Your alarm goes off in the morning. Do you snooze or wake up? You open your closet and you have to pick each article of clothing that you plan to wear that day out of an entire wardrobe. Next you walk into the bathroom- to shower or not to shower? Do you brush your teeth before breakfast or after? Maybe you even decide to pick up breakfast on your way to work or school. But then where are you going? Dunkin Donuts, McDonald's, or the neighborhood coffee shop? Is it cold outside? Should you wear a coat? Before you even make it out the door in the morning, you have already been faced with a dozen choices.

Throughout your day, you experience countless choices that vary in complexity and importance. In the same day you are deciding whether to get a bagel with breakfast, you might also be making choices at work that affect major budgets and the livelihood of other’s working beneath you. All of this decision-making wears down our psyche to a point in which we come home exhausted and depleted from choices and can’t decide what to do, eat, watch, etc.

This causes a phenomenon called ego depletion. When your brain is exhausted, it is harder to maintain self-control. For instance, if you started the day out with a healthy breakfast and a jog, then went to work and exhausted your brain with too many decisions, it is likely that when you come home, you will eat the frozen pizza in your freezer rather than preparing a healthy meal.

There is another occurrence that affects our decision-making, resulting in a condition called choice overload. This is similar to ego depletion in that your brain is working too hard and under producing quality outcomes. Choice overload occurs when there are too many options for an individual decision. Think about when you are at a restaurant like Cheesecake Factory, where the menu reads like a book. While after several visits you might confidently walk in and say, “I’ll have the teriyaki chicken,” no doubt on your first visit, you struggled and skimmed for minutes before making a halfhearted choice.

Many studies have covered this topic of choice overload, concluding that our brains are more equipped to choose between 8-12 options, depending on the person. Think about the restaurant menus you regularly encounter. Do any of them have as few as eight options? If they do, you probably turned up your nose upon first glance. Similarly, I think I would be hard-pressed to find a person in my life with only eight outfit options in his closet.

We live in a society in which we are constantly depleting our brain power with decision making. This overabundance of choices leaves us with less functionality when it comes to the really important decisions. It’s important to establish routines that eliminate the ego depletion on small decisions. This will give us more ability to ponder and think through the more important decisions. Much like a battery, our brain has a bandwidth for the day before it needs to recharge. There’s only so much you can accomplish once your phone battery drops below 10%. Your brain is the same way. Manage your decisions, cut out the ego depletion in easy decisions by planning ahead, and take time to recharge your brain before the next busy day. This method will prove more productive long term.

-        Bria