You know that feeling you get at the gym when you overworked your muscles and you can’t keep going? When you got one last set to do, that’s fine. You push through the pain and do it. But when there’s more you just end up on Instagram, Pinterest and what not. You do the sets but performing poorly. You lost your good posture, lost the momentum.
When you overwork your brain, it leads to decision fatigue. A fancier term to describe this is
EGO DEPLETION
A person’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions due to doing too much, too fast. You know, I’m science-backed for everything I type here, so yeap, there are journals, research, and math to prove the facts.
Formulating multi-tasking methods and refusing to focus on just one thing at a time, drains our mental resources and leads to bad decisions or in my case, no decisions at all.
It’s true. Sometimes I struggle to make the simplest decisions.
I will invest all my thoughts and energy on writing a high-quality article, on editing those images from last night’s show for that band that I work with, I will carefully examine and research marketing strategies for my collaborators and double check the business emails I send and receive.
But please don’t ask me to decide what movie to watch later tonight, or what I wanna have for dinner. Like I said:
And maybe we can finish watching the season finale of Archer, ’cause I was too tired from making decisions all day and you let me fall asleep.
I like to use up each season’s last, ripe, juicy fruit when I cook.
I’m so ready for sugar-soaked strawberries and lush peaches, but let’s see if we can make those apples enticing again. And put them in a simple salad.
Pour yourself a glass of wine too. It looks very grown-up.
I didn’t even drink mine. It just looked good next to the salad. Lucky me, I got hungry friends coming over and raiding my fridge and glasses full of wine before I feel bad for neglecting to drink the entire bottle.
You don’t really need an ingredient list, just fruit, a bit of balsamic vinegar and something sweet. It could be sugar or honey (not vegan) or maple syrup (yes, vegan) or dammit, I should have thought of this earlier when I was at the shop, molasses. Rich, decadent luxe molasses.
Make yourself a green salad. Use up those dandelions, bitter leaves are perfect for this combo. Wild greens.
Slice your fruit, be careless, they don’t have to be even. Heat a pan and add the sweetener of your choice. Let it melt. Sensuous, isn’t it?
Place the fruit in the pan, a minute on each side.
Add flaky salt, just a pinch. Serve. Happy.
Add a dash of balsamic vinegar to deglaze the pan. Just a drop. Use that as a dressing for your greens. Heaven.
No need to waste your willpower and finite mental resources on food.
Until the next one,
Originally published at http://www.chelf.net on April 24, 2019.