Decision Fatigue and the Power of Defaults
Why rewriting your defaults matters more than fighting cravings
Every day we are faced with so many choices. Some of these are small, some are large but many of them are so automatic we just go along with what the norm is. Researchers estimate the number of decisions we make hovers around thirty-five thousand in a single day. It begins at the start of the day with what to wear, what to eat, how to respond to an email, whether to check our phone again or not, which task to prioritise and whether to go for a run or sink into the sofa. Each of those choices that we make, even the minor ones, draws from the same pool of mental energy and eventually that pool runs dry. By the evening most of us are depleted and when our mental energy is gone we don’t always choose what is best for us. We make poorer decisions that what was intended at the start of the day and we choose what’s easiest and the path of least resistance which is the default. That is decision fatigue.
It’s relevant for any life change we want to make so you can apply it to whatever it is you’re working on currently. It can sabotage our best intentions causing us to renege on the promises we made to ourselves only that morning… to eat well, to not drink alcohol, or even to go to the gym. We defer to the easiest choice.
In my drinking years this was the thing that dictated my life. By five o’clock in the evening I was done. Truly done. My willpower was spent on work, parenting and navigating the hundreds of tiny negotiations that make up an ordinary day. By the time I walked or drove past the supermarket in the late afternoon, I had no energy left to argue with myself. I had so many good intentions that morning but the decision had already been made. My default was to buy and then open the wine. I didn’t think of it as a decision at all, it was just what I did.
This is why so many people struggle when they try to change their relationship with alcohol or even with food or fitness through sheer force of will. We think willpower will do it and like to imagine ourselves as rational, strong, capable of making the right choice when it counts. But willpower is like a battery and every decision we make throughout the day drains it, and by the end of the day the charge is low. You can hold out for a while, maybe even weeks, but eventually you will be too tired to fight the same battle over and over again. And when decision fatigue peaks, the old default will win. Sobriety cannot rely on willpower alone, instead it requires new defaults.
Don’t panic though because new defaults can be created. A default is simply the option we fall back on when we are too depleted to think consciously. It’s our fall back plan that doesn’t require effort. Behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call it the “nudge effect.” They showed that when organ donation was made the default in some countries, participation rates soared. This is because people had the tendency to stick with the preset option because it was easier. Defaults shape behaviour far more than we like to admit and our personal lives are full of them. It isn’t just about the drink we automatically grab from the fridge either. It could be the app we open without thinking when we pick up our phone. The food we order when we can’t be bothered to think or the coping mechanism we turn to when stress rises.