30,000 decisions a day – no wonder your reptilian brain eventually says, ‘Not another step. STOP.

Introduction: before you can say ‘good morning’

If you feel tired before you can even utter your first ‘good morning’, it's not necessarily because you didn't get enough sleep. Your brain may have already been through three wars, seven crises and a minor melodrama before you even opened your left eye.

It stands by your bed like an old warehouse worker and reports:

‘So, Boss, we have 12 notifications, 6 possible breakfasts, three moods for today and one person who has already annoyed you – even though they haven't done anything yet. What shall we do?’

Welcome to an era where people don't run from tigers, but from red messenger apps. They don't hunt for meat, but for a charger. They don't make decisions about surviving the winter, but about which plant-based milk – almond, oat, rice, coconut, ‘barista edition’ – will least offend their digestive system and bank account.

And yet we are more exhausted than our ancestors after a day of ploughing the fields.

This text is about just that: about fatigue that does not come from doing too much, but from thinking too much. About life that increasingly resembles a quantum experiment. About a brain that behaves like Schrödinger's cat – a little alive, a little dead, a little ‘I'll do it in a minute’, a little ‘I still have to think about it’. And about how to stop living in a permanent superposition before quantum physicists start to get genuinely worried about us.

Before we go any further, it's worth taking a moment to pause and see if this is actually about you.

🟦 BOX: Quick check-in to start

Ask yourself three questions:

• Do I wake up more often tired than rested?

• Do I feel like I'm ‘always thinking about something’ even when I'm not doing anything?

• In the evening, is it difficult for me to say what I've actually ‘accomplished’ today?

If you answered ‘yes’ to at least two of these questions, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with you. Your brain is simply working in superposition mode.

Firstly: you at 8 a.m., or Schrödinger's cat in human form

Imagine a box. Inside is a cat. No one knows whether it is alive or dead.

Until someone looks inside, the cat is both alive and dead. Physicists call this superposition. I call it Monday.

This is what your morning looks like.

You haven't even turned off the alarm clock yet, and your brain is already calculating scenarios: get up now or in five minutes? Snooze or heroic ‘okay, I'm getting up’? Coffee right away or bathroom first? Take the ‘no talking before coffee’ mug or the pretty one you're always afraid of breaking? Porridge, eggs, a sandwich, or maybe nothing because ‘I'm not in the mood for breakfast’? Reply to that strange message from yesterday, or pretend you haven't seen it yet? Leggings, tracksuit bottoms pretending to be leggings, or ‘I'm going out, so I can look like a human being’?

Until you choose, you exist in ten versions of yourself at once. The one who got up right away. The one who pretends the alarm clock doesn't exist. The one who makes porridge. The one who rolls her eyes at the thought of porridge. The one who mentally gives up on today before it has even begun.

This is life superposition. And it comes at a cost.

Before you get to your first coffee, half of your battery is already drained, not by action, but by analysis. The most biologically expensive state is not ‘doing too much’. The most biologically expensive state is ‘I don't know yet’. Energy is not spent on movement. Energy is spent on being in limbo.

And the body – as it is – does not remain indifferent to this.

🟨 BOX: How does this look in the body? – morning superposition mode

• you wake up already ‘in the red’, as if you had run a marathon the day before (even though you ran through your Insta feed at most)

• you feel tension in your neck, jaw or stomach even before breakfast

• you catch yourself sitting with your coffee, staring at one point, thinking about five things at once

• the simplest choices (‘what to wear?’, ‘what to eat?’) can tire you out more than two hours of work

Secondly: the brain used to have it easier (and this is not ‘back in the day’)

This is not going to be a nostalgic song in the style of ‘people used to have it easier, and now young people...’. This is going to be about biology. About the fact that our brain is a structure that is thousands of years old, and we are making it run a modern operating system with a million notifications.

