This was a link on Facebook that directed me to a 7 page article from the August 17th New York Times about Decision Fatigue (I refer back to my blog, of August 4th). I have been wondering why I am so tired of late. Even with all my so called "help" these days, there are still decisions to made of who comes what day, what time, if I do this in the morning then I can't do that in the afternoon....if this one comes on Tuesday,then probably shouldn't have them again on Wednesday...should I stay home when someone is here, to clean, or get out while I can...but I have nothing to do, I could just go to the library where it is quiet. AND what do I make for dinner.
Anyway I excerpted parts of the article below that I think make my decision-making induced exhaustion understandable. The original article deals with how Decision Fatigue leads to lack of will power. In my case, it just supports being tired.
"Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move —......
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis.
These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser.
The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend......"
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