Why We Repeatedly Struggle With These 4 Hard Decisions

Every day we’re burdened with the task of making the right decision.

“Should I go for a run this morning? Ugh, but I’m so tired.”

“It’s been a long day at work. Should I cook dinner tonight or just order take-out?”

“I want to go out with the girls tonight, but I need to edit my blog post…”

The list goes on.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t end up choosing what’s better for us in the long term. Because it’s hard. We cave in, choosing the easier option.

This is because we rely on brute-force willpower, hoping it will be strong enough to make the right decision for us. Problem is, relying on willpower all the time can be mentally exhausting (and quite frankly, depressing).

It’s not as if we lack willpower. It isn’t “weak”.

We’re just forcing ourselves to choose between hard and easy — between what we should do and what we want to do — in the wrong environment and in the wrong state.

Instead, we need to make smarter decisions earlier, so when the moment to choose arises, we are in the right state with the right circumstances to choose what’s best for us.

We must remove potential points of failure in advance.

We must create circumstances that minimize the chance of failure.

Then we can go from thinking about doing it to actually doing it.

Let’s explore this further with 4 examples of things most of us struggle to do.

1. Eating Healthy

No, the decision to eat junk food isn’t made when you’re hungry in the afternoon and you go to your pantry, grab the jumbo bag of Cheetos and start munching it down.

The decision was made when you bought the bag of Cheetos at the grocery store last weekend. The decision was made as soon as you brought that thing into your home.

Similarly, debating between take-out and cooking dinner is pointless when you’re hungry and tired. The decision to order take-out is not made when you’re browsing through UberEats after a long day at work.

The decision was actually made last Sunday when you didn’t meal prep. When you didn’t pre-cut your salads, have fresh fruit lined neatly in your fridge and pre-pack your quinoa stir-fry in cute (cute!) ready-to-heat containers.

We actually make tiny wrong decisions all the time, leading us to make bigger wrong decisions later. It snowballs quite fast.

We set ourselves up so there is no easy way to make the right decision.

Instead, we can:

• Go to the grocery store on a full stomach with a list in hand
• Choose to spend time learning simple recipes we love
• Purchase a slow cooker, a smoothie blender, or any other tools which make cooking convenient
• Prepare meals in advance

These trivial things you don’t feel like doing on a Sunday afternoon can change the course of your entire week, and over time, your entire lifestyle. When we make simple decisions like these in advance, we set ourselves up for success.

2. Exercising

The decision to wake up and go for a run is not made when you wake up. If you’re forcing your zombie self to choose between a cozy bed and the gym every morning, good luck.

The decision to go for your run was made the night before when you laid out your workout clothes. When you decided you’d reward yourself after your run with an hour of reading. Or maybe Starbucks. Whatever your incentive, it was pre-planned, and you were excited.

The decision to go on the morning run could’ve also been made when you promised your friend you’d go running with them. Or the decision to go to the gym was made when you booked the 7:00 am appointment with your personal trainer a week ago. When you (hesitantly) paid her $80 dollars in advance for this session.

We have to deliberately put ourselves into situations where we can’t (or it’s really hard to) back out.

We have to consciously design our lives so that the path of least resistance is the path that is ultimately better for us. It won’t just magically be easier to do hard things one day.

Putting money on the line, making external promises to create accountability, and creating an environment that rewards us is how we experience real change.

3. Rising Early

You guessed it…the decision to wake up early isn’t made the night before when you set your alarm for 6:00 am.

It wasn’t even made when you read 9 articles about productive morning routines on Medium, pledging yourself you’d become a morning person starting tomorrow.

The decision to wake up early is made the moment you realized there is something important to be done — something so important, it needs your undivided attention, first thing in the morning, before any of your other duties demand you.

You’ve set yourself up to wake up early when you have strong a reason to.

And you know exactly what needs to be done in those 2 extra hours. You have a schedule laid out. You don’t need to decide what to do when you wake up — you jump right in.

We can design our environment to make the process easy, like keeping a glass of cold water nearby or leaving your curtains open to let sunlight pour in at 6 in the morning. And even take a more aggressive approach, like cutting internet access an hour before bedtime.

We have to find what works for us and stick to doing it regularly.

4. Focusing

You don’t choose to avoid being distracted by your phone when the notification ding goes off. Or when there is a disarray of sticky notes, loose papers, and food crumbs all over your desk. And definitely not when you make yourself available to people so that they can reach you anytime.

You choose to stay focused by putting your phone on autopilot. By throwing it out of your room, perhaps.

By leaving your desk clean the night before.

By having an uncluttered calendar because you canceled plans with your friends a week ago.

By meal prepping. By doing trivial chores beforehand.

You choose to avoid distraction by never giving it a chance in the first place.

Then, nothing will remain for you to do except for the one thing that truly matters.

I mean, doing these things is tough.

We can’t simply trust ourselves to make the right decision at the right time all the time. It’s a hit or miss.

Being proactive is the only way to experience change at the habitual level. We have to proactively do the groundwork to prevent mental barriers from arising.

Each decision we make now affects a multitude of decisions we will make in the future. For better or for worse.

By internalizing this, we can make it easy to do the harder things in life.