What dish to concoct? The day returns and we are paralyzed by the ingredients. Purchase. Sale. A bouquet for the cousin’s birthday. We reminded the HRD that recruitment must be accelerated. We prepared the call of the night with Asia while asking for the last elements for the intervention in front of an audience of selected students which must take place in a week. And also an unexpected call: the apartment on which we have views becomes free, we have to make an offer. Fast. We’ve been in front of the oven for twenty minutes. Fixed. Pasta ? The Cretan salad? How are falafels made? We’ll have to decide but it’s anxiety: we must not be mistaken. Everyone can make a mistake, Everyone will make a mistake, sang Patrick Bruel. We are totally helpless and yet we must not make a mistake. It is too hard. Mark Zuckerberg, Karl Lagerfeld and Steve Jobs solved the problem by dressing the same way every day. “Decision-making fatigue occurs either in a period of life between 30 and 45 years old, when you have your children and your career to manage, or when you are in a phase with important decisions to be made”, describes Camy Puech, founding president Qualisocial, a structure that supports companies in improving the health of employees. He recalls that Deliveroo created its business model on the blocking of the evening meal to be prepared, an insurmountable effort after an intense day of actions/reactions.
Agree to give up some things
“Women are more exposed than men, because in general they have more decisions to make,” he continues. An adequate workload makes it possible to maintain good performance, but conversely, there are four psychosocial risks likely to cause these symptoms of paralysis for harmless things: qualitative underload (repetitive gestures, without meaning); quantitative underload (non-existent physical and/or mental activity related to the task); qualitative overload (the task requires too much effort or the person is not trained) and quantitative overload (too much work in too little time). Overloading causes mental fatigue and then saturation. “We see a lot of mental fatigue because our economic societal model is in transformation: what was valid yesterday is no longer valid today or tomorrow and yet, while working, I have to think about how to make my work evolve”, indicates the expert. In short, a double job. To fight against this fatigue that sets in, we must first organize ourselves. Then you have to agree to give up certain things, not to take everything head-on so as not to saturate. “It’s letting go, renunciation. It’s very important to go through it and not run several hares at the same time.” Camy Puech also advises not to sacrifice everything to your ideals, “not to expose yourself too much so as not to put yourself in pain. You must not forget yourself for a process that is much too heavy and tell yourself that rather than to be successful, life is worth living. Even if you give up, you have to accept that the future will be what it will be”.
Self-awareness
“Decision-making fatigue occurs either through fear of taking action, or through fear of judgment from others, or through fear of making a mistake, of hitting a wall… and that brings us back to our starting point: that prepare dinner?”, sums up coach Valérie Ficheux. “We experience this fatigue because we are polluted by our subconscious which absorbs all the information. It drives us and we can’t move forward. Often, we procrastinate so we have to ask ourselves why”. Why are we afraid? What are our beliefs? What has been projected onto us? The risk is exhaustion and burnout, with anxiety that has set in. The solution: cleanse the subconscious, suggests the author of Go Half Way… (Independently Published, 2019). When you are conditioned, you have to find the way out, which goes through self-knowledge. Then you have to take another look at what you really want and have a very clear objective, “a beacon”. Set your intention. Take another path to find a positive energy, a momentum. When you have a role model, try to look like him, put yourself in his shoes. Seek the experience of others. Finally, adopt the small steps method by breaking down your flagship into several small objectives. Also author of Retraining: dare – the other half of the way (Bookelis, 2020), Valérie Ficheux concludes: “This decision-making fatigue is also a lack of faith in what we do”. So let’s no longer be afraid, let’s find faith. And dare the falafels!