“Mom, what’s for dinner?” my 9-year-old asked at 9:40 in the morning, spoon still in her cereal bowl. I told her. Twenty minutes later, from the hallway, half-dressed and hunting for a swimsuit: “Wait, what’s for dinner again?” By the third ask, somewhere before noon, I heard my own voice come out flat and a little sharp, and I actually stopped and thought, something is wrong with me today.
Nothing was wrong with me. Something was wrong with the day — or more accurately, with how many days exactly like it had been stacking up, one on top of the other, since school let out.
We’re deep in the no-camp stretch of summer this year. Budget’s tight enough that camp for three kids wasn’t really on the table, so it’s been me, the girls, a rotation of box fans that lose the fight against the heat by 2 p.m., and roughly four hundred small decisions a day that didn’t used to feel like decisions at all. Pool or sprinkler. Watermelon now or after lunch. Whose turn it is to pick what we watch. Why the 7-year-old is crying about a popsicle that, by the time anyone gets to it, has already melted down her arm and onto the laminate floor in a sticky orange river nobody has the energy to deal with yet.
The Decision Fatigue Nobody Warns You About
After the third dinner question, I texted my friend S something like “I think I’m losing my mind, is that normal,” because that’s usually my first move when I feel unhinged — check with someone else before assuming it’s just me. She sent back one word: “decision fatigue,” which, fair, is a term I’ve actually written about before — I’ve researched it more than once for Kind Shelf. But there’s a real gap between researching a thing at a desk and living it at full volume with three kids and no camp budget, and the knowing doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d think it should. So that afternoon, while the girls did something with couch cushions I chose not to investigate, I went back and reread the actual research, the way you do when you’ve explained a thing to other people a dozen times and somehow still need to hear it again for yourself.
The psychologist credited with a lot of the early work on decision fatigue is Roy Baumeister, who studies willpower and self-control. The idea is pretty simple once you sit with it: your ability to make good decisions isn’t unlimited. It behaves more like a muscle that gets tired than like a switch that’s just on or off. Make enough decisions in a row — even small, dumb ones, especially small, dumb ones — and your brain starts looking for shortcuts. It gets irritable. It avoids choosing at all if it can. Researchers estimate the average adult makes something like 35,000 decisions a day, and that number goes up considerably once you’re the one responsible for keeping other small humans fed, sunscreened, and not actively drowning.
Thirty-five thousand. I sat with that number for a minute. It explained a lot, honestly — why I can write clear-headed copy for Kind Shelf by 10 a.m. and still snap at a kid over a popsicle flavor by 4. The morning writing is one big decision I get to make with a clear head, early, before anyone’s asked me anything. The popsicle is decision number four thousand and something, and by then there’s nothing left in the tank to be gracious with.
What got me, rereading it, is that it’s not really about the size of the decision. Nobody’s mental load gets wrecked by one big call. It’s the sheer volume of tiny ones — the invisible-load kind that doesn’t show up on any to-do list because it’s not a task, it’s a hundred micro-negotiations a day about snacks and screen time and whose turn it is and whether that thing on the floor is a rock or something else entirely. Research on parenting stress during and after the pandemic found the same pattern: it’s not one crisis wearing parents down, it’s the accumulation of small, constant choices with no real break between them.
The other thing that stuck with me on the reread: decision fatigue gets worse the longer you go without rest or food, which tracks with something I already half-knew about myself but had never quite pinned to the research. My worst decisions of any given day, without fail, happen between 4 and 6 p.m., which is exactly when I’m hungriest, most tired, and furthest from my last real break. It’s also, not coincidentally, the exact window when everyone else in this apartment wants a snack, a verdict on a sibling dispute, and an opinion on dinner, all in the same three minutes. Nobody plans it that way. It’s just biology being unhelpful at the worst possible time.
It also explained something about our nights lately. Bedtime’s been sliding later and later because it’s still bright out at 9:30, and by the time it’s actually dark enough for anyone to believe it’s sleep time, I’ve got nothing left to negotiate with. Some nights I just let the youngest fall asleep on the rug in front of a fan and carry her to bed later, because arguing about it would have cost more than it was worth. That’s not a parenting failure, or at least I’ve decided it isn’t. That’s just recognizing when the tank’s empty and choosing not to spend what isn’t there.
Some of the Ways It’s Shown Up Lately
Once I’d reread it, I started noticing the pattern everywhere.