Our great-grandparents made rare, specific, life-changing decisions. Such as: repair the roof today or tomorrow? Go out to the field before the rain or wait it out? Where to hide the cattle if a storm is coming?

Which tree is ripe and which one can wait?

These decisions made sense, were important, had consequences and followed a very clear biological logic: ‘if you don't do this, you will be cold, hungry or wet’.

The brain was perfectly designed for this: a few hundred, at most a few thousand decisions a day, each of them related to real survival.

Today? Today, according to various estimates, the average person makes between twenty and thirty thousand decisions a day. Every day. Not because we live more deeply, more wisely or more reflectively. It's because every stimulus, even the most innocent, generates a choice.

🟦 BOX: Your great-grandmother's everyday life vs your everyday life

Great-grandmother:

– ‘Will I manage to collect the laundry before the rain?’

– ‘Will this roof survive the winter?’

– ‘Did the children come home before dark?’

You:

– ‘Should I mute my notifications or “be available”?’

– ‘Should I watch one more video or really go to sleep?’

– ‘Should I order food or feel guilty that I didn't cook?’

Third: micro-decisions, macro fatigue

Take another look at your morning. Alarm clock: get up or snooze? Reach for your phone or pretend you're the type who ‘doesn't start the day with a screen’? Open Instagram or your email inbox? Black coffee, with milk, with foam, without? Which milk? Plus toast, porridge, smoothie, ‘nothing, because I'm not hungry’?

Then clothes: something comfortable or something ‘presentable’? Hair: bun, ponytail, loose, ‘not today, a hat will do the trick’? Full make-up, a quick ‘face refresh’, or a day in the style of ‘the world must bear my truth’?

That's dozens to over a hundred decisions before you even really start your day. And each one is a tiny loop that your brain has to close. It's like opening more and more tabs in your browser. It may seem like a small thing, but after the fiftieth tab, even the most powerful computer starts to wheeze.

Your brain registers every micro-change, every ‘yes or no’, every thought: ‘now or later?’, ‘this or that?’, ‘right away or after coffee?’. And it doesn't matter to it whether it's choosing an app to play music or whether you'll have anything to eat today: the decision-making mode is the same.

That's why you may feel like you ‘haven't done anything yet’ and you're already tired. Because you have. Only most of it went into analysis, not action.

🟨 BOX: Micro-decision fatigue test

• You change your outfit several times before leaving the house.

• You open an email, close it and say ‘later’.

• You take a screenshot of an important message to ‘come back to later’... and you don't come back

• You end the day feeling like you were busy, but you didn't really get much done

The more ‘yes’ answers you have, the more energy you spend on decisions rather than on living.

Fourth: the digital world – a factory of decision-making fluff

Phones are no longer a tool. Phones are a factory of choices.

Every notification is a decision: open, don't open, read, put off until later, reply, ignore. Every email: read now or later, reply immediately, leave it for ‘after the break’, mark it, move it, filter it. Every scroll: stop, rewind, enter comments, click on profile, add to favourites, share, ‘save for later’.

Every app is designed to trigger another ‘what to do?’ in you. The brain cannot recognise that it's just Instagram, TikTok or another WhatsApp group. For the old, caveman part of your nervous system, every sudden signal, sound or flashing dot is like the crack of a branch in the forest. And the crack of a branch in the forest meant one thing: ‘something might eat you, you should decide – now.’

That's why we're so tired of things that ‘objectively’ shouldn't be tiring: sitting on the sofa, browsing social media, replying to emails. Biologically, it looks like a day spent in constant combat readiness.

🟦 BOX: Work fatigue or stimulus fatigue?

• After a day of work, you know what you've done – this is ‘effect’ fatigue.

• After a day of scrolling, you feel drained, but you don't know where your energy has gone.

• If you feel the latter more often, it's not ‘laziness,’ it's system overload.

Fifth: the brain does not need perfection. It needs direction.

