Do we really make 35,000 ‘remotely conscious’ decisions per day? Perhaps not.

 

Recently I was reading Bob Goff’s 2022 book, Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy. The fourth paragraph in his fourth chapter (The Happiness of Pursuit) begins:

 

“How many decisions would you guess you make in a typical day? A dozen? One hundred? Does one thousand sound a little closer? Get this. Each of us makes about 35,000 decisions every day. More if you spend an hour in a candy store. Some decisions are mundane, and some are major.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I looked in the back of the book at his Notes section, but didn’t find a reference for that claim. But it is a relatively large (or even absurd) number. Consider that a day is 60 x 60 x 24 = 86,400 seconds – so 35,000 converts to one decision in every 2.469 seconds (or 24.3 per minute). The Wikipedia article on respiratory rate says for an adult at rest it is 12 to 15 breaths per minute. That equates to one breath every five or four seconds. For the slower respiration rate, we would have to make slightly more than two decisions for every breath we take.  

 

I also found an article by Eva M. Krockow at Pychology Today on September 27, 2018 titled How many decisions do we make each day? She linked to another article by Joel Hoomans at The Leading Edge on March 20, 2015 titled 35,000 Decisions: The great choices of strategic leaders. He said that:

 

“Various internet sources estimate that an adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day [in contrast a child makes about 3,000] (Sahakian & Labuzetta, 2013). This number may sound absurd, but in fact, we make 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone according to researchers at Cornell University (Wansink and Sobal, 2007).”

 

But Brian Wansink is not generally regarded as a very credible source. The Wikipedia article about him notes that as of 2020 Wansink had 18 of his research papers retracted (one twice). That article by Brian Wansink and Jeffrey Sobal at Environment and Behavior (January 2007 Vol 39 No. 1) titled Mindless Eating: The 200 Daily Food Decisions We Overlook was not retracted though.