So I need you to imagine. That you're shopping for shampoo. Seems pretty easy, right? And this should take about 5 minutes of your time. You know, you go in, you come out, you have shampoo. But when you head down to that shampoo aisle. You look around. And there's like 37,000 options for dry hair, for damaged hair, for curly hair, for volume hair, for moisture. This one has coconut oil in it. This one doesn't have sulfates. Our sulfate's good. Are they bad? I don't know But this one, you know, it has something called bond repair, which sounds pretty cool. And then you start thinking, are my bonds broken? So you pick one up, you put it down, you read the label, you put it down, you check the price, you check your favorite influencer, I don't know. You put it back down, you check for coupons, and then it's like 10 minutes later, you're still standing in the exact same spot thinking.

When did this become a project just to buy shampoo. And here's what I want to say to you because what if the problem isn't the decision itself? What if the problem is that your brain is being asked to compare, to evaluate, to eliminate, to predict, to choose over and over and over again?

Because we tend to think that having more options is a good thing. More options mean freedom, more options mean we're more likely to find exactly what we want.

Except we see that research is saying decision making isn't that simple. Because choosing requires effort, and that choosing can affect a lot more than what shampoo you bring home.

And welcome back to the Ariza Inspire Podcast. I'm Samantha, a licensed professional counselor, you know, therapist, mom, speaker, semi normal human being, but, you know, I always want to be your go to person. For, you know, this mental wellness thing that we're all learning about. And of course, I just want to remind you that this is not therapy, but this is a space where we make mental health make sense, because around here we believe that mental health does not have to be stiff or scary. We keep it human. We keep it practical, and we have a little bit of fun along the way because life is messy and chaotic, and we're just trying to figure it out. So grab a cup of coffee, get cozy. Because we're gonna get into it, my friends.

And last episode, we talked about cognitive load or that mental load. Why you can end up at the end of the day, feeling super exhausted. Even when you feel like you've done nothing. And I know for me, like I sit here and I talk to my clients, and so I haven't really moved, but at the end of the day, I want to tune out and just be done. And one of the things I briefly mentioned was decision making. Because choosing is work. And today I want to pull that one piece out and really look at it a lot more because we are making choices constantly. And as a mom as a business owner, as a person, there are so many choices I have to make, so many decisions. And most of the time, they don't feel very significant for them for us to count them as work. You know, like, just picking out shoes or an outfit.

doesn't seem like a big deal. But it is. So today we're going to talk about what decision fatigue actually is. Why choosing requires such mental effort. What happens when decision making continues for a long time? And why more choices aren't necessarily better for us?

How fatigue can change the decisions we make. And of course, at the end. We're going to talk about practical ways to reduce unnecessary decision making, to kind of help with that whole mental load thing that we're talking about this season. Because what actually is decision fatigue. I was listening to a podcast earlier today, and they literally brought up decision fatigue. And I feel like it's a concept we're becoming very used to and is normalized, but what really is it? If we are to define it carefully? Decision fatigue describes the tendency for our decision making behavior to change as the cumulative burden of effortful decisions increase. Sometimes we'll hear it as the more decisions you make, the worst your decisions become.

And that's super catchy, but scientifically, that's a little too simple, and we're going to get into that science today because the research doesn't suggest that your brain has a fixed number of decisions. Like, you get a 100 decisions per day and number 101 is going to be the one that's terrible. Or anything after 100 becomes a terrible decision. Makes me think of how I met your mother, where they're like, there's no good decisions or no good things happen after like 2 AM. It doesn't work like that. Instead, researchers are interested in how repeated, effortful, decision making interacts with the ideas of fatigue, motivation, cognitive control, time on tasks, stress, and the complexity. Of the choices themselves.

