About a year and a half ago,
researchers discovered that every time you make a decision, no matter how large
or small it is, the decision takes energy.
The very act of deciding is somehow literally tiring, and it’s
cumulative, the more you’ve decided on a given day or spot in time, the less
able you are to decide again. (So, for
example, judges are more likely to make the difficult decision to parole
prisoners at the beginning of the day when they’re fresh and have lots of
energy than at the end of the day when they’ve already made lots of other
decisions.) The researchers coined a
phrase to describe what you get when you’ve made a lot of decisions; it’s
decision fatigue. I got really excited
when I heard about that research, because it confirmed something I’ve been
thinking about for a long time.
Many
years ago I had a job in a toothbrush factory.
I had to scoop up handfuls of toothbrush handles and align the handles
so the curves all went the same way and then I had to stuff them into two
different hoppers and grab little wads of bristles and stick them in a certain
place in the machine and keep an eye on the toothbrushes that were shooting out
the side, all at a rate of speed that I couldn’t possibly keep up with. I found it incredibly stressful and boring at
the same time and after three weeks I quit; I had taken a semester off from
college to live in the real world but three weeks of that kind of real world
was plenty for me. But during those
three weeks I drove to the factory every day in the middle of the afternoon –
the job was second shift, from three-thirty to midnight -- and worked on that
machine, grabbing the handles, wrestling with the bristles, et cetera, for
eight whole hours -- and then I drove home and went to bed and did it all night
long in my dreams. Of course, no
toothbrushes appeared in the real world while I was making them in my
dreams. But that doesn’t change the
fact that I was doing all that work while I was asleep.
And
since I’ve been harnessing time, thinking about how to get more peaceful and get everything I have to do done,
how to rest and relax in this era of constant busy-ness and constant stress,
I’ve been realizing that you can be doing invisible, metaphysical, incorporeal
work even when you’re awake. Just like
that decision fatigue research shows.
Decisions,
yes. They take energy, there’s no doubt
about it. While you’re struggling to
make decisions, the invisible worker inside you – like the part of me that was
making toothbrushes in my sleep -- is struggling to get something off the
ground: a thought, a decision. It picks up one alternative and puts it
down. Picks up another one and puts it
down. And so forth. Over and over. And that takes energy. That’s one reason I plan my day at the start
of the day: So I don’t have to keep
debating about what to do, don’t have to keep deciding, lifting the little
decision weights and putting them down, all day long. Right there I get some relief; the inner part
of me gets to rest a little instead of working all the time.
But
I like to think the ramifications of decision fatigue go way beyond decisions. If decisions take energy, surely so does
worrying, where that tooth-brushing-making factory worker inside you is
basically experiencing some potential disaster in the future, having all the
feelings you might have when the bad thing happens, and then running around (still
on the virtual reality plane -- that is to say, still in your head) trying to
find ways to keep it from happening.
Regret
or second-guessing -- feeling like you woulda, coulda, shoulda done something,
like I saw in an ad that flashed across the TV screen once at the bank (see
“Avoiding the Woulda, Coulda, Shouldas,” posted here on July 13, 2012) -- are definitely
another heavy lifting job for the interior factory worker. And then there’s feeling like you should do
something (instead of should have
done something), don’t have enough time for something, or should quit what
you’re doing right now to do something else. Plus there’s worrying that someone might get
mad at you if you don’t, can’t, or forget to do something. There we’ve got worry fatigue combined with
decision fatigue along with guilt and self-beating-up fatigue. And if we blame someone else because they or
their needs are keeping us from doing something, we can add in the intense
thankless labor of resenting along with all our other psychic exertions. No wonder we’re so exhausted all the time.
So
how can we cut down on some of this work,
allow our inner workers to take a little time off? Planning is one way, like I already said. It’s
easier to make a decision -- a little series of decisions about what you’re
going to do today -- once, when you’re fresh in the morning, than it is to have
to keep trying to make decisions throughout the day. Planning the day also eliminates most of the shoulds and should haves, because you can be confident you’ll find time – make
time, harness time – to do what you should, if not today then tomorrow or some
other day, and you can also harness time to do what you should have done before. In addition to eliminating should and should have fatigue, this also cuts down on guilt, fear-of-screwing-up,
and worry-that-someone’s-going-to-get-mad-at-you fatigue.
Avoiding
making decisions altogether definitely isn’t the way to avoid decision
fatigue. On the contrary, we have to
make decisions once in order to avoid struggling with making them over and over. And in the same way, we should make definite
decisions about when we’re not going
to work. Because just thinking you should do something,
even could do something, is a kind of work in itself.
So, for example,
if you’re going on vacation, you’ll probably enjoy yourself more and get a lot
more rest if you decide beforehand that you’re not going to go over that manuscript or … (fill in the blank with some other large
task), than if you tell yourself that maybe you’ll go over the manuscript when
you’re on vacation because after all you want to do it and you won’t get a
chance to do it any other time. Let’s face
it, you probably won’t end up doing that work while you’re on vacation anyway –
you’ll be to be too tired to do it, that’s why you need a vacation. And if you decide beforehand that you’re not
going to do that work on vacation no matter how much you might need to, want
to, et cetera, you’ll feel free, relaxed, unburdened, during your time
off. But if you think you might do that
work, some part of you will keep picking it up and putting it down, holding it
in your thoughts, carrying it around. The
tooth-brush-making factory worker inside you will never get a break, and
eventually it may collapse or run screaming out of the building and never want
to go back.
-- Mary Allen
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