Spring Training Tips: Decision Fatigue - Your Biggest Roadblock to Health and Fitness
People take mental energy for granted. Life is busy and multitasking seems necessary in order to get anything done these days. Every decision made throughout the course of a day costs some form of energy. Some decisions are huge and expensive and create a lot of stress.
Other decisions are small, like what kind of cardio to do when you get to the gym. Regardless of how big or small the decision, we make thousands of them in a day and they can slowly chip away at our executive function.
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Our ability to use executive decision-making, which is the right choice at the right time, can go out the window by the end of the day. This is why we make poor food choices after work, or have a mediocre workout or skip the gym entirely. Under ideal circumstances with a low stress load and no decision fatigue, when you get out of work, you’ll go to the gym, have a great workout, then go home and cook a nice healthy meal with all the organic foods that are waiting for you in the fridge. Yeah, in what world?
One thing’s for certain, if you have decision fatigue at the end of the workday and you have to decide whether you should drag yourself to the gym, put in a good workout, prepare and cook food versus going down the street to Wawa and watching a Netflix show while eating a hoagie, the latter will win most of the time.
So what do we do to overcome decision fatigue? The solution is to be prepared to eliminate the amount of decisions you have to make. Make sure that everything you need to make it to the gym after work is in your gym bag. Hungry before you hit the gym? Be prepared and have a healthy snack with you. If you fail to plan then plan to fail.
Self-awareness of your own decision fatigue is valuable and if you are prepared and eliminate the amount of decisions you have to make, you’ll be much more successful meeting your health and fitness goals.
-- Brandon Mentore: Optimal Sport's Personal Trainer/Health Coach, Strength and Conditioning coach, Functional medicine practitioner and Sports Nutritionist