We see one influential study that came from Kathleen Voss, Roy Baummeister and his colleagues in 2008, and I'm citing this one specifically because they didn't just ask people whether making decisions felt tiring. They manipulated the situation of how much choosing people actually had to do. So participants made repeated choices, which is what we do on a daily. And we had them involving things like consumer products, college courses, you name it, they made them decide about it. Now, the other participants considered about similar information without actually having to make the choices. So we have one group who is deciding through all these things, and one group has doesn't have to make the decisions.

They're just getting the same information. And what we saw is that researchers tested things like persistence, physical stamina, procrastination, and performance on those tasks requiring that self-control. We see that the participants who had been making choices tended to perform worse afterwards on several of those measures. So, After everything they tested and they weren't doing so well in, you know, persistent stamina, procrastination, they were kind of shaking on that. The researchers took this information and argued that actively choosing was more mentally taxing than simply thinking about the options. And that's an important distinction, if you think about it. Because we compare about things a lot, you know, the comparing isn't necessarily the same thing as committing, which.

There are people out there with some commitment issues. But we're not talking about them. Think about online shopping. Because you can casually scroll through 10 pairs of shoes. You can be like, this one's cute. That one's cute. one's cute. But the moment I say, hey, you have to pick one of those cute shoes. Something kind of changes. Now you have to do more work because you have to compare, which one costs less, which one will last? What color actually matches my skin tone? Is this a summer? Is this a spring? Are they comfortable? Who reviewed it? Does this one have more reviews than the other? I regret saying this, but eventually, You probably feel like I don't even want these dang shoes anymore, right? And that's the difference between simply being exposed to information and having to resolve that uncertainty and commit to an outcome.

Yes, this might have something to do with commitment issues in dating, but we're not going there. We're studying some other things.

This is an important science note that I want to make sure I don't forget, though. The VOS study was built partly on a theory called ego depletion. This idea that self-control and decision making consume a limited internal resource. Think of it as like a battery. And this theory became extremely influential. But I want to be very accurate because later research kind of complicates the story a bit. A large, pre-registered multilab replication, led by Martin Hager in 2016, did not find convincing evidence for this classic ego depletion effect. Using kind of the same task that they tested. So today researchers don't universally agree that decision fatigue happens because we're literally draining one finite reservoir of mental energy.

And I actually think that makes this topic a little bit more interesting because the question becomes if it's not simply a battery running out, what is changing it? And that's where we kind of have to dive deeper into the brain.

And what is that cognitive control? Because every decision isn't equally difficult. Choosing between 2 television shows? Pretty simple, right? Has no, you know, weight against like choosing and accepting a new job career or a new job post if you're between two. Effortful decisions, meaning decisions that require effort, require your brain to do a few different things, several. Things indeed. You have to identify your options. You have to hold that relevant information in your mind. You have to compare those options. So another whole process. You have to think about those possible outcomes. So kind of almost project the future a little bit. You have to consider then your goals and how does this information match up with that information? You have to cancel out things that are irrelevant.

Things that don't matter to this decision. And sometimes inhibit the thing you want right now, in the favor of something that matters more later. Which then leads us to committing. And a major player in those processes is that prefrontal cortex, you know? We've talked about him before. We will continue to talk about this prefrontal cortex. Particularly because networks are in that prefrontal cortex are involved in cognitive control. And this is the part of the brain we talk about a lot in relation to planning, attention, working memory, goal directed behavior. But today we're looking at it specifically through the lens of choices, and those choices that require us to think and put some oomph behind, right? Choices that take work.

One, especially interesting study, comes from Bastion Blaine, Gillamy Hollard, and Matthias Pescliolone. You say that for me. And this study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. These researchers had participants spent about 6 hours performing either demanding cognitive control tasks or easier versions of those tasks. So we kind of had those doing the hard, those doing the easy. And the one group that had the tough mental work to do. And the other one didn't. You probably wish you were in the easy group, right? They looked at how that long-term effort of mental work affected that next set of decisions. And what happened with that is after the harder work, participants became more likely to favor options that offered more immediate rewards with less effort.