This is neurobiological gold. Dopamine, the motivation hormone, does not activate in response to a perfect plan, a beautiful goal, a moving inspiration or another ‘motivational quote’. Dopamine starts dancing when the brain sees one thing: direction.

You don't need to know exactly how you're going to get there. You don't need to be sure that it's the ‘smartest’ option. You don't need to have five contingency plans written down. All you need is a clear ‘let's go there’.

If you choose, your brain goes. If you don't choose, your brain turns off the engine. What we often call ‘lack of motivation,’ ‘laziness,’ or ‘lack of will to live’ is very often simply a decision-making failure: too many options, too little direction. Too many tabs. Too much ‘I'll think about it.’ Too many ‘I don't know, we'll see’. This is not moral weakness. It is a weakening of the control system.

🟨 BOX: One question that unlocks dopamine

Instead of struggling with the question ‘what is the best decision?’, try:

‘Which way do I WANT to try first?’

The brain doesn't need guarantees. It needs a first step.

Sixth: no decision can be more dangerous than a bad decision

Your limbic system – that old, reptilian part of your brain – is not a fan of uncertainty. It sees fog and immediately sounds the alarm: ‘life-threatening’.

In the world of cavemen, this made sense. If you thought too long about whether to run or stay, whether to climb a tree or stay in the bushes, whether to leave the cave or wait, the risk was simple: someone or something would make the decision for you. And usually it would be a tiger.

Today, the tiger has been replaced by other things: an unsent email, a conversation you're avoiding, a relationship where you're stuck between ‘stay’ and “leave”, a task you've been putting off for three months. But for the brain, the pattern is the same: we're in ‘I don't know’ for too long = alarm.

Hence the many physical symptoms resulting from mental suspension: insomnia, migraines, heart palpitations, stomach cramps, hypersensitivity, irritability, emotional swings. This is not dramatising or ‘making a scene’. It is the body saying, ‘I am not made for eternal half-decisions, choose anything, just close this loop.’

🟦 BOX: How the body says, ‘make a decision already’

• the same symptoms return when you think about one specific issue

• the longer you put off a decision, the worse you sleep and the more you think

• the need to escape arises: TV series, scrolling, eating, anything to avoid feeling the tension

• the topic comes back again and again, despite attempts to ‘not think about it’

Seventh: living in superposition – ten versions of yourself at once

You know that feeling when your head is full like an overloaded hard drive, and you haven't ‘done anything big today’?

In the background, there are simultaneous threads: work, money, housing, health, children, family, relationships, ‘what I'll say tomorrow’, ‘what I didn't say yesterday’, plans for the weekend, fear of the future, and the thought that it would be good to rest sometime.

Each of these topics is an open tab. Your brain has to keep each of them going energetically, as if you were baking a cake, doing your make-up, driving a car, looking after a child, scrolling through Instagram, planning Christmas, arguing in your imagination and still wondering if you shouldn't ‘take better care of yourself’.

Your laptop can freeze with seventeen Chrome tabs open. You try to function with fifty-seven and still blame yourself for ‘not being able to cope’.

This is not a failure. It is system overload.

🟨 BOX: Mini exercise – list of open tabs

Take a piece of paper and write down everything that's been on your mind lately: things you think about several times a day.

Then mark the ones you can actually influence here and now (in the next few days).

Just seeing it in black and white begins to close part of the loop.

Eighth: clarity – the moment when the universe says ‘thank you’

In quantum physics, this is called wave function collapse: all possible options collapse and one remains. In psychobiology, we talk about closing the conflict loop. In everyday life, it sounds less spectacular: ‘Okay. I'll do it.’

And yet, a lot happens in this seemingly mundane moment: the body calms down, cortisol begins to drop, dopamine kicks in, energy returns, emotions settle down, and thoughts begin to form into more meaningful sentences.

Why? Because finally there is direction. Out of millions of potential universes, there is only one left: the one where you actually do something, rather than just contemplating it. The universe – and your nervous system – finally know where to send the energy package.

