Am I going crazy?

Okay, I might be speaking more about myself than about you, but like me, over the past few weeks you may have noticed that you’re “dropping balls” - right, left, and center. Your routine responsibilities may be going undone, as your to-do list gets longer and longer - even though, theoretically, you now have all the free time in the world. You may be making mistakes you never would have made before. I know I am.

Am I rambling here? 

In a 1998 study, Roy Baumeister demonstrated that laziness often correlates with exhaustion. He invited two sets of students into a lab and, on a table, offered two bowls. One bowl was full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, the other contained a bunch of radishes. He asked members of one group to eat the cookies but leave the radishes alone; he asked the other group to eat the radishes, while skipping the cookies. The researchers left the lab, hoping the test subjects would be tempted to cheat. Would the radish-eaters sneak a cookie? Or, perhaps less sadistic, would the cookie-eaters be tempted to eat a radish? None of the subjects failed the test, and that’s the end of the experiment - except for one small detail.

The researchers next asked the subjects to solve a logic puzzle. Unknown to the subjects, the task was designed to be impossible to solve. The researchers simply wanted to see how long the volunteers would persist before they gave up.

This is where the surprising result appeared.

The cookie-eaters tried to solve the puzzle, and tried and tried for an average of 19 minutes before giving up. The radish-eaters, on the other hand, lasted just eight minutes. Why this huge gap? The answer may surprise you. The radish-eaters had used up their reserves of self-control, resisting those delicious cookies.

It turns out that monitoring our own self-behavior is exhausting.

This explains why, when we come home from an exhausting day at work, we’re more likely to snap at our partners. It also shows how difficult it is to handle multiple challenges at the same time. Just imagine if you were to be on a diet, exercising, learning a new language, and changing the hand you use when brushing your teeth - all at the same time. Sounds exhausting, right?

That’s exactly what’s happening to all of us, right now. Deeply engrained habits, intrinsic to who we are and how we behave, are all up in the air. I’ve talked to people who tell me their daily lives have turned into one gigantic blur. They find themselves eating breakfast at 2 pm and dinner at 3 am, working on Sundays, running meetings in their underwear. They’re doing all that while avoiding shaking hands, avoiding friends, avoiding people, washing their hands twice an hour - and then once again, just to be sure. They’re obsessively cleaning door knobs, water taps, car handles, the steering wheel … not to forget tuna cans, the milk carton, and plastic wrap. And they’re doing this all at once.

That’s where we drop the balls.

As straightforward as all these things may seem - I mean, how difficult is it to wipe a door knob? - yet add it all up, and we’ve become psychologically exhausted. On the surface, it sounds oh so easy. ‘You just have to be careful, stand away from people, and remember not to shake hands.’ But underneath the surface, we’re rewiring our entire behavioral patterns. 

Which brings me back to what I said in the beginning. The reason why I - and presumably millions of others - are dropping all those balls is not because we’re lazy, but because monitoring our self-behavior has us exhausted.

Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People.” Lindstrom is a high profile speaker and author of 7 New York Times best-selling books. His book Brand Sense was critically acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best marketing books ever published,” Small Data was praised as “revolutionary” and TIME Magazine wrote this about Buyology: “a breakthrough in branding”. 

Watch this space for exciting pre-order packages for Lindstrom’s new book: The Ministry of Common Sense - coming soon!