And we have brain images that kind of go along with that. It suggests that there's changes in the way that that prefrontal cortex contributed to those decisions. So basically what we're saying is after that long cognitive work, People didn't simply become incapable of choosing, they still could choose. They just made different kinds of choices, things that, you know, they preferred. Things that really weren't that important, and that's when mental fatigue played a part in it, because mental fatigue doesn't necessarily mean that I can't make decisions anymore. Sometimes it just means that my brain starts to prefer the options that cost me less effort right now. So it's like, that seems nice, nice shiny object over there.

I'm going to go take that one because it's less work than figuring out if it is the best option. So think about it at the end of a long day. You plan to cook. And this is me in a nutshell. There are vegetables in the refrigerator, and you know exactly what you could make. And then when you open the refrigerator at the end of the day, you stare at it, and think about all of the things that have to come next, so you close it, and you order DoorDash. Because you didn't suddenly forget how to cook. You didn't become incapable of it. But you just know that the relative cost, that cost that comes into doing that thing has changed. Because at 10 AM, chopping vegetables seems completely manageable. But at 7 pm, after a full day of work, parenting, appointments, emails, and all the choices that you had to make that day.

The exact same task can suddenly feel enormously expensive. And that's what I want you to remember that fatigue can change the cost of that effort.

So can we see mental fatigue in the brain? And this is probably my one of my favorite studies in the episode because it really has that kind of science, neuroscience thing behind it.

Because we see that researchers took the question one step further. If prolonged cognitive work makes effortful control harder. Can we actually detect that change in the brain? And in 2022? Antonius Wheeler and colleagues published a study in current biology, and these participants spent more, again, than 6 hours performing these tasks. I feel kind of bad for these participants because 6 hours is a long time to be using your brain. I feel like that's like, Work. Like when I'm working. That feels like a lot of work, like 6 hours straight of doing things is a lot. We see one group, again, performed more demanding versions, harder versions of tasks while the other one did easier ones. And then they got to use some techie stuff, this magnetic resonance spectroscopy to examine the brain's chemistry.

After a long time, the high demand tasks showed that there was more glutamate in the brain in that, you know, lateral prefrontal cortex part of the brain than those who are in that low demand group. So the higher, harder tasks had higher glutamate in their brain. And glutamate is just that major neurotransmitter in the brain that is, it signals communication between the neurons. Um, which is good because we need our neurons and all those things to communicate. It helps them do that. Which is essential for, you know, learning, thinking, and of course decision making. What we see is that excessive glutamate activity overstimulates the brain cells, so it makes them overactive, which can actually disrupt communication instead of helping it. And increases those energy demands on the body.

While in extreme cases can damage the neurons that it's actually trying to help. So your brain also has to keep that glutamate carefully regulated on a normal basis in order to function accordingly. So, if there is more glutamate in the brain, your brain is trying to actively regulate it while using it to the right way, while not overcoming everything, which, you know, sounds like a lot of processes, right? I don't want you to think that your brain is putting too much toxin in it. It's not that. It's just that what the study is proving.

is that cognitive work causes a metabolic change, that makes that activation of the brain more costly. And it encourages the brain to regulate how much it has and how much cognitive control it can continue to use. And this was really showed behaviorally. So we have, The mechanics, the glutamade and all of the stuff we could see in the brain, but behaviorally, we see it as well because those doing the high demand tasks started to pick lower effort options, ones with more immediate rewards. You think of it like that shiny, quick, shiny, like gimme something quick kind of thing. So your brain is not simply saying, I have no energy left, which is what that ego depletion thing said. It's kind of adjusting.

It's saying the cost of continuing this level of control is getting a lot higher. And we need to choose something easier to regulate.

