About this episode
A nurse in Pennsylvania had been on her feet for twelve hours. She was supposed to go home, but the unit was short-staffed, so she stayed. During that overtime, a patient was diagnosed with cancer and needed two chemotherapy doses. She administered the first, placed the second in a drawer, and headed home.
She forgot about the second dose.
It wasn't discovered until the next day. The patient was fine; they got the treatment in time. But think about what happened. This wasn't a careless nurse. This was a dedicated professional who stayed late to help her team. Her skills didn't fail. Her knowledge didn't fail. Her energy failed, and her judgment went with it.
That's the trap. We assume our thinking stays constant, that the brain in hour fourteen is the same brain that showed up in hour one. It's not.
Last episode, we tackled deciding under uncertainty. But fatigue does something different. Uncertainty makes you hesitate. Fatigue makes you stop caring.
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Why Your Brain Makes Worse Decisions by Evening
You've probably heard the popular saying: “Making too many decisions wears you out, so by evening your judgment is shot.”
That idea dominated psychology for twenty years. Researchers believed decision-making drained from a limited mental reserve, like a battery running down.
Then, independent labs tried to reproduce those results at scale, and the effect vanished. One study, 23 labs, over 2,000 people, found n
