The advice on how to make better decisions tends to agree on one thing: stop being afraid of regret. Manage it, minimise it, use the frameworks designed to protect you from it. If you’ve tried the standard toolkit (decisional balance sheets, the ten-ten-ten method, asking what you’d tell a friend), you may have noticed that it helps, somewhat, sometimes, and then the next difficult choice arrives and the familiar knot returns. The more recent research suggests something slightly inconvenient for the self-help industry: that knot, the one that shows up before a hard decision and whispers about all the ways you might get it wrong, might not be a malfunction. It might be the mechanism.
Why decisions feel harder than they should
The popular explanation goes something like this: you have a finite amount of mental energy, and once you’ve spent it on smaller choices throughout the day, the bigger ones become harder. Decision fatigue made intuitive sense when it arrived and spread quickly through productivity circles.
The trouble is that the evidence is messier than the tidy narrative. The research that first put decision fatigue on the map was a study of judicial parole decisions showing that prisoners received more favourable outcomes early in the day or just after a break. Researchers have since challenged several of its core assumptions, and context and expectation seem to explain the effect, where it appears at all, as well as genuine depletion does. The experience of decisions becoming harder over time is real, but the mechanism is probably more complicated than a mental resource you can top up with a biscuit.
Hard decisions feel hard for reasons that have very little to do with fatigue. They involve genuine uncertainty about outcomes that matter to you. They ask you to choose between options that are good in different, incompatible ways, a fundamentally different cognitive task from the ones that come easily. Understanding how to make better decisions starts, perhaps counterintuitively, with accepting that the difficulty is often an accurate read of what the choice actually costs.
If you’re finding that anxiety around decisions has become constant, turning up not just before major choices but in the routine ones, that is worth raising with a psychologist. In Australia, the Medicare Better Access pathway covers psychology sessions annually and exists for exactly this kind of difficulty, not only for crisis situations.
The regret reframe
Most decision advice frames regret as the outcome to avoid. Get the choice right and you won’t accumulate any. The implicit goal is to reach the end of a decision with your regret account sitting at zero.
This isn’t quite how regret works. The more useful piece of information, the one that changes how you approach a hard choice, is that anticipated regret, the mental rehearsal of how you might feel if things go wrong, is associated with better decision quality and higher post-decision satisfaction. The discomfort is doing useful work.
The uncomfortable imagining you’re already doing, the mental simulation of different futures, the quiet rehearsal of potential loss? That is one of the mechanisms by which people make choices they tend to stand behind. It doesn’t need to be overcome before you can decide.
The practical shift this suggests is modest. When you find yourself mentally rehearsing how a choice might turn out badly, you can work with it rather than override it. Ask what the imagined regret is telling you about what actually matters. Treat it as signal, then decide.
Learning how to make better decisions may involve less silencing of that discomfort than most advice suggests. When you feel anxious before a hard choice, that anxiety is often pointing at something real, and dismissing it quickly is its own kind of error. Worst-case thinking can become its own trap, but the first move is to listen before you discount.
Maximisers, satisficers, and the problem of too many options
Barry Schwartz drew a useful line between two decision-making styles: maximisers, who feel compelled to find the objectively best option, and satisficers, who stop once something clears their threshold. The maximiser approach looks more rigorous. It produces worse outcomes more often than you’d expect.
Research on choice overload finds that more options make choosing less likely and reduce satisfaction with whatever you end up picking. The problem runs deeper than volume. Maximisers, even when they select objectively superior outcomes, report lower satisfaction and more regret than satisficers who chose something adequate. Every unchosen option becomes a counterfactual you keep running. The anticipation of that regret is part of what drives the overlong search in the first place.
Most people default to maximiser thinking when a choice feels significant. So you search harder, compare more, delay. Past the point of useful information, you start weighing options you never intended to take, generating the anticipated regret that, in moderate amounts, improves decision quality, and at high volume tips into paralysis.
Define what good enough looks like for this choice before you start searching. Some decisions warrant sustained scrutiny. Many do not, and learning to tell them apart before you’ve spent three weeks on a decision that deserved three hours is most of how to make better decisions in practice.
Decision fatigue – what the evidence actually shows
Decision fatigue became a cultural touchstone after research suggesting that judges gave more lenient parole decisions early in the day, and harsher ones as the session wore on. The implication: exhausted decision-makers default to the safer, easier option. The internet ran with it, and the concept settled into popular productivity writing as established fact.
It is not quite that.