Which is a very different way to think about decision fatigue versus I've run out of decision making energies. So what does that mean for our decisions? The shift kind of looks like this, and I'll explain. Researchers tend to see an increased tendencies to use heuristics. And you know heuristics. It sounds fancy, but it's just a word that we use called habits. It's a mental kind of shortcut. And they're not automatically bad because some of our habits are not bad. Our bodies just need shortcuts. So imagine having to deeply analyze every decision that we've had to make. Socks, coffee mugs, which route to work, which parking spot. Your brain would never get anything done because it's constantly thinking.

So these shortcuts, these habits we have, allow us to function efficiently. We use the same parking spot at work every day. We might grab the same mug every day. We might do things like, for me, I have all black socks, because then I never have to think about matching the socks, and I never have to worry about what color socks I'm wearing today. We just have black socks.

Because the problem is that under fatigue, we may start relying more on these shortcuts, believe it or not. In situations where more careful considerations probably would be better for us. We're not talking about like which socks are we wearing kind of situations. We're talking about bigger decisions. There's a fascinating real world study by Hirschleifer, Levi, Laurie, NTO, published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2019. And we know I'm not great with math, but It's kind of interesting because they studied financial analysts who sometimes issue multiple earnings forecasts in a single day. So these people, their job, is to broadcast and predict what's going to happen with financial earnings.

And researchers found that as these analysts issued more forecasts during the day, those later forecasts tended to become less accurate. But there was another interesting pattern because the analysis increasingly relied on shortcuts, these kind of mental habits they might have. They're more likely to move towards a consensus forecast. So something that was kind of generally in the range, let's say. They were more likely to repeat their even their own previous forecasts. And there was evidence of more rounded forecasts. In other words, as the day progressed, decisions increasingly looked like, what's the easiest reasonable answer? Rather than let me carefully do the math from scratch, which is kind of how I do my math on a daily basis, but remember, I want you to remember that these are professionals doing something they're highly trained to do.

And so decision fatigue isn't necessarily about not knowing how to make a good decision. They knew what they were doing. It was about whether their brain was willing to pay the cost required to make that decision.

And we're going to get into this famous judges' study. And I want to walk into it a little cautiously. Because it could be a little controversial.

And I don't want us to, you know, take this with a grain of salt and start, like, riding at dawn for this stuff because there's a lot of factors that go into this because we'll see. Is this? In 2011, Shy Danziger, Jonathan Levave and Leora and Bion Peso, studied more than a 1000 parole decisions made by experienced judges. You can see why I'm kind of walking into this one a little, like, hesitantly, because they found a pattern. At the beginning of a decision session. So at the beginning of their day, going through these parole proceedings, there were favorable rulings. They were probably more lenient. They were probably, you know, more likely to do something good at that time, right? As the sessions progress, though, we start to see those favorable rulings becoming less common.

But that wasn't it because they would go have lunch. And then after lunch, the rate would rise again of more favorable rulings. The author suggested that as judges became more mentally depleted, they increasingly defaulted towards maintaining the status quo. Which, in this context, generally meant that they were not granting parole. They would see there was a reason for them to be in jail so they would keep them there. That's fascinating. That's interesting, even if it doesn't feel great inside to hear that. But I don't want you to think that this means hungry judges make bad decisions or even really like make too many definitive statements from this because this was just an observational study, meaning it was just somewhat observing.

There wasn't any experiments. They were just trying to see what was going on. So the more responsible takeaway, isn't that lunch magically kind of reset their brains? The takeaway is that the decision order fatigue breaks and contexts may influence even highly consequential professional decisions, and that finding helped that fuel much more research into decision fatigue.

When we talk about the studies in this broad context of the world and justice and things like that.

This isn't everybody, and this isn't a one all be all rule of things. This is just an observation, and I kind of want you guys to take it that way.

And it's because when we look at more recent research, like this 2025 systematic review, examining decision fatigue about healthcare professionals, they looked across all the dozens of studies and found evidence consistent with decision fatigue effects in some settings, but not universally. So even though these judges, we came to this conclusion. It doesn't mean that this is a universal truth. Research conducted and concluded that the phenomenon is important, but definitions, measurements, and underlying mechanisms remain to be very inconsistent. So decision fatigue appears to be real enough to take seriously today. But it's not a simple law that every decision inevitably gets worse as the day goes on.

