Why Choosing Anything Feels Impossible Lately (It's Not Just You)

So this is a day late but , I feel like this blog post will explain why .... it's okay to not be perfect. 

The other day, I stood in front of my fridge for six full minutes trying to decide what to make for dinner.

Not because there was nothing there. There was plenty. There were options. There were, in fact, *too many* options — and my brain looked at all of them and just... powered off. Like a laptop that's been running too many tabs for too long and finally gives up.

I ended up making a fried egg and toast.

If you've been feeling like even the smallest decisions lately require more energy than you have, I need you to know: you are not losing your mind. You are experiencing decision fatigue. And it is very, very real.

What Decision Fatigue Actually Is

Decision fatigue is what happens when your brain has made so many choices throughout the day that it starts to run out of the mental energy needed to make good ones — or any ones at all.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: your brain treats every decision as a withdrawal from the same account. What to wear. What to feed your kids. Which email to answer first. Whether to schedule that appointment now or later. What to watch tonight. Which of the seventeen browser tabs you had open actually matters.

Every single one costs something. And most of us are making hundreds of decisions before noon.

By the time someone asks you what you want for dinner, you have nothing left. The account is empty. Breakfast for dinner it is.

Why It Feels So Much Worse Right Now

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because it genuinely feels like it's gotten harder. And I don't think that's just in my head.

We are living in a time of genuinely overwhelming choice. Every streaming service has thousands of options. Every grocery store has forty-seven versions of the same product. Every life decision — parenting, work, health, money — comes with approximately one million think pieces telling you you're probably doing it wrong.

Add ADHD into the mix and it gets even messier. ADHD brains already struggle with prioritizing and filtering — we're working harder than neurotypical people just to decide what to do first, let alone best. Decision fatigue hits us faster and harder because we're starting from an overdrawn account.

And then there's the mental load. If you're the person in your household who holds all the information — the appointments, the school schedules, the what's-in-the-fridge, the we're-running-low-on-that — you are making decisions for multiple people all day long. Of course you're exhausted. You're running everyone's operating system simultaneously.

 The Decisions That Are Actually Draining You

Let me paint you a picture of a completely normal day.

You wake up and get yourself ready first — because if you don't, it won't happen. Then comes the real challenge: waking up my kid. No alarm on earth can do it, so that job falls to me. Every single morning. She wears a uniform which honestly saves us both, but I still have to make sure every piece is there and — crucial detail — actually clean.

Then breakfast. Some mornings we wake up ready to eat the entire world. Other mornings the thought of food is genuinely nauseating and we're just doing our best. After that I'm at the fridge packing lunches, checking the Google Calendar to make sure I haven't missed anything for school, scanning the class WhatsApp group, checking my email just in case something came in overnight. Then the weather — does she have the right layers? Are the water bottles filled? Did I do her hair? Has anyone seen her jacket?

And somewhere in the middle of all of that I picked up my phone and made approximately fifteen micro-decisions before I'd even had coffee. Answered a text. Remembered something I forgot. Added it to a list. Lost the list.

You get to work and open your email and immediately have to decide what's urgent, what can wait, what needs a response, and what you're going to pretend you didn't see yet. Four tabs open for research. Two for things you were going to buy. One you can't even remember opening anymore.

Somewhere around 3pm you realize you haven't decided what's for dinner and the thought of making that decision makes you want to lie down on the floor.

By evening you are done. Cooked. Someone asks you a simple question and you stare at them blankly because your brain genuinely cannot produce an answer.

This is not a character flaw. This is math.

What Actually Helps

I'm not here to tell you to wake up earlier or batch cook on Sundays (though if that works for you, genuinely good for you). Here's what has actually made a dent for me:

Create defaults.

The less you have to actively decide, the better. Same breakfast on weekdays. A meal rotation you don't have to think about. Defaults aren't boring — they're protective.

Stop optimizing every choice.

Not every decision needs to be the *best* decision. Sometimes good enough is genuinely enough. The mental energy you spend trying to pick the perfect option is often worth more than the difference between good and perfect.

Name it when it's happening.

Seriously — just saying "I can't choose today" or "I'm all out of brain power, please help" out loud takes the pressure off. It's not weakness. It's accurate self-reporting.

Protect your low-capacity hours.

Know when you're depleted and stop scheduling hard decisions for those times. If you're done by 3pm, stop making important choices at 3pm.

You're Not Lazy, You're Depleted

Here's what I really want you to take from this: the exhaustion you feel around even tiny choices is not a personality flaw. It is not laziness. It is not you being dramatic.

It is your brain telling you that it has been working incredibly hard, probably for a very long time, and it needs a break. We are not computers, smartphones, or home AI devices. We are people — you don't tap to wake us up or ask us what the weather is.

We live in a world that demands constant decision-making and then wonders why we're all so burned out. The bar for what counts as a "normal" mental load has quietly gotten very, very high — and most of us are carrying it without acknowledging how heavy it actually is.

So if today you made a fried egg and toast for dinner, or you picked the first option just to be done with it, or you asked someone else to just decide so you didn't have to — that wasn't failure. That was survival.

And survival counts.

What's the decision you've been putting off the longest? Drop it in the comments — no judgment, just solidarity.

Sara is the co-host and producer of Burnt Out Perfectionist, a podcast about ADHD, burnout, and surviving adulthood with your sense of humor intact. New episodes every Monday at 6 AM PST. Find us at here burntoutperfectionist.com

or follow along on Instagram

and Linktree