breast? Co-sleeper or crib? The choices you have to make accumulate, forming a huge, intimidating snowball that threatens to flatten you. The potential consequences of each decision weigh heavily, as they are no longer simply about your own preferences, but your child’s future.
The average person makes more than 35,000 decisions each day, Dr. Lisa MacLean, chief wellness officer at Henry Ford Health in Michigan, told HuffPost. “And each decision — no matter how small — requires time and energy,” she said.
If you find yourself so overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices you have to make on a given day that you feel unable to make even one more decision, you may be experiencing what is known as “decision fatigue” ― though it can be tricky to separate this phenomenon from the general stress of parenting.
Here is what you need to know about decision fatigue, and some tips on how to minimise its impact in your life.
Studies have shown that people’s capacity to make thoughtful decisions diminishes as the day wears on. A 2011 study involving an Israeli parole board found that board members were more likely to grant parole requests in the morning, and after breaks for food. The theory is that people’s minds expend energy, like a muscle, when they make decisions, and that after a lot of decisions, an exhausted mind works less effectively. In the case of the parole board members, when they were hungry or tired, they seemed to skew toward the “safe,” or default choice of keeping the prisoners incarcerated.
“Decision fatigue occurs when decision making becomes increasingly difficult,” MacLean said. “Essentially you make so many decisions that you become drained.”
The result can be an inability to decide — decision or choice “paralysis.” People may defer to a default option, like the members of the Israeli parole board, or they may start to make choices impulsively. Others might procrastinate or attempt to avoid making a decision at all, MacLean said.
If you’re stymied by deciding what to make for dinner, it’s possible that decision fatigue is to blame.
“Just think about the number of decisions a parent makes in the morning alone before their children [go to] school. They then work all day — both within and often outside the home and then pivot back to trying to effectively parent after a full day’s work,” MacLean said, noting that this stress may be multiplied for single parents.
“You might notice that your own tank is on E before your kids even get home from school,” she continued.
But the stress you’re experiencing may not simply be a product of the quantity of decisions you’re making.
“While I believe that the mind can fatigue, I don’t think this is always due to the specific number of choices made or the specific time of day,” Eva M. Krockow, professor of psychology at the University of Leichester in the U.K., told HuffPost.
Other factors, she explained, can also make decision-making difficult. “When it comes to parenting, there are lots of different sources of information out there, including information on internet forums and social media. Some of this information is conflicting. It’s a hugely complex cognitive task to make sense of all this information and reach decisions around parenting styles, school choices or even food choices.”
Given these challenges, it’s not surprising for “parents to feel overwhelmed and paralysed,” Krockow continued.
In other words, if you’re struggling with a choice, it may be that the number of decisions you’ve already made that day is to blame — but it might also just be a tricky decision. No amount of minimising choices throughout the day will help you decide what to do about child care when all of the options are too expensive, for example.
You can’t always make the work of parenting any easier, but you can sometimes give your brain a break by limiting the number of choices you have to make each day, or trying to schedule them strategically.
Krockow and MacLean made the following suggestions: