Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life: Delights of the Ordinary No. 37
“Human beings can apparently endure an amazing amount of misery as long as there is hope…”
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. If you know even one person who will benefit from reading Delights of the Ordinary, feel free to share so they can subscribe.
Last week I took an impromptu break from writing my letter to you. Not for any particular reason other than being gripped by some sort of fatigue. As it was, it’s been mighty hard to churn out my creative expression at a robotic mechanical speed each week!
Choosing what to write; what to keep for another time; carefully configuring my thoughts into words; doing enough credible research and even finding a suitable topic to send your way started to look like an impending catastrophe coming right out of those horror movies where the ghost never shows up but we are holding the edge of our seats, nauseous and fatigued all at the same time!
My friend who is also a reader of my newsletter kindly sends me a few topics to graciously assert my writing powers, yet as a writer, I periodically move into a sort of limbo that hits my brain at the hypothalamus level and it feels all the faculty shutting down with decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is a real thing of real people!
Yet on a closer look, I find this as a hopeful truth of a moving, breathing human being!
Of us.
That we are not mere intelligence. Not mere machines. We are dynamic people shifting between tiresome toilings and fatigues of different kinds, desiring smallish luxuries of naps, to have melons in summer and also to the most elegant luxury of our creative callings, of challenges and life successes. We “cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams.”
And hence, now you can be beyond comforted that I am a real blobby human being just like you, with defined errors and marked failures and through my letters I hope to remind you about these challenges, struggles and little victories of life.
“And yet this is the paradox of the creative life: The world of ideas needs the world of atoms and forces.” -Maria Popova.
What is Decision fatigue?
Have you ever had those days when you’d sunk into the hunkered hollow of your numbness about tiny things like what to wear for work, no genuine idea what to cook for dinner, yet still what movie to watch, what food to order or bigger decisions like which house to buy? You are aware that you have to make decisions; soon execute the plan, but the deadening effect sucks out all the life’s glory in that very moment.
This is decision fatigue.
Dr. MacLean, a psychiatrist and chief wellness officer at Henry Ford Health System says that decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse. The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult it can become.”
Whatever we do, physical or mental work it requires energy and making endless decisions at work, social dealings, deciding for our children, and even planning a holiday all need energy resources. When you are experiencing decision fatigue, every decision you have to make feels like climbing an Everest cliff without your oxygen mask in place. Exhausting! And even though you may be sapped mentally, your body too freezes doing smaller tasks.
Dr. MacLean says that “by the time the average person goes to bed, they’ve made over 35,000 decisions and all of those decisions take time and energy, and certainly can deplete us.”
“Repetitive experience serves to intensify the hopelessness — talents that never lead to achievement, whether because again and again energies are scattered in too many directions or because the difficulties arising in any creative process are enough to deter the person from further pursuit. This may apply as well to love affairs, marriages, friendships, which are shipwrecked one after another. Such repeated failures are as disheartening as is the experience of laboratory rats when, conditioned to jump into a certain opening for food, they jump again and again only to find it barred.”
- Karen Horney
The Social Experiment:
When three Israeli prisoners in 2011, appeared before a panel of three judges to be granted parole, the judges granted freedom to only one of them, even though all three of them had completed a minimum of two-thirds of their sentences and were eligible for parole. The basis was all about timing. Researchers analyzed more than 1,100 judgements over the span of a year, where prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, while those who appeared later in the day were paroled less than 10% of the time. Since this was a study by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University they concluded that the judges were not biased toward some prisoners but like every human being were succumbing to the occupational hazard of doing the ceaseless mental work of judging case after case. Other studies also showed that managers like CFOs are prone to disastrous dawdlings making faulty decisions late in the evening!
Studies have found that individuals have a daily threshold to make decisions and once that threshold depletes it starts to set into fatigue. The process of choosing may itself drain some of our resources.
