Reaching Capacity

We find ourselves once again in the back to school season (even if you’re not in school or don’t have a kid in school – this month will forever feel like back to school season!). It’s the time of year where there is one task, signup, or meeting after another. Everything seems to refresh in the fall. There are new moving parts and fresh details involved, and to try to hold it all together, I’ve found myself making countless to-do lists. But instead of simply making a decision and checking the tasks off the list, I find myself calling or texting others in attempts to confirm and reassure myself about my choices.

At this time of year, our brains feel full of decisions. We need to decide what committees we’re going to be a part of this year. We need to choose when we’re taking vacation days. We need to decide what we’re serving for dinner or what afterschool activities to sign kids up for.  We need to figure out which plane flight to schedule or what book we’re going to read next. And in the midst of all of that, we often use this “back to school fresh start” mentality to pile on decisions about starting new workout routines, new healthy meal plans, and making a promise to ourselves that we will schedule all our doctor’s appointments to stay healthy.

Maybe this sounds familiar to you right now. Your brain feels overwhelmed. Just the other day I had so many decisions to make it felt like my brain started short circuiting. And I simply started to cry. (Thankfully my first line of defense is often to go back to the basics – I took a nap and ate a snack and felt a bit more ready to handle the world again!)

Do you ever experience decision fatigue? It’s when you struggle to have capacity for any more decisions to be made. It will send you into full blown exhaustion or meltdown if you have one more decision -- even if it's to decide where to pick up takeout for dinner because your brain is so tired.

Several years ago I read the book, The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi, and it was a revolutionary tool. (Note: She also has a podcast which is amazing!). She encouraged people to “decide once” about things so that the decision could go on autopilot and you wouldn’t have to remember it every week. For example, decide once what day you’re doing your laundry each week. For me, I do all my laundry on Monday. It’s a fresh start to the week, I know I’m working from home, and I can change out the loads easily during the day. It now means I never have to remember if I have enough clean socks or not – because every Monday I’ll reset! I was shocked at how much energy my brain had been using each week to gauge when would be best to do laundry before I decided on a specific, routine day. It feels so freeing now to have that off my checklist and I rarely think about it anymore.

Adachi suggests in the book that you can do this for all sorts of things – for example, Monday nights are always pasta nights. Give the same birthday gift or housewarming gift to every person for the year. Decide that Wednesdays are the day you skip cooking and go out to eat. Schedule extended family Zoom calls every other Sunday evening. Write all birthday cards for loved ones on the first day of the month. All of these things you can decide once and then let it go because you’ve taken some of the decision making out of it all!

If you find yourself exhausted from making decisions lately, know that Laura and I are here to walk with you. We’d be happy to help you work through the decision fatigue and figure out if there are things in your life that you can benefit from “deciding once.” Feel free to send us an email or book via the website.