My father-in-law, who moved out here about a year after we did specifically to be close to the girls, stopped by earlier this week with a bag of oranges from the outdoor market and ended up staying most of the afternoon. He’s hands-down the best unpaid babysitter I have — he taught the 9-year-old a card game I’d never heard of, lost to her at least twice in a row (I’m fairly sure on purpose), and gave me two straight hours where nobody needed anything from me directly. That’s the actual upside of having family close by: more hands, and at least one person who’d genuinely rather be at our kitchen table getting beaten at cards by a 9-year-old than doing literally anything else. I’ll take it.
Earlier this week, the building’s facade crew showed up to start marking out sections for the aluminosis reinforcement work, which is its own slow-moving stress I’ve written about before and won’t rehash in full here — the short version is our building’s concrete has a decades-old weakness that humidity’s been quietly working on, and the whole building is heading into a couple years of construction, split cost among everyone who lives here, mine included. I watched two guys in hard hats measure a wall for a solid ten minutes while I stood on our little balcony holding a cup of coffee that had gone lukewarm an hour ago, doing math in my head about the numbers on Kind Shelf that month. That’s not a decision-fatigue thing exactly. That’s just a low hum of a worry that doesn’t resolve, that I carry around under everything else, the kind where there’s no clean answer, just “we’ll figure it out,” repeated until it’s true.
A few days ago, the middle one and the youngest got into a fight over the good fan — there’s one fan in this apartment that actually moves air with any real conviction, and everyone knows it, and everyone wants it pointed at their spot on the rug — and it ended with the 7-year-old sobbing that her sister “breathes the cold air first” like that’s a thing that happens, like there’s a finite amount of cool air and her sister was hoarding it. I did not have the bandwidth to explain thermodynamics to a crying 7-year-old at 5 p.m. I moved the fan to a neutral position and called it diplomacy.
One morning, before things got more complicated, I actually applied one of the small tools I usually just write about for other people. I wrote three things on a sticky note before the girls woke up: dinner, one activity, one thing I was and wasn’t going to say yes to that day (that day it was “no” to a grocery store run none of us needed). Three decisions made early, with a clear head, instead of scattered through the day whenever someone asked. Everything else — snacks, screen time negotiations, whether we were going to the pool or just sitting near it — I let myself answer on autopilot without agonizing, because I’d already spent my good decision-making on the three things that actually mattered.
It helped. Not in a dramatic, life-changing way — I still snapped at somebody by dinner, because apparently that’s just going to happen some days no matter what — but I noticed I had more patience left for the snap when it came, and I recovered from it faster. I said sorry, actually meant it, and moved on instead of spiraling about what a terrible mother I am for twenty minutes afterward. Small win. I’ll take those too.
A Technique I Keep Coming Back To: the STOP Method
Here’s the part that’s actually stuck with me more than the sticky note. Decision fatigue isn’t really the problem on its own — it’s a symptom of something bigger, which is that caregiving of any kind, kid-related or otherwise, runs on a kind of constant giving that doesn’t clock out. You don’t get a lunch break from being the person whose brain everyone else’s day depends on. That’s caregiver burnout in its most ordinary, unglamorous form — not a breakdown, just a slow wearing-down that shows up as snapping over popsicles and forgetting what you walked into a room for.
Of all the grounding techniques I’ve read and written about over the years, the one I actually reach for in real moments — standing in a kitchen, not writing a nice page about it — is the STOP method. It’s a four-step technique from dialectical behavior therapy: Stop whatever you’re doing, physically pause. Take a breath, slow and deliberate, which is the part that actually nudges your nervous system out of fight-or-flight. Observe what’s true right now — your body, your emotions, the actual facts of the moment, without immediately judging or fixing any of it. Then Proceed, choosing your next move on purpose instead of on autopilot. The whole thing takes about a minute.
Here’s a short, clear demonstration of it if you want to see it laid out in under a minute:
I like it because it doesn’t ask for anything I don’t have on a bad day — no candle, no ten free minutes, no quiet room, just one minute and a willingness to notice what’s actually happening instead of reacting to it. Whether it works usually comes down to whether I remember to use it before I’ve already snapped, which is maybe half the time. The other half is where it earns its keep, and last night was one of those nights.
Then Yesterday Happened
Yesterday, if I’m honest, made every paragraph above look like a warm-up. Six different sets of strangers walked through our apartment over the course of the day. The place has been on the market since May, after a two-year stretch where we didn’t even try, because how exactly do you stage a home for sale in the middle of a building-wide structural renovation. Showing a home you’ve made cozy on purpose to people who are mentally measuring it for their own furniture is its own flavor of exhausting. They opened closets. They asked about “the crack in that wall” (yes, we know, it’s the aluminosis, we’re getting to it). Six showings. Zero offers. Surprise, surprise, said the very unsurprised part of me that had still somehow let herself hope a little anyway.