It's not that simple, because context matters. Complexity matters, stress matters, motivation matters, rust matters, and of course, the type of decision matters.

If you've been enjoying the conversations we're having here on the Ariza Inspire Podcast, there's another new way. Well, not new, but a revamped way to explore these topics a little further. The Ariza Inspire blog is officially back. Every other Wednesday. We're breaking down mental health topics in a way that's approachable, grounded and research, of course, and useful in your everyday life. From understanding why your brain is overloaded to navigating the stress of emotions, relationships and everything in between. Each post goes beyond explaining what's happening to you, to give you a little sneak peek and tidbit of a practical tool that you can actually use. Think of it as another way to take what we're learning here on the podcast and putting it into practice.

So head over to arizainspire.com to check out the latest post and be sure to come back every other Wednesday for something new, because understanding your mental health is important. But knowing what to do with that understanding, that's where the real work begins.

Which makes us look into when choice becomes a lot because that's another piece of this that's especially relevant to our modern life. Choice overload. And I know I'm a victim of this because when I was writing this, this sounds very much like me because we tend to assume that more options mean more freedom and we love having choices, but more options also means more information to evaluate because this brings me back to like the end of the day. When I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to pick on Netflix, to watch, or if I'm going to watch something, you know, 1st off, it might not even be Netflix. I might be trying to decide between Netflix or Hulu or HBO. That's the 1st choice. But at the end of the day, there are 1000s of options, not only between what to watch, but where to watch, and we scroll and we scroll.

And 20 minutes later, we're watching like The Office again or Bones or, you know, friends, that kind of comfort show that we have. And why is that? Because every additional option gives us more to think about. Gives us something else to compare something else to decide. And for me, it could be like, do I have the emotional capacity to invest in this show? Is it going to entertain me? What's going on? Because what we see is that the research has studied this. You may have heard about the famous jam study, where researchers examined what happened when shoppers encountered large versus smaller assortments of items, the larger displays attracted more attention. But people presented with fewer options were more likely to actually purchase things. Um, and that study kind of popularize the idea of choice overload.

But here's what the science gets interesting again, because a later meta analysis by Benjamin Scheibehan and colleagues. They looked across these 50 published and unpublished experiments involving more than 5000 participants, which is a lot. And they combine the results. Which showed that the average effect of simply adding more options was, Zero. Zero. Meaning that more choices don't automatically overwhelm us. Sometimes more choice could be a good thing. But the problem appears to depend on things like how difficult are the options to compare. Do I know what I want? How much information do I have on this subject? How important is this decision? How different are the options? How much time do I have to make this decision?

So again. The problem isn't simply that too many choices are bad. A better way of saying it is choice becomes costly, when evaluating those choices require more effort, then feels worthwhile. I think you can start seeing a pattern in this, right? And modern life kind of gives us a lot of those situations. What should I watch? What should I eat? What insurance plan should I join? Which school should I go to? What phone should I buy? Which therapist should I talk to? Which therapy modality should I use? Which toothpaste? Because somehow, there are like 47 kinds of toothpaste out there. And at some point you're standing in Target thinking, I just don't want toothpaste, I'm just going to take this one.

We end up with like Colgate again because it just feels right.

Because small decisions can feel huge at the end of the day. So we finally come back to dinner because this is the part I want you to remember that when someone asks you, what do you want for dinner? At the end of a long day, that decision itself hasn't necessarily become more complicated. The restaurants are the same, or you have the same food in your refrigerator, you have the same choices. What has changed? As you. Your current level of fatigue has changed. Your willingness to invest your brain effort into that decision has changed. Your tolerance for comparing, the alternatives have changed. And potentially, your brain's calculation of whether that effort is even worth it has changed. It could even get to the point where you're like, I'm not even that hungry.