Maybe for you and me, we don’t have to deal with criminals or juggle daily between life and death emergencies like doctors, yet the act of dealing with life is a stream of ever-demanding decisions to be made. Some are taxing, others are not.
The rapid rate of life, the number of decisions in an hour, the many things to keep account of, in a busy city man’s or woman’s life, seem monstrous…
- William James
How to Cope?
When you google how to dismiss the distress of decision fatigue you will find some great practical tips on how to cope with it. James Clear in his article How Willpower Works: How to Avoid Bad Decisions (link here) sends out some ultra-practical ideas to do so. Yet, I feel that coping with distress of such kind is a work that extends deep down. The one that roots far into our liminal space that adjoins our heart to habits and habits to our spine. The one that just not polishes the outer shell but also seeps into the resounding expanse of our being.
The practical outer life is the handiwork of what is running around inside. Hence, here are my ways to cope with the decision fatigue that engulfed me in the past weeks. Hope it may help you someday in some way:
Don’t:
Feel guilty for not performing in every breath you take.
Blame others for your frustrated fatigue.
Blame yourself. If you are fatigued, dulling yourself is not wrong.
Don’t medicate yourself by ineffectively scrolling reels, sleeping pills or alcohol.
Do’s:
Find someone to talk to. Indecisiveness is not a cardinal sin and everyone needs a listening ear.
Understand that procrastination, numbness, and impulsiveness are normal ways of our body telling us we need to step back.
Find some time alone. When you are doing nothing. I find my time just right before going to sleep. Staring into the oblivion of the street-lit highway.
Find time to watch ridiculous silly movies. Let your brain breathe with lots of unjudgemental laughter.
Keep away the critical observation. Let things be.
Be grateful for what you have right now. At this very moment.
And lastly, remember that unlike Siri or Alexa, who would be open-eyed 24x7, me and you are tempered with tantrums, will split like a splinter, bending from our spines yet we will stand again.
you do not have to settle in your doom fatigue. If fatigue was our destiny and mechanical life the only governing factor of our inner and outer world, things like courage, despair, hopelessness and then coming out of it all would not have been the actuality of our lives.
“Suddenly, as when the mist dissolves from a mountain top, the landscape would be visible and the way would be clear. It is only necessary to open the doors of our hearts and minds to let the imprisoned demons escape and the beauty of the world take possession.” - Bertrand Russell
To End: This week I leave you with a poem to soothe something inside of us. The past few weeks to find some good internet finds was no less than climbing the Himalayas. I chose not to climb it this time!
Below is extracted from “Poem Written in a Cab” by Alex Dimitrov
To the people
reading this poem, hello.
I want you to know
nothing bad will happen
as long as you’re here.
Every line you see
was written in a cab.
I’m on the FDR
in the middle of winter
and the sky is suddenly bluer
than Sundays in June.
There’s no reason for it.
No real science
to what will happen when
I get off at Chambers
and Broadway, wearing
gold and black sneakers
on my way to meet
a friend who is sad.
To my sad friends, hello.
For you I will be
a version of myself
I hardly remember.
I will be a lake
at the top of morning
some late afternoon into night.
And if you look away from
this page, to your right
there’s the world.
I am only trying to describe it…
I thought I’d be happier
and more handsome,
certainly better loved
and more stable
this late in the day.
But the secret with me
(as I’m sure with you too)
is that everyone thinks
I am fine. Doing great!
Thank you for your time here, and if you’re feeling “slightly slouchy” this week as I was, remember that “Human beings can apparently endure an amazing amount of misery as long as there is hope…”
- Anugrah
Delights of the Ordinary started somewhere in April of twenty-twenty-three with just two readers and now has a readership of 140+ of you. I am highly grateful for the time and room that you give me in your heart.
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with Fomo, Jomo, Wagmi And Why We Need Them in Our Lives, To The Ordinary Woman or read about The Art of Walking.
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Interesting choice of topic. So so proud of you..in wait for your next newsletter. Keep going girl!
Very Apt read..... relatable