Since the apartment turns into an actual sauna if we so much as breathe near the windows in July, and since there’s nothing quite like eavesdropping on strangers discussing your bathroom grout, we cleared out for most of the day. We hit the grocery store slower than we needed to, made a stop at the bazar chino — the discount everything-shop that’s basically wall-to-wall plastic sandals and phone cases around here — bought nothing memorable, and then parked ourselves at a coffee shop for about an hour longer than one coffee justifies, purely for the air conditioning. By 3 p.m. I had made approximately zero decisions of any consequence and felt oddly great about it.
At 6, the 7-year-old had a birthday party for a friend from her class, held right on the beach. We are, it should be said, not social butterflies — small talk with parents I’ve met twice is its own kind of tax on a brain with nothing left in it — so we set up our umbrella and chairs a little ways off, right at the shoreline, with the other two girls, and let the 7-year-old disappear into the pack of kids and cake while we watched from a comfortable, low-effort distance. It worked out fine for everyone. She got her party. We got to sit in the sand not making conversation with anyone, which might genuinely be my favorite way to attend a birthday party.
By the time we got home and the girls were finally down, I made the mistake of opening the news on my phone in bed, which is a habit I really need to break. What came up was the story out of Ceuta, a Spanish territory in North Africa a few hours from where we are, where thousands of people crossed the border from Morocco over the span of a few days and where a number of them didn’t survive the crossing. Spain sent in the military. Some of what I read called it an invasion; other outlets called it a migrant crisis; either framing, it’s a real and awful thing that happened to real people, and the coverage was enough to keep me scrolling long after I should have put the phone down.
And because it was late, and I was tired, and the day had already asked more of me than I had left to give, my brain did the thing it does — leapt from “that’s genuinely troubling, and it happened a few hours from my kids” straight to “should we just move back to the U.S.,” a question I have now asked myself, by my own rough count, at least once a season since we moved here. This is exactly the kind of moment I mean about knowing a technique and still not automatically reaching for it — I lay there scrolling for a solid ten minutes before it occurred to me, with some irony, that I had just written the paragraphs above.
So I actually did it. Stop: I put the phone face-down on the nightstand. Take a breath: four or five slow ones, which felt a little silly and helped anyway. Observe: my actual situation, physically, at that moment — three kids asleep and safe down the hall, a locked door, a fan running, nothing on fire, nothing wrong in this room right now. The scary thing on my phone was real, but it was several hours and a very different situation away from the one I was actually lying in. Proceed: I decided, on purpose, not to solve “should we live in Spain or the U.S.” at 11 p.m. by myself. That’s a conversation for M and me, in daylight, not a verdict my tired brain gets to hand down alone in the dark.
It didn’t resolve the actual question, and I want to be honest about that instead of tying a bow on it. Spain has my father-in-law fifteen minutes away, my parents an hour away, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt anyone, a slower pace that’s been genuinely good for all of us, and yes, a region that occasionally makes international news for reasons that have nothing to do with my actual day-to-day safety. The U.S. has family on my side that I miss more than I let on, book sales that pay out in dollars, and systems I wouldn’t have to Google my way through — and also, if I’m being fair about it, rates of everyday gun violence, including in schools, that this particular story doesn’t come close to touching. Neither list resolves anything. The STOP method was never going to solve it — that’s not what it’s for. What it did was get me to sleep instead of doing math on our lives until 1 a.m. Smaller win than “solved it,” but I’ll take it.
So: still Spain, for now. Ask me again after the next round of showings.
If you’re dealing with your own version of the 11 p.m. spiral, Calm Your Mind Tonight is the one I go back to most for exactly that — quieting overthinking enough to actually fall asleep, not fixing your whole life by midnight.
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If any of this sounds familiar, I wrote about a related flavor of this same mental static a few weeks back in Is “Mom Brain” Real? What Happened When I Tried to Stop Losing My Mind (and My Keys), and on the general theme of a rough stretch turning around in an unexpected way, there’s also My Body Knew I Felt Better Before I Did.
As always, thank you so much for spending ten minutes here with me today. If you think someone in your life could use a little story-time break, or if any of this resonated with you, I’d love it if you shared it with them. Immensely grateful for your support!
See you next time!
— L
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