The evidence for decision fatigue, and for its underlying mechanism, ego depletion, is significantly more contested than its reputation suggests. A large pre-registered multi-lab replication found weak and inconsistent evidence for ego depletion effects, the idea that making decisions depletes a finite cognitive resource. The judges study itself has since been reanalysed, with hunger and scheduled break-taking patterns offering competing explanations for the findings.
None of this means that decision exhaustion is fictional. Most people have experienced something that feels very much like it. But “this is a real lived experience” and “the mechanism the textbook describes is correct” are different claims. For how to make better decisions in practice, the useful takeaway is this: treat cognitive load as a real constraint worth managing, without assuming you know exactly how it works.
Practical orientations that hold up
The most transferable piece of advice from the regret research is also the least intuitive: lean into the feeling rather than suppress it. Anticipated regret, the sense of how you’ll feel looking back if a choice goes wrong, tends to improve decision quality when you engage with it rather than dismiss it as nerves. You don’t need a framework. Ask yourself which option you’d be more at peace with having chosen in a year’s time. That question cuts through a lot of noise.
The contested status of decision fatigue points somewhere useful: don’t make important decisions when you’re depleted. Not because of a glucose mechanism, but because tiredness affects attention, and attention matters. You already know when you’re too tired to think clearly.
On the perfectionism question, the evidence on how to make better decisions is consistent. People who aim for “good enough” tend to end up more satisfied than people who search exhaustively for the optimal option. Exhaustive searching raises expectations in ways that make any outcome feel insufficient. Aiming for good enough is the more rational approach, not a compromise.
Separating the information-gathering phase from the actual decision can also help. Gather on one day. Decide the next. The gap reduces how much weight the last piece of information carries.
If decision difficulty has moved beyond frustrating into something that affects your daily functioning, it is worth talking to a psychologist. The Medicare Better Access pathway covers a significant portion of the cost for most people, and what presents as a decision-making problem sometimes turns out to be anxiety that responds well to proper treatment.
Closing / key takeaways
Anticipated regret, when you let it inform rather than overwhelm, improves both decision quality and satisfaction with the outcome. That inverts the standard advice, which treats regret as the problem to manage before you can decide well.
Decision fatigue is a real experience. The evidence for how it works is contested. Take the tiredness at face value; treat the framework lightly.
Gather information on one day. Decide the next. Choose with genuine attention to what you value. That, more than any framework, is how to make better decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does worrying about regret actually make decisions harder?
The research says the opposite. Anticipated regret, the feeling you'd have if a choice went wrong, is associated with more careful deliberation. You consider options you'd otherwise skip. You're more honest with yourself about what actually matters. That's the useful version: a quiet resistance worth paying attention to. The unproductive version is catastrophising, running worst-case scenarios on loop without making progress. Knowing the difference matters because "just decide" is reasonable advice for one of these states and fairly useless for the other. Anticipated regret is information you can use. Anxiety about regret is a separate problem worth separating out.
Is decision fatigue real? Everyone seems to treat it as settled science.
It's an interesting idea with messier evidence than most people realise. The original research, a 2011 study of Israeli judges, found that judges made harsher decisions before breaks and more lenient ones after eating. That finding spread everywhere. More recent replications have complicated it: the pattern is sensitive to confounds like case ordering, and the effect doesn't appear consistently across settings. That's not a reason to dismiss the concept entirely. Hold it lightly instead. If you're making important decisions when you're depleted, the impact on your reasoning doesn't need a formal study to validate it. The claim that willpower runs on a measurable glucose tank is probably too tidy. The broader intuition that careful thinking has limits is worth keeping.
How do I know if I'm overthinking or thinking it through properly?
Overthinking tends to cover the same ground repeatedly without producing new information. Thinking something through properly generates new questions, new considerations, or shifts in what you value. If you've been circling the same two concerns for a week without learning anything new about either, more deliberation probably won't help, and what you're experiencing is closer to avoidance than analysis. Research on somatic markers points to something similar: your body registers inconsistencies between what you're planning and what you actually value before your reasoning catches up. If a decision keeps feeling wrong after you've talked yourself into it, that's worth taking seriously rather than overriding.
What separates a good decision from a good outcome?
A decision can be well-reasoned and still produce a bad outcome. An impulsive choice can work out well. Confusing the two is how you end up judging past-you unfairly, because outcomes are what stick in memory. The psychologist's term for this is resulting: rating the quality of your reasoning by what happened rather than by what you knew at the time. Ask yourself something more honest: given what I knew, did I gather relevant information, consider realistic options, and make a choice that aligned with what I actually value? That process is yours to own. Outcomes involve probability and circumstances you couldn't have predicted, and you don't control them.
