Dealing with the Dreaded Decision Fatigue, Anxiety, and the Illusion of Control
Eszter Noble is a Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT®) practitioner, clinical hypnotherapist, and coach specializing in anxiety, fears, and depression. Her method utilizes effective techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), psychotherapy, and hypnotherapy, with the ability to provide freedom from any issues and deliver permanent, lasting solutions.
It’s been a few years now, but I remember having the mindset that if I’m not working late at night, if I’m not maximising all my opportunities to be productive, I must be lazy. It was only after some research and studying that I finally understood a simple but important aspect. Until that point, I didn’t realise that my brain is a lot like my iPhone: intelligent, holds copious amounts of information, and needs to be recharged regularly. It was initially hard to accept that powering down at the end of the day wasn’t a sign of weakness. So, on that note, let’s take a moment to explore how to avoid burnout, make better decisions, stay calm, and succeed while relinquishing some control.
The bed, the wardrobe and a fork in the road
When it comes to being highly effective, the most counterintuitive thing you could do is prioritise sleep. I worked with a lot of people who consider too many hours in bed a ‘waste of time’, and don’t even get me started on the ‘you can sleep when you’re dead’ attitude. Slowing down and recharging should actually be non-negotiable for all of us. Sleep helps prevent decision fatigue because it restores the brain systems you use to focus, weigh options, control impulses, and choose deliberately rather than reactively. When you are short on sleep, those systems become less efficient, so ordinary choices feel harder, and you are more likely to default, procrastinate, or act impulsively.
The prefrontal cortex supports executive functions such as working memory, attention, self-monitoring, and impulse control, which are all crucial to good decision-making. Sleep loss disproportionately affects this region, reducing its activity and making it harder to hold information in your mind, update a plan, and inhibit unhelpful impulses. Let’s not forget that sleep also helps regulate our emotions. A rested brain can tolerate uncertainty and discomfort more easily. A tired brain is more reactive, which makes decisions feel emotionally loaded and encourages shortcuts.
I would suggest that you treat important decisions as sleep-sensitive work. If a choice is significant and you have slept badly, delay it if possible, reduce the number of options, decide in the morning, or have preset criteria, such as budget, time, health, and long-term value, so you rely less on depleted willpower. We generally function best with 7 to 9 hours of sleep, which supports attention, memory, and daily performance, so go ahead and ‘embrace the bed’, or at least the idea of sleep.
Before you hit the hay, though, you could make your life a bit easier by approaching your wardrobe and laying out your clothes for the next day. By now, you may have heard about the “infamous” entrepreneurs who always wear the same thing, or at least the same style, a uniform of sorts. I have had my fair share of meltdowns in front of a seemingly empty wardrobe, desperately trying to decide what to wear, often resulting in unnecessary anger and running late. So, do yourself a favour and, with the little bit of energy you have left in the evening, pick out what to wear for the next day.
Some entrepreneurs wear the same thing because it removes a small daily decision, creates a recognisable personal brand, and helps them begin the day with clarity rather than choice overload. Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck and Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirt are the best-known examples. It’s about freeing up mental space and capacity for the really important decisions.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you slept very well, picked out an empowering outfit the night before, and now find yourself at a fork in the road. What should you do? To handle the situation well, turn a vague, emotionally loaded choice into a clear, values-led decision process, made when you are rested, with a short list of realistic options and a defined deadline. This reduces decision fatigue considerably. What you shouldn’t do, though, is allow any “what ifs” to torment you as you go about your day. When you make your decision, be prepared to stick to it. You have absolutely no way of knowing what would have happened if you had chosen the alternative path. It is completely and utterly futile to ruminate on the possibilities and “what ifs”. Accept that you made a choice to the best of your abilities, with the information you had to hand at the time, and move on.
Instead of rigid rules and routines, embrace uncertainty
Rigidity and rules won’t be able to offer the feeling of safety we crave, so we need to learn to embrace uncertainty as a natural and even valuable part of life. Japan’s skyscrapers offer a fantastic example. Rather than trying to remain completely rigid during an earthquake, many are designed to move with the shaking. They use flexible foundations, shock-absorbing dampers, and structures that can sway, allowing the building to absorb and disperse the energy of the earthquake rather than resisting it until it breaks and falls apart.
Life works in a similar way. Structure, planning, and healthy routines can support us, but when they become an attempt to control every outcome, they often create more anxiety than peace. True resilience comes not from refusing to bend, but from developing the inner flexibility to adapt when circumstances change. Just as a well-designed building survives by moving with the earth rather than fighting it, we grow stronger when we learn to respond to uncertainty with curiosity, courage, and trust in our ability to adjust.
When we release the need for certainty, we create space for creativity, growth, and new possibilities. We stop postponing life until everything feels predictable and begin taking meaningful steps in the present. Uncertainty is not the enemy of progress. It’s actually where real transformation happens.
When efficiency becomes the enemy
Many of us feel like the only exercise we can fit into our schedule nowadays is performing cognitive gymnastics, or, in other words, multitasking, all in the name of efficiency. Unfortunately, the only thing we can achieve with that is raising our blood pressure and feeling fatigued faster.