That's why we can become more likely to choose the default. Choose what's familiar. Put the decision off and ask someone else to choose. Sometimes we even pick the easiest option. If you know me, you know I eat a lot of Dino chicken nuggets, and that's because it's the easiest option. Don't judge me. You can genuinely say, I don't care anymore, because sometimes you actually don't. And sometimes what you're really is saying, I don't have the bandwidth to evaluate this. I can't think anymore. My brain is tired. That's what I say to my husband all the time. My brain is tired. And that's a completely different thing.

Because there's an emotional consequence here. When every choice starts to feel super difficult. We often turn that frustration. onto ourselves. Because we start to say, why am I so indecisive? Why can't I figure this out? Why do I keep procrastinating? Why can't I just pick something?

And we get tough on ourselves. I know I beat myself up about this all the time. Like, why can't I just do this thing?

But maybe instead of doing that, we try this. And maybe instead of saying that we're terrible at this. We try, hey, I've been making decisions all day long. Maybe this one doesn't deserve this little bit of attention that I have left.

And then that leads us into a part that actually helps, because we're never going to eliminate decisions. And we don't want to, like, we love having autonomy and having choice, that's important to us. The goal isn't to create a life or someone else is going to make every decision for us. The goal is to stop spending that high quality, cognitive effort on decisions that don't deserve it.

So here's my favorite part of the episode, these practical tools that we can use against decision fatigue. And tool number one is to create defaults for low stake decisions. Defaults, habits, whatever you want to call them. These are one of the easiest ways to reduce unnecessary choosing. A default just means you've already decided what happens unless there's a reason to change it. Maybe Tuesday is always taco night. For us, we have fast food Friday because on Friday, I'm just done. Mentally, physically, I'm not cooking. Fast food Friday it is. Maybe you have 3 go to breakfasts. Maybe you either have like scrambled eggs, French toast, or yogurt. You have less choices. Maybe you have a standard grocery list, maybe you exercise at the same time on the same days. It's not removing choice.

And I think when we talk about habits and defaults in this case, or these shortcuts of how we live our lives, we think of it as being bad. You're just kind of removing that requirement to redecide something that doesn't really need reconsideration every single time. You don't need to question whether you need to have breakfast. You just remove all of that extra stuff that keeps you away from getting it.

So you ask yourself, what am I repeatedly deciding that I could decide just once? Because that's the question that leads to that freedom and that default for you.

Tool number 2 is to use a good enough threshold. Some decisions deserve very careful analysis. When you're buying a home, when you're investing a lot of money into something, yes, that requires careful analysis, but others, they really don't. So before you start comparing every possible option. I want you to ask. How important is this decision 6 months from now? And if the answer is not very, then give yourself permission to choose a reasonable option rather than the perfect option. We get so caught up in the perfect, my friends, we really do. I do too. Think I've gotten better about it, because optimizing every decision really comes at a cost.

And sometimes good enough really is good enough.

I want you to do tool number three, which is to narrow the menu. If 10 options feels overwhelming, don't compare 10. Don't do it. Why are you doing that to yourself? I want you to pick your top 3 and then choose between those. This is especially helpful when your shopping, meal planning, scheduling, or even choosing entertainment. Instead of what do I want to eat this week? Let's just go like, do I want chicken pasta or tacos? I think I'm stuck on tacos. Maybe we should have tacos tonight. Anyway, you've changed this open-ended decision into a constrained one and that's really what matters. We see this with kids all the time. We'll be like, what do you want? And they don't know what they want.

It makes me think of that meme from the notebook. What do you want? I don't know. That's how it feels. But once we kind of are like, do you want this or this? It's so much easier to get there. So let's just narrow the menu for ourselves. Tool number 4 is to protect important decisions from fatigue. And this is something that genuinely matters.

