Decision detox: simplify your life by making less choices

Perhaps the greatest luxury, in a world full of choices, is not having to choose. This certainly seems to be the attitude of some of London’s hottest restaurants. At Beast in Chapel Place, the menu is as simple as the stripped-down décor: steak and king crab. That’s it. You don’t even get to choose the weight of the steak: the chef simply gives you what he thinks you can handle. The owners of Beast cottoned on to the lure of a no-choice menu at their previous venture, Burger & Lobster. The concept is everywhere, from Bubbledogs to Chicken Shop and gin-only bars such as 214 in Bermondsey.

These single-minded successes reflect a very modern problem: in a city where you can eat food from Eritrea or Goa, where you can visit a Korean café that’s also a hair salon (Hurwundeki in Bethnal Green) or a bar where you can draw on the walls (Doodle Bar in Battersea), is what we really crave a night off from endless freedom of choice?

For much of the past century, the mantra has been to give customers what they want. And what we were presumed to want was variety: Starbucks boasts that its stores offer 87,000 ‘drink combinations’ and the average Sainsbury’s super-market stocks 30,000 products. But businesses are increasingly un-afraid to acknowledge that offering a smaller selection often makes each one better. As the fashion boutique Cop Copine in Islington shouts from its shop window: ‘Yes, we mainly do black! But we do black very well.’

Some people take this austere approach further. In 2012, Barack Obama told Vanity Fair that he only wears grey or blue suits. ‘I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing,’ he said. ‘Because I have too many other decisions to make… You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.’ Another profile of Obama, by The New Yorker, reveals that he asks staff to send him memos with just three checkboxes at the end: ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ and ‘let’s discuss’.

The psychological rationale behind this approach is a phenomenon called decision fatigue. At first, the idea seems counter-intuitive: people with few choices in their lives will tell researchers this makes them unhappy. But having too many choices can be just as debilitating. Many of us have already realised that the only way to deal with modern life is to resist exploring the full range of choices at our disposal — how often do you cook the same meal, or buy a new version of your existing mobile phone because it’s too much hassle to compare them all? If we didn’t shut ourselves off from at least some of the bewildering range of options on offer, we’d go mad.

Our brains, like our bodies, can get tired. The difference is that there are no aching muscles or sore ligaments to let us know. Studies have shown that every decision we make has a cognitive cost; when ‘decision fatigue’ kicks in, we either get tired and do nothing, or become reckless and do anything. And it’s the act of committing to a single choice that’s so exhausting, not just browsing through the options. That explains why I can waste hours scrolling through Netflix, boggling at a world where I can watch old Louis Theroux documentaries or the latest series of Orange is the New Black whenever I want. The modern ailment FOMO — fear of missing out — also plays a part here, as we know from our friends’ Facebook pages and Instagram feeds just how much culture we need to keep up with.

Understanding the concept of decision fatigue has huge implications, and not just for restaurant owners looking to capitalise on the latest trend. A 2011 report by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University looked at the judgements of Israeli parole boards. It found that prisoners were more likely to be freed in the mornings than in the late afternoon. By the end of the day, the board was tired of making decisions, and more likely to go for the safe option of keeping the prisoners behind bars. There was a small uptick in leniency directly after the mid-morning break and post-lunch, but it didn’t last. ‘The percentage of favourable rulings drops from around 65 per cent to nearly zero within each session and returns abruptly to around 65 per cent after a break,’ wrote the authors. ‘The caricature that justice is what the judge ate for breakfast might be an appropriate caricature for human decision-making in general.’

One of the few things known to combat decision fatigue is food. Researchers at Florida State University gave subjects a glass of lemonade with either sugar or artificial sweetener in it before asking them to complete a willpower test. The group that had the glucose boost did far better, showing improved self-control and a greater ability to think strategically. Further research showed that when your blood-sugar levels are low, you are more likely to make decisions based on short-term rewards rather than thinking about the bigger picture. As journalist John Tierney, the author of Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, puts it: that means dieters are stuck in a ‘nutritional catch-22’. ‘In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower,’ he noted in a 2011 article. ‘In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.’

Obama isn’t alone in streamlining the smaller details of his life to help him focus: Apple’s Steve Jobs became notorious for only wearing jeans, a black turtleneck and New Balance trainers. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told CNN last year he wears the same outfit every day, joking: ‘If you could see my closet at home…’ Simon Cowell has adopted a uniform more restrictive than the one I wore at school: black or grey Nicole Farhi T-shirts, white Armani shirts and jeans. ‘When I go shopping I buy five of everything,’ he has said.

It’s easier for men to be so bland in their fashion choices. I’m a regular panellist on the BBC’s Sunday Politics television show, and if I wear the same dress two weeks in a row, I get tetchy tweets. Meanwhile, I’ll bet some of the male politicians on the show are wearing suits older than I am. (Huge respect here to Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, who has the same style of jacket in more than 30 colours.)