Multitasking creates greater decision depletion because every switch between tasks forces the brain to reassess priorities, retrieve context, and decide what deserves attention next. Rather than conserving mental energy, constant task-switching spends it on low-value logistical decisions, like what to do now, what to pause, and what to return to later.
Over the course of a day, these repeated micro-decisions erode our capacity for the choices that genuinely matter. By the time we face a complex problem, a strategic trade-off, or an important conversation, our cognitive resources may already be depleted. We become more likely to default to the easiest option, postpone difficult decisions, or make choices based on urgency rather than importance.
Sadly, multitasking is simply a myth, and that’s all it will ever be. What feels like doing several things at once is just rapid switching between them, forcing the brain to pause, refocus, and rebuild context each time. The result is rarely greater efficiency. More often, it is slower work, more mistakes, and mental fatigue.
In this sense, multitasking does not simply divide attention. It taxes judgement. The more fragmented our focus becomes, the less energy remains for deliberate, high-value thinking.
The ‘savage’ way to make decisions
Contrary to what the name might suggest, making decisions in a savage way does not mean being reckless or harsh. It means refusing to drift through life on autopilot. It means filtering your decisions through your standards, aligned with your values and actionable goals that empower you!
S – Standards. Defining them means deciding, in advance, what you will and will not accept in your work, relationships, health, and use of time. Think about your values, translate them into specific behaviours, and decide how you will respond when those standards are not met.
A – Aligned. Being aligned means your values, goals, decisions, and everyday actions point in the same direction. In simple terms, you are doing what you say matters to you, and not what’s easy.
V – Values. Living by them means looking for the principles that consistently matter most to you, not the ones you think you should have. Start with real experiences, name the underlying qualities, narrow the list to a few core values, and describe what each looks like in practice.
A – Actionable. This entails setting goals and making decisions that are within your scope and are also realistically achievable. You can have big aspirations, but you cannot skip steps along the way.
G – Goals. Setting them means picking a specific outcome you intend to achieve and deciding how, when, and by what measure you will pursue it. An achievable goal should be challenging enough to matter, but realistic given your time, skills, energy, resources, and current circumstances.
E – Empowered. Feeling that way means making meaningful choices, acting on them, and influencing the outcomes in your life. It combines confidence in your abilities with a sense of agency, a sense of “I can do something about this”.
Making decisions this way means setting standards that are fiercely aligned with your values, then letting those standards guide your choices with clarity and courage. A savage decision-maker does not chase every opportunity, please everyone, or wait for perfect certainty. They ask, “Does this move me closer to the life I am intentionally creating?” When your goals are actionable, and your boundaries are clear, decisions become less about fear and more about alignment. You stop negotiating with what drains you and start choosing what strengthens you, your peace, your purpose, your growth, and the future you are building with intention.
The crucial aspects you do need to control
Control is merely an illusion because we often overestimate how much influence we have over outcomes. We can shape our choices, effort, preparation, and responses, but we cannot fully control other people, timing, circumstances, health, the economy, or results.
For that reason, it becomes all the more important to focus your energy on what you actually can control:
Your preparation and effort.
Your values, boundaries, and decisions.
Your attention, attitude, and response.
The next small action you take.
Focus on your inputs, as you cannot directly control another person’s feelings, a market shift, an illness, the past, or how events ultimately unfold. Stoic philosophy frames this as the dichotomy of control: focus your energy on what is genuinely within your power, and meet the rest with acceptance and adaptability. Ultimately, even the mightiest oak will need to bend in a severe storm.
The deeper shift
The strongest leaders are not those who never feel anxiety. They are those who no longer organise their entire life and leadership around avoiding it. Wanting constant control often comes from a previous situation, from our past or childhood, where the lack of control caused so much distress that the brain decided once and for all, “We’re not doing that again.” The situation would have felt very unsafe, threatening even, so the brain made the executive decision that control is crucial, absolutely paramount. After all, the brain’s primary focus is to keep us alive, not to thrive.
Once you understand that certainty is often just a comforting story, not a reliable strategy, you can make better choices and have more favourable outcomes. Make decisions with conviction, but hold plans lightly. Take responsibility without assuming omnipotence. Don’t try to hold it all together. Create teams that can think, adapt, and act, even when the path ahead is not fully visible.
The release isn’t by any means a loss of control. It is the discovery that leadership and success were never meant to be a one-person attempt to control the future. It is the art of creating clarity, trust, and momentum in the middle of uncertainty.
Read more from Eszter Noble
Eszter Noble, Clinical Hypnotherapist & Coach
Eszter Noble is an established clinical hypnotherapist using the RTT® method, trained by world-renowned hypnotherapist Marisa Peer. She is known for handling extremely difficult cases and clients who have been stuck for years and have tried it all. Specializing in anxiety, fears, and depression, she is extremely intuitive and honest, dedicated to empowering her clients to become the best possible versions of themselves. Offering her expertise in English, German, and Hungarian, Eszter’s mission is to take the taboo out of therapy.
