Decision Fatigue
How to Deal with 35,000 Decisions Every Day, Plus AI
How did you get this far and achieve so much without knowing about brain science? What more and what better might happen if we looked for neuroscientists and invited them into our community of Gifted Professionals and Communicators?
These questions enter my mind and won't leave until satisfied. That moment of realizing "this should exist, but it doesn't" is the spark that ignites the engine of progress. It compels us to fill the void and potentially create something entirely new and valuable.
That's what happened in February 2020 when a global pandemic was in the news but not yet in my country or my clients' offices across America. Within a few weeks, cities and businesses closed, people went home, and travel dropped to almost nothing because professional conventions were cancelled, and millions were scrambling to learn Zoom and online business practices.
That's when I discovered brain science and the rapid growth of knowledge and interest around it. That's when I noticed gifted adults. That's when I started to learn about my own giftedness. That's when I encountered a gap in existing knowledge—something I expected to find but didn't exist. I sought safety, wisdom, massive amounts of knowledge, and some genius solutions. That void became the opportunity for a community of Gifted Professionals and Communicators.
Fascination with the human brain connects us to areas that define who we are, why we are alive, and what we want to do or experience before we die. In recent years, neuroscience tools have allowed scientists to observe the brain in action during the decision-making process and which has fueled more research.
Brain science gets us past the mystery of why we struggle with choices and decisions and provides clear explanations we can use to write the Handbook or Instruction Manual for our life, which we thought someone else might hand us.
Decision-Making: It's What Your Brain Does When You Awake
If you call yourself an average human, your brain makes about 35,000 decisions a day, according to Dr. Shad Helmstetter, a psychologist who researches and writes extensively on the power of self-talk, decision-making, and habit formation. He is the founder and president of the Self-Talk Institute.
If you identify as a gifted human, your brain is more complex. You process information faster, see more connections across all possibilities, and relate to your environment in highly sensitive ways, including sight, sound, touch, taste, and feeling. Nobody has measured how many decisions you make a day. We can only guess that the cognitive overload causes you to appear brilliant or exhausted. Maybe both at the same time.
Decision Fatigue is an Equal Opportunity Condition
Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made after a long session of decision-making. The more decisions you make, the more your cognitive resources are depleted, making it harder to make good choices as the day goes on. This is why the experts, with their research, books, and keynote speeches, always emphasize finding your most productive hours for deep work and include themes of choice overload and habit formation.
How Can Brain Science Savvy Improve Decisions?
There's no decision meter to gauge the accuracy of research by neuroscientists and behavior psychologists; still, their observations and fascinations with the subjects tell us about 90% of those 35,000 decisions are habits or automatic.
How to walk, brush your teeth, dress yourself, and get about your environment and your day —all of that became automatic after you learned it and reinforced it with repetition.
Most books, conversations, and workshops about decision-making are about the other 10% which is where we struggle. What is it about that tiny slice of decision-making every day that determines 100% of our quality of life and success as human?
Figure It Out Fast for Yourself, Before AI Takes Over
There are three reasons our community and stories about and by Gifted Professionals and Communicators seem to enjoy rapid growth in a few years.
First—We want to learn more from each other about why humans struggle with decisions. Habit health is directly related to how long you will live, how well, or how miserably.
Second-If we understand the factors of our struggle, then we have the imagination, context, and power to approach decision making in an engaged and excited way.
Third—The more we learn about neuroscience, the brain, and decision-making, the more we understand the exponential growth and our future relationship with artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT.
Here's why we struggle. The better question: What are you going to do about it, now that you know?
Assumptions and biases create shortcuts in your brain that may not be serving you well. Misunderstandings seem to start here.
Emotions can get in the way or throw you off course. Fear, anxiety, excitement, falling in love, grief, and other emotions make decisions less than automatic.
Information overload can lead to analysis paralysis and poor choices. The data economy has produced 70 times more information in just the past 10 years.
Incomplete information, lies, and misinformation increase uncertainty and risk. That's why no decision might feel like the easy way out when the truth is that stopping or not deciding is still a decision—horrible and with greater risk
Social pressure and the influence of others make decisions harder. If you are not thinking for yourself and go along with the expectations of a crowd, you might end up in a bad place.
Lack of clear goals will mess up decision-making, over and over again. This is tough, necessary "inner work" that we must do to wake up from sleep walking through life and get to the core values that determine how we show up in the world and what contributes to society, starting with self and families. After studying goals and aspirations for several years and across all professions, the good news is that seven areas cover all of your values and life.
Your goals and core values live in one or more of these areas:
1. Emotional & Family
2. Physical & Health
3. Financial & Wealth
4. Intellectual & Career
5. Spiritual & Personal Development
6. Environmental & Relationships
7. Social
Learn More Brain Science to Understand Your Relationship with AI
In the recent five years, everyone shifted from the Information Age to the Intelligence or Wisdom Age, where the key is no longer just having data, but knowing how to use it well.
The brain did not grow or evolve 70 times larger or faster in five years and that's where the artificial intelligence comes into our history.
For the first 6 million years of life on Earth, the definition of resource was something that diminishes. Everything has a life and then dies or humans deplete it. Information is the first resource that multiplies through use rather than diminish. The more we can organize, connect, or understand information, the greater its value to us, individually, happens.
"AI won't replace you. A person using AI will." Futurists and technologists emphasize that AI is a tool and the people who learn to work with AI will thrive.
The Stanford Digital Economy Lab emphasizes AI as augmentation and reshaping work with what humans do best: creativity, context, judgment, and empathy.
Why We Adore the GPC Members
We believe everyone who subscribes to this Substack and participates in the community is an Everyday Genius. They seem to have no problem with decisions. They are brilliant and made the right decision—to subscribe to GPC and return often for stories and daily exchanges of emails, better questions, and fresh ideas.
Next month we will begin exploration of five new small-cohort, Communication Concierge projects. Sia and I will get plenty of feedback from you, our subscribers, to decide which to complete for a June launch. The project design for each is four weeks. We will do one at a time starting with the one with the most votes.
The possibilities and design for these concierge projects got clearer and smaller when I asked myself, "Who among these professionals and communicators are the ones who are best at exciting, engaging, understanding, inspiring, and getting me to solve problems that still need solutions?"
We've enjoyed two years of growth with this Substack GPC Community and it's time to go to the next level with you.
Do you feel like you're on the edge of something amazing, and you just can't figure out what it is? That's where I come in. My name is Georgia Patrick. I work with curious, intense, understanding professionals—still in practice and retired—to tap into their full potential and get extremely clear on their gift (their value) to individuals actively seeking such wisdom. It starts with an email. Maybe later, a short call to make sure I hear you.
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So much logic applied to neuroscience, thought processes, and understanding. A remarkable ability so few can access.
Fascinating. Looks in all three temporal directions (past, present, and future) for actionable living and leadership.