To Avoid Decision Fatigue Develop your Decision Muscle

One of the muscles we need to develop is what I call our “Decision Muscle.” The Decision Muscle is the intuitive answer we hear when we consider whether to keep an object in our lives or move it out of our lives. Call it your gut, your third eye or listening to your heart. It’s that instant, often ignored feeling that tells us the truth about whether to keep an object in our life.

To create a happy home, we should only keep those things that bring us joy. But the problem is that many of us hit mental and emotional roadblocks. We ignore what our heart (or gut or our third eye) has to say. We rationalize keeping something we don’t truly love because we might come off as ungrateful if we don’t keep something that someone gave us. Or maybe we paid a lot of money for the object and think we should keep it, even if we don’t love it (Heads UP! – you’ve already paid for it once- don’t keep paying for it when it doesn’t bring you joy). Or worse, we have the space, so why not just keep it anyway – after all, it’s not hurting anything.

The problem is, these mental and emotional rationalizations are actually roadblocks that keep us from listening to our intuition. Our intuition will tell us immediately if we love something. When we hem and haw, we are switching from intuitively knowing whether to keep something to rationalizing keeping something because we’re running into emotional and mental roadblocks. These roadblocks lead to decision fatigue.

To develop the Decision Muscle, simply listen to your instincts about what makes you happy. Know the answer about keeping something in your life comes quickly without guilt, pain or overthinking.

Clear out the roadblocks and you have cleared out a lot of physical and emotional clutter.