The usual explanation for information fatigue is cognitive overload – the idea that your brain has a limited processing capacity, and too much information wears it out. There is another candidate worth taking seriously. Part of the fatigue from information overload may come less from processing information than from making decisions about it.
Roy Baumeister and colleagues proposed that choice, active response, and self-control may all draw on a common inner resource, a pattern they called “ego depletion.” In one of their experiments, people who made a meaningful personal choice to perform an attitude-relevant behavior later quit sooner on unsolvable puzzles, much like people who had first used willpower to resist tempting chocolates [1]. That suggests the act of deciding, not only the act of taking in information, may use up something that later tasks need.
A follow-up series by Vohs and colleagues sharpened this idea. In four laboratory studies, some participants made choices among consumer goods or college courses, while others thought about the same options without choosing. Making choices led to reduced self-control, including less physical stamina, less persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and lower quality and quantity of arithmetic work. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating about options [2]. The options were the same; the difference was whether people had to decide.
If that holds, it could explain why modern information-heavy work can leave you more tired than the effort seems to warrant. Reading a dense document is mentally demanding, but sorting through fifty emails asks for something different. The document requires processing – staying focused, understanding it, connecting the ideas. The emails require decisions – reply, archive, delegate, flag, delete. Each email is a tiny decision, and those tiny decisions may add up. This is an illustration of the idea, not something the studies above measured. [OPINION]
The practical fix, on this view, may be less about more rest than about cutting down on the number of decisions you have to make in the first place – which is a more realistic goal than it sounds.
The changes that help most may be structural, not just willpower-based. Cut off channels that create decisions without creating value. Mute notifications that interrupt your focus without being urgent. Set specific windows for checking information – say, two short blocks a day for your inbox instead of checking it constantly. There is some experimental support for the email part: in a two-week study of 124 adults, people who limited email checking to three times a day for one week reported significantly lower daily stress than in the week they could check as often as they liked [3]. That study measured stress, not decision fatigue, so it supports the habit but not the mechanism. [OPINION]
The simplest tool you can actually use is “default to no.” Most incoming information doesn’t actually need a response. If every email is a decision, every email has a cost. Defaulting to “no action needed unless this clearly meets specific criteria” turns a constant stream of decisions into a small number of deliberate ones. It isn’t rude. It’s just managing a limited resource. [OPINION]
There’s an important counterpoint worth mentioning. The ego-depletion idea has faced serious replication problems. A 2010 meta-analysis of 83 studies reported a significant depletion effect and called its support preliminary [4]. But a later preregistered replication across 23 laboratories (N = 2,141) found a small effect whose confidence interval included zero (d = 0.04, 95% CI -0.07 to 0.15) [5], and a preregistered 36-lab project (N = 3,531) found a nonsignificant result (d = 0.06) [6]. Those projects tested standard self-control tasks, not the choice-making experiments described above, so the choice-specific effect isn’t settled either way. The honest reading is that the mechanism is uncertain and any effect is probably smaller than the early work suggested. Even so, fewer email checks cost little and have some support.
The bottom line: some of the exhaustion you blame on “too much information” may really be “too many decisions about that information.” Stop constantly sorting. Start batching. Default to no. How tired you feel will tell you which approach was working. [OPINION]
References
↑︎ Baumeister RF, Bratslavsky E, Muraven M, Tice DM. Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? J Pers Soc Psychol. 1998;74(5):1252-1265. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
↑︎ Vohs KD, Baumeister RF, Schmeichel BJ, Twenge JM, Nelson NM, Tice DM. Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: a limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2008;94(5):883-898. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.5.883
↑︎ Kushlev K, Dunn EW. Checking email less frequently reduces stress. Comput Human Behav. 2015;43:220-228. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.11.005
↑︎ Hagger MS, Wood C, Stiff C, Chatzisarantis NLD. Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis. Psychol Bull. 2010;136(4):495-525. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019486
↑︎ Hagger MS, Chatzisarantis NLD, Alberts H, et al. A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2016;11(4):546-573. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616652873
↑︎ Vohs KD, Schmeichel BJ, Lohmann S, et al. A multisite preregistered paradigmatic test of the ego-depletion effect. Psychol Sci. 2021;32(10):1566-1581. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621989733
Kurt Greiner
Kurt is a digital strategist and IT professional blending emerging technology with practical application to help businesses and individuals streamline their digital presence. His current work focuses on the intersection of intentional living and technological resilience, exploring how individuals can leverage modern tools to navigate the second half of life with purpose.
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