HOW MANY DECISIONS DO YOU MAKE EACH DAY?

I was at a very interesting seminar last weekend in St. Paul, MN. One of the topics covered was the human brain and how many decisions we make each day. How many would you guess? (course that's adding to your decision load for the day ;-) According to the speaker and several authors that she quoted, the average adult in the USA today makes about 35,000 decisions each day. Most of them rather simple ones. Where will I sit, what will I have to eat at each feeding, how much, am I thirsty, should I call to let them know I'm late. Along with driving a car and what lane to be in, looking for other drivers, etc. HOWEVER kids who are in residential treatment programs make about 3,000 decisions a day.


WOW what a difference, we also talked about how folks who are just coming out of military duty, and folks in nursing homes, also have much less day to day decision making responsiblity. So imagine you're decision load going up by a factor of 10 or 5 or eve 3. This is why parents with kids at any stage of development MUST take steps to see that many decisions are made for their young ones. It's easy to push them forward and tell them to, "decide that yourself!" BUT...it seems it's very important to only increase the decision making load a little bit each year that a youth is developing. It was an interesting day. How many decisions do you force upon people around you who might not be prepared to make that particular decision, or to make that many decisons in a day? It's really made me rethink how I interact with folks of every age.