Ninth: the paradox of routine – the elixir of youth and the elixir of boredom in one bottle

Here comes the beautiful paradox that you like so much: routine both saves you and ages you.

On the one hand, routine lowers stress levels, reduces the number of decisions, gives a sense of predictability and security, and stabilises the nervous system. It's like pouring yourself a glass of good red wine every day for comfort – a slight relaxation, a pleasant ‘phew’, the body stops standing at attention.

Without routine, the brain lives in a mode of ‘what, where, when, how, why, with whom, why, and if not...?’. Routine allows you to say, ‘Sunshine, there's no need to analyse here, we do it automatically’. And that's really good.

But on the other hand – if routine turns into concrete, if it lasts too long without any modifications, if it kills curiosity and stimuli, if it makes you go on autopilot for weeks... the brain begins to age functionally. Not spectacularly, but slowly, elegantly, like a rose in a crystal vase that no one thought to change the water in.

Neurologically, the brain does not age because it repeats something. It ages when it has too few opportunities to create new connections. And new connections are created when you do something differently: you learn, you try, you experience different sounds, images, words, paths, tastes.

🟦 BOX: Healthy routine vs dead routine

Healthy routine:

• makes your day easier instead of more difficult

• gives you a sense of support, not suffocation

• after doing it, you feel more space

Dead routine:

• you do it ‘because you have to’, but you no longer know why

• you find it difficult to change anything, even though you feel you need to

• days merge into one, and life looks like a ‘copy-paste’ loop

Tenth: the ideal proportion – 80% routine, 20% novelty

This conflict gives rise to a simple but very effective rule: eighty percent of life can be calm, predictable and ‘routine,’ while twenty percent should be new, different, a little surprising.

That 80% is your rituals, structures, habits, repetitive paths. It's your morning coffee, a similar daily routine, fixed meal times, familiar clothing choices, repetitive micro-rituals that don't require your brain to stand on its head.

The 20% is the spice. It's a different route to the shop. A new tea. Different music in the shower. A nail polish colour you ‘would never wear, but still’. Three minutes of dancing to an absurdly silly song. A short conversation with someone outside your bubble. A book from a section you don't normally even look at. It's the little everyday ‘oh, I haven't seen that before’.

The brain loves two states at the same time: ‘it's safe here’ and ‘but it's not boring’. In this mixture, it works like a young god.

🟨 BOX: Mini recipe for the 80/20 day

• 80% – familiar things: fixed rituals, repetitive decisions, a predictable daily routine

• 20% – one small element that is different from usual: a new flavour, a new route, different music, a new colour, a small spontaneous decision

It doesn't have to be a revolution. It's meant to be a signal to the brain: ‘the world is still interesting’.

Eleventh: routine as a foundation, novelty as oxygen

Routine gives you energy for what is important. Novelty gives you the feeling that you are living, not just replaying.

When you are less tired of making decisions, you have more space for creativity, relationships, development, deep conversations, passions, and pleasure. When you have a fixed daily framework, you can allow yourself spontaneity that doesn't turn everything upside down.

Routine is not a prison, although it can easily become one if you stop observing yourself. Routine is the stage. And novelty is your dance.

Conclusion: Your brain does not want perfection. It wants clarity.

We live in an age of thirty thousand micro-decisions a day, a thousand stimuli, endless scrolling and eternal superposition. It's normal to sometimes want to throw your own head out the window and buy a new one. It's normal to feel tired. It's normal to feel chaos.

But the solution doesn't have to be complicated.

It's not the perfect decision that brings relief, but the clear decision.

Not a perfect routine, but a kind routine that supports you instead of controlling you.

Not constant ecstasy of novelty, but small, reasonable doses of curiosity.

Energy does not return when you do more.

Energy returns when you finally say:

‘I decide.’

And you close the box with the cat. At least for today.