What does all this decision-making do?
Why was I so tired when I got home at night?
Turns out the answers were right in front of me.
What do you find every morning and lose every night?
Imagine you start every morning with a bright yellow sponge firmly implanted in your brain. Sounds painful, but good news, it’s a magic sponge! This bright yellow sponge makes all your decisions for you. Just like that! Make a decision? A little chunk of sponge cracks off. This happens throughout the day. And what happens when the sponge is completely gone? You’re spongeless. You can’t make decisions. And there are only two ways to regrow your sponge: food and sleep.
Until you eat or sleep, you are mindless and ripe for making bad decisions.
John Tierney is the New York Times–bestselling coauthor of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. He says: “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.”
Many people are familiar with the painful process of walking around a giant department store and picking items for a wedding registry. When Leslie and I went to Hudson’s Bay at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, we were full of energy. Yellow bowls or blue bowls? Dark yellow or light yellow? Shiny or not that shiny? What about glasses? Should we get eight or twelve? Heavy or light? Do we need tall and short or just tall or just short? What design? What about wineglasses? Do we need twelve as well? What shape? What brand of blender? How many blankets? How many pillows? How many towels? What color towels? By the end we were exhausted. Our sponges had disintegrated. I remember the clerk asking if we wanted to add a $300 ice bucket at the end of our trip and us nodding with glassy eyes and our mouths hanging open.
“Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs,” John says, “which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making . . . To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted . . . If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest . . . Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales . . . And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar.”
The only person whose rules you have no choice but to follow
I struggled investing money for years.
I read a book on how to do it myself and knew I had to try carving off a small percentage of income, move it to an investing account, and put it in a diversified fund. There was no reason not to invest! But at the end of the year, every year, any money I tried setting aside was just sitting there. Not invested. No increases, no dividends, no nothing. Just getting eaten away by inflation.
I felt stupid, lazy, and forgetful.
What was wrong with me?
I looked back and found a horrible case of decision fatigue had set in without me realizing it. When this happens people have only two options:
Make no decision.
Make a bad decision.
My bank didn’t have an automatic investing feature, so I had to do it myself. I set a calendar reminder on the first of every month to try to move some money into investments, but . . . whenever the first of the month hit, something happened. I looked at the price of the fund and if it had risen over the previous day, week, or month, I said to myself, “Oh, I don’t want to buy it now. It’s too expensive. I’ll wait a couple of days until it comes down.” Then I’d keep checking the price every day, multiple times a day. Occasionally it would come down and I’d buy some. But sometimes it would keep rising. So I’d watch it go up and keep telling myself I’d buy it as soon as it came back down. If it was $50 one day, $51 the next, and $52 the next, then even if it dropped down to $51, I’d tell myself it wasn’t as cheap as when I started, so I had to keep waiting. Eventually a month would pass and my calendar reminder would go off telling me it was time to invest again. But I hadn’t invested for last month yet! So I now had two months saved up, which meant my decision on when to invest was even more important.
My brain was feeling a tremendous amount of options around making these investment decisions. And I was just trying to buy one fund. I couldn’t overcome this fear. Soon another month had piled up. Then another. Anxiety set in about my failure to invest anything, and I called my friend Fred one night in a panic.
Fred studied economics under John Nash at Princeton, worked in investment banking for years, and, more important, was someone I trusted enough to share my financial failures with.
“I had the same problem,” he said. “Then I made rules for myself. I have three rules. I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which I leave at my desk. I follow the three rules even if I don’t want to.”
Rule #1: If Checking Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investing Account.
Rule #2: If Investing Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investments.
Rule #3: Never Break Rule #1 or Rule #2.
“It works because I remove my brain from the equation. I don’t have any choice, so I’m forced to be happy with how I’ve invested. If the fund went up in value, I tell myself I was smart for investing some earlier to capitalize on those gains! Like, if the market is at an all-time high and there has never been a worse time to buy, I tell myself, ‘Boy, I sure am smart only investing a little now and not my entire life savings.’ Alternatively, if the fund has gone down in value, I tell myself I was smart for saving money to benefit from lower prices today. It’s a win-win. Now all my money is invested, I don’t pay any adviser fees, and I don’t spend any time thinking about it.”
Rules. Limits. Barriers. Creating mental brick walls to stop making decisions. Like the fish department with all the choices removed. Why can’t we make rules for our own brain? Preserve our decision-making energy for decisions that matter. A guided workout at the gym. A preset breakfast shake.
What happens when we give ourselves less choice?
The unanticipated joy of being totally stuck
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, wondered this, too. He gave a TED Talk about an experiment he ran on the Harvard campus:
We created a photography course, a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras, they went around campus, they took twelve pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog. They bring us the camera, we make up a contact sheet, they figure out which are the two best pictures, and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up and they have two gorgeous eight-by-ten glossies of meaningful things to them and we say, “Which one would you like to give up?” They say, “I have to give one up?” And we say, “Oh, yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one.”