A Coin Toss - Decision Fatigue and Its Resolute Cure

Introduction

Decision fatigue is the mental and emotional strain from having to make excessive amounts of decisions. Undoubtedly, the average person in the modern world is riddled with more decisions than our ancestors ever had to worry about in the past. Most of these decisions are minute and not that meaningful, like what to wear, what to eat, or what movie to watch; nonetheless, they all lead towards decision fatigue. With the rise of short-form entertainment, this problem has gotten exponentially worse, and as we scroll endlessly, we make micro-decisions on what to watch and what to skip, and through a death by a thousand cuts, we wear ourselves thin.

There are many negatives that come from decision fatigue, and most noticeably, it manifests as stress, and it often leads to things like:

• Procrastination - delaying and dealing with important matters at a later date, usually resulting in additional stress. 
• Impulsivity - Potentially harmful and not thought-out decision making due to not wanting to make a decision.
• Avoidance - Deciding not to make decisions and do things. Like skipping a meal because of the choice between foods.

While some decisions are not important and can still affect us, decision fatigue is especially bad when it comes to delaying or stopping us from doing things that are important and matter to us. To combat decision fatigue, there are several steps we can take, and by consciously directing our thoughts and actions, we can reduce the stress in our daily lives and achieve more of the things that are of importance to us. We can focus on self-care, prioritise decisions that matter, and remove unnecessary decision-making. There are many ways to combat decision fatigue, but today we’re focusing on one small thing I personally do: a coin toss.

The Cure: A Coin Toss

“Flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you will know what you’re hoping for” - Arnold Rothstein

They say to get anywhere in the world, you need a healthy dose of good luck, and while we can’t always be in control of our fortunes, we do have a significant amount of influence over our destinies, and that can be a real burden sometimes. To leave things up to fate and to distance ourselves from the decision-making, we can leave it up to chance to decide for us. It’s as simple as asking a yes or no question and deciding what side of the coin is yes and what is no. This is a practice I adopted many years ago after hearing about the plot of the story “The Dice Man”, where a psychiatrist starts making daily decisions based on the roll of a die. In the book, the psychiatrist’s life starts spiralling out of control as he invites both chaos and gambling into every decision in his life and his free will and moral compass are thrown out the window, replaced by total and absolute liberty. The book serves a lot of social commentary, especially about the nature of freedom, as well as good and evil and if anything, serves as a cautionary tale to the idea of total freedom. The decisions I make with a coin flip usually aren’t as life-changing or crazy as the dice man’s. 

There is a time and place for letting a coin toss guide your life choices, and it probably shouldn’t be allowed to dictate the most important decisions in your life. For me, it’s a matter of going to a place: yes/no, or work on project A or B, etc. Small but important decisions, and instead of tormenting myself with going over all possible scenarios of each decision I just let fate decide, and more often than not, as I toss that coin I realise immediately what decision I want to go with, because when that coin is in the air, you feel in your heart what decision you want it to land on. 

Cash is sparse these days, and not everyone carries a coin around at every moment to make a coin toss, and so in this digital age, I use a little website called random.org to make that coin toss for me. Using the website, I set a roll between 1-2, where 1 is yes and 2 is no, and then ask the yes or no question before rolling it. For the final part of this post, let’s talk a little bit about randomness, and while random.org has a wonderful coverage on what they call “true randomness”, we will talk a little about the perceived randomness of a traditional coin toss.

Coin Tosses & the Illusion of True Chance

Coin tosses might not be as random as you think, and while we can reduce the question about randomness down to a philosophical one about the nature of the universe, let’s talk about some statistics and research into coin tosses. For some hundred years, mathematicians have argued whether or not there is a bias in a coin toss, but the difficulty of proving that coins tend to land on one side slightly more often than the other has eluded a real conclusion to the question. Getting the statistics would require thousands upon thousands of meticulously recorded coin tosses, and the logistics alone behind it seemed to be the biggest obstacle. Few were bothered enough to find out that was until František Bartoš, studying the research methods of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, became interested in this old question and began recruiting volunteers and writing his paper.

Initially, it was difficult to find enough people, but after he began his Ph.D studies, he tried again and found around 47 volunteers, many of them his friends and fellow students. The research included a 12-hour marathon session and many more long hours, but eventually the team had performed 350,757 tosses, which surpassed the previous held record of around 40,000 coin tosses. What they found seems to be empirical evidence to support the idea that there is a marginal and tiny bias when flipping a coin. They found that the coin landed with the same side facing upward as before the toss, a total of 50.8% of the time. The large number of throws allows statisticians to conclude that the nearly 1% bias isn’t pure chance. There is a small and almost unsubstancial bias, but it is there nonetheless. This bias was initially theorised in 2007 in a physics study by Stanford University statistician Persi Diaconis and his colleagues, whose calculations predicted a same-side bias of 51%. From the moment a coin is launched into the air it’s trajectory can be calculated by the laws of mechanics and according to that - a coin in the air won’t turn around their symmetrical axis, but instead tend to wobble off-center, which causes them to spend just a little more time with their initial upwards facing side on top. 

This marginal bias doesn’t make a perceivable difference on a few coin flips, so in your day-to-day life, it won’t make a big difference. But if you find yourself tossing a lot of coins, your best bet will always be on the same side, which is already facing upwards. 

Final Words

Decision fatigue is very real and a common symptom of modern life. We can take several steps to lessen its negative impact on our lives, and we can also leave it up to chance. There’s both something scary and liberating about leaving the decision in the hands of fate. Letting a coin toss decide important but not too important decisions can help lessen decision fatigue and add a little spice to the everyday decision making, and if you trust the process enough, maybe it will even bring you good luck. 

You might not have a coin on you at all times, but more often than not, you do have your phone, and so there are digital alternatives to use, and while most random number generators use pseudo-randomness, some like random.org use “true randomness”. Even a traditional coin toss isn’t a complete 50/50 chance of randomness, as we might often think it is. Statistically and physically bound, the coin has a slight bias dictating its trajectory. Whether or not that’s a profound truth about reality, randomness, determinism, or just some fun trivia is up to you, regardless of whether we have true free will or if we’re given the illusion of free will, one thing is for certain and very tangibly real: we have to make decisions every day. 

You made this decision to read this post, and I hope it was the right one for you. I wish you the best of luck in your future decisions, and don’t overthink them, and if you find yourself stuck and unable to make a decision. Toss a coin, you might find your answer before it has landed.