Making decisions day in and day out—whether they may be as easy picking a route home from work or as difficult as navigating a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic—may be onerous and reason people to feel overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed.
This is called decision fatigue, that’s a state of mental overload that can impede an individual’s ability to continue making decisions. You have likely experienced decision fatigue throughout the pandemic as it has added new layers of complexity to the each-day choices we are confronted with. The AMA’s What Doctors Wish Patients Knew series presents physicians with a platform to proportion what they need sufferers to understand about today’s health care headlines, especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

For this installment, AMA member Lisa MacLean, MD, took the time to speak about what sufferers want to know about decision fatigue. Dr. MacLean is a psychiatrist and chief wellness officer at Henry Ford Health System, an AMA Health System Program member. Decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse,” stated Dr. MacLean, a psychiatrist. “The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult it can become.” “Every day, just in our personal lives, we’re making a ton of decisions. And a lot of these decisions you are not consciously making,” she stated. For example, “you open the refrigerator door and sometimes the only thing that’s in there are bagels and that’s a pretty easy decision. “But if there’s a lot of different things in terms of … what do I eat, what do I wear, what do I do with my day especially on a day off, that can create stress,” Dr. MacLean added, noting that “by the time the average person goes to bed, they’ve made over 35,000 decisions and all of those decisions take time and energy and certainly can deplete us.”

While decision fatigue isn’t a brand new phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about existence to become “more complicated and we have to make more and more decisions in an ever-increasing complex health care environment,” stated Dr. MacLean. “The addition of the pandemic has only made matters worse and added to moral distress, especially when caring for COVID patients during the peak of the pandemic,” she stated, including that decision that stems from the pandemic increase to carrying a mask, getting vaccinated in opposition to COVID-19 and whether or not it’s far secure to travel. “All of this adds to the burden of decision fatigue,” stated Dr. MacLean.

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