As a senior business leader, you make high-stakes decisions non-stop: which strategies to pursue, where to allocate budget, how your team should spend their time, and more.

These decisions would be hard enough in a world of perfect data and clear priorities, but most organizations operate in a far messier reality. On top of that, constant interruptions make the kind of deep focus needed for complex decision-making seem impossible.

If you’ve ever felt mentally drained, foggy, or strung out after a long day of difficult decision-making, you’re not alone. In fact, there’s a clinical term for these symptoms: decision fatigue, a scientifically recognized state characterized by brain fog, irritability, and degraded decision-making skills.

If left unchecked, decision fatigue can lead to poor decisions, frustrated teams, and lackluster business results. Fortunately, an experienced leadership consultant can teach you how to get over decision fatigue for good.

What Is Decision Fatigue?

Decision fatigue is the state of being so mentally taxed by constant decision-making that you develop psychological symptoms, including unclear thinking, indecisiveness and/or impulsivity, and procrastination.

This happens because your brain is literally becoming fatigued. The chemicals that power your brain become unbalanced when you use your higher-order brain functions for too long. In other words, overuse of your brain leads to exhaustion, just like overuse of any other muscle.

As a result, decision quality declines. Other higher-order functions, like emotional regulation and long-term planning, can also suffer. And your brain might try to protect itself from greater fatigue by tempting you toward procrastination.

Almost everyone experiences decision fatigue on occasion, but senior leaders are especially prone to it. After all, you make more decisions than the average employee, often with higher stakes, while juggling dozens of other demands on your time.

Under these circumstances, decision fatigue is almost inevitable unless you get support for managing it.

How Decision Fatigue Shows Up in Leaders’ Behaviors

Decision fatigue primarily shows up as poorer decision-making, but it impacts organizational culture, too. Some common behaviors of leaders dealing with depleted cognition include:

• Decision delay or avoidance. Leaders experiencing decision fatigue may take longer to reach decisions, as the brain defaults to “safe” or “no-action” options to conserve energy. They may even procrastinate due to difficulty focusing on complex situations.
• Impulsive decisions. If taking time to make a decision isn’t an option, a fatigued leader may instead be hasty, opting for the most obvious choice instead of developing a more informed conclusion. Research shows that this is especially common later in the day, when our minds are naturally tired.
• Over-reliance on meetings. A fatigued leader might call countless meetings to talk over an idea, hoping that someone else will reach a conclusion. Meetings sometimes serve as a form of “analysis paralysis” or procrastination, effectively offloading the mental burden onto the group.
• Inability to delegate. Delegating decisions can reduce fatigue, but when you’re cognitively drained, you may struggle to determine which tasks are appropriate to offload. Fatigued leaders often become micromanagers, losing the capacity to trust others to do their jobs autonomously.

When employees see these behaviors, they lose trust in their leader’s decision-making capabilities, harming the performance and cohesion of the team in the long term.

How Leadership Development Consultants Help

Many people turn to productivity apps to combat decision fatigue, hoping to make more decisions with less effort. But while these tools can function as helpful hacks, they ultimately just address the symptoms of the problem.

Leaders looking for how to get over decision fatigue for good must rethink the habits and mindsets that shape how they approach decisions. This work is best supported by leadership development consultants.

Mindset-focused leadership consultants are trained to help you understand the subconscious thought patterns that inform your habits and replace them with healthier patterns that support clearer, smarter decision-making.

For example, a leadership consultant can help you notice and reframe:

• Perfectionism, particularly the impulse to always make perfect decisions. A mindset consultant can help you understand that these impulses are often rooted in maladaptive evaluation, or the fear of making mistakes or being judged. They help you build the confidence needed to embrace “good enough” criteria and take healthy risks.
• Control narratives, which reinforce the belief that if you’re not in complete control of a decision, problems could arise. This kind of mindset prevents you from delegating, but a coach helps you relinquish control to conserve mental energy.
• Scarcity thinking, or the idea that you have limited resources like time. This can translate to a belief that everything is urgent and no errors can be tolerated, which in turn causes you to put extra pressure on yourself. When you transition to an abundance mindset, you can think more clearly and prioritize strategic pursuits over reactionary measures.

When these harmful mindsets have been tackled, you regain the clarity to commit to better decisions and the energy to make those decisions strategically. 

3 Habits for Eliminating Decision Fatigue

After you’ve mastered your mindset, you’ll be better positioned to embrace positive habits that sustain your mental energy. These include:

Creating decision frameworks and prioritization strategies

Develop decision-making frameworks to help you stay focused on the core issues of a problem, as well as prioritization strategies regarding which decisions to tackle when. This protects against decision fatigue by minimizing the number of small decisions you need to make as you work toward a big strategic choice.

Also create a set of rules for which decisions you can comfortably delegate so you don’t feel pressured to decide everything on your own. 

Delegating

Delegating prevents you from getting mired in endless tactical decisions, saving your energy for the ones that matter most. Your mindset consultant can help you tackle any anxieties around control so you can build advanced delegation skills that empower your direct reports. 

Making time for mental renewal

It may feel counter-intuitive to pause and rest when you have dozens of decisions to make, but if you want to avoid fatigue, rest is necessary. Mindset consulting can help you overcome the anxious thoughts that prevent you from stepping back when you start to feel drained. 

You can conserve mental energy by taking short breaks throughout the day, batching your work to improve deep focus, and making big decisions in the morning while your mind is fresh. 

The Metrics that Improve When Decision Fatigue Goes Away

When you’ve worked with a mindset consultant to improve your confidence and decision-making, you’ll see concrete benefits across your organization. 

For one thing, decision turnaround time decreases as you unlock the ability to make smarter decisions without getting worn out. Decision filters, delegation skills, and a healthier mindset combine to help you make decisions with greater speed and confidence. 

When decisions are quicker and clearer, team members face fewer rework requests and waste less time mulling things over in meetings. 

The result of all of this is employee engagement and manager effectiveness scores going up. Employees appreciate being able to trust their leaders to make good decisions, and they enjoy being trusted with decisions as well, resulting in better retention and productivity. 

How to Get Over Decision Fatigue for Good

Our minds are like any other part of our bodies: They get tired. And with the amount of complex, high-stakes decisions the average senior leader makes, it’s only natural you get fatigued. 

But you don’t have to stay stuck in decision fatigue. A mix of healthier habits and mindset consulting can help you overcome it.

Mindset consulting, in particular, helps you protect your mental energy while developing the confidence and clarity you need to prioritize and delegate. If you want more help understanding how to get over decision fatigue once and for all, contact The Pacific Institute today.