Try not to make it when you're already mentally exhausted, if you have an option to wait on making a decision. Because that might mean you wait the next day. So don't make a major purchase at midnight after you've worked all day and taken care of the kids. No, your brain is done. Don't do it. Don't decide something immediately after 6 hours of demanding work. Don't do that. Don't force yourself to resolve a complicated issue simply because it's right there in front of you. Sometimes the best decision is, I need to think about this tomorrow. I need to wait until I am fresh. I need to sleep on this is the big one. Because it's not avoidance. It's recognizing that your decision quality. Can depend on your current state.

So if you're tired, don't do it.

Tool number 5 is to build decision free recovery. And rest is never, well.

It's not always about just sitting down. Sometimes mental rust means that you are not having anybody ask you questions. You aren't comparing. You aren't planning. You aren't having somebody ask you a 1000000 questions. You're not researching. That's what mental rest can mean for you. You're allowing your brain to exist without constantly evaluating options. And for some of us, that might be the kind of rest we're actually missing.

Tool number 6 is very simple. We are to share the decision load. And this one is especially important in families and relationships. If one person is constantly responsible for what are we eating? What do the kids need? When are we leaving? What needs to be bought? What's happening this weekend? Who's making the appointments? They're not just doing the tasks, they're carrying all the decisions and all of the responsibility around it. I read an article that talked about like splitting responsibilities in a family and in a relationship. It's not just about splitting that one job. It's about taking over the domain. So it's not just about like taking out the trash. It's like making sure that, you know, you notice the bag is full, that you remember that it's garbage day, that you put a new bag in.

It's not just about the one task it's about, everything around it. So instead of saying, just tell me what you need me to do. Sometimes it's a lot more helpful when asking, what can I completely take ownership of? Because delegating the task, well, someone's still deciding every detail doesn't necessarily remove the decision burden. And that's what we're looking for to ease that mental load. Tool number 7 is to notice when your brain starts choosing easier. And this might be the most important tool from today's episode. To start noticing your actual patterns, like when you're tired, do you order food, do you scroll, do you avoid emails, do impulse shop? Do you have an extra, you know, sweet treat?

Because when saying yes, because, you know, there's no more thought required to that decision or even like saying no automatically because considering something else might feel like too much, putting everything off until tomorrow.

of these are actually anything wrong or meaning anything wrong, but noticing that pattern gives you information. I want you to ask yourself, am I choosing this because it's what I actually want or because it's the lowest effort option right now. Because sometimes the answer will still be, yeah, I want to do the easy thing. But great. At least it's intentional now.

If there's one thing I want you to take from this episode, It's this, that your brain is a machine that approaches every decision with exactly the same amount of energy, motivation and cognitive control. The decision maker you are at 9 in the morning may not be the same decision maker. You are at 7 at night. And that doesn't necessarily mean your brain has simply run out of that magical decision making resource. The science is more interesting and more in depth than that. We know that prolonged cognitive effort appears capable of changing how costly further mental effort feels.

And when that happens, our decisions may start leaning towards what's easier, faster, more familiar, and more immediate. So the next time that somebody asks, what do you want for dinner? And your entire nervous system, body, soul, mind responds absolutely not. Maybe the question isn't, why can't I make this decision? Maybe it's more like how many decisions have I already made today? And does this one really deserve another? And if the answer is no, go order that pizza, please.

That's it for today's episode, my friends. Thank you for hanging out with me yet again. If you found something helpful, inspiring, or even just validating. I'd love it if you'd follow the show. Leave a review, or share this episode with someone who might really need it. Do you want tools to support your mental wellness journey? Well, head over to aresainspired.com. You'll find resources to help you heal, grow, and show up for yourself. And don't forget to follow along on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, @arizainspireco, because that's where we keep this conversation going. We share mental health tips, and we post about new episodes. as well as the new things that are coming, like new resources, or even new blog posts.

So take care of yourself, my friend, and I will catch you next time.