You already know the feeling.
You’re three coffees in, the inbox won’t quiet down, and you make a call that you wouldn’t have made on a calmer Tuesday.
You hire too fast. You say yes to a client you know isn’t right. You send an email at 11pm then notice the mistakes when you re-read it at 7am.
Then you google it.
Why do I make bad decisions under stress?
Why can’t I think straight when I’m overwhelmed?
How to stop making impulsive decisions in business.
Sadly, no matter what Pinterest tells you, there is no five-step fix. You’re not doing anything wrong. This is what stress does to decision making.
It’s not a discipline problem – it’s physics.
And the advice you’ve been given about it is mostly aimed at the wrong target.
What’s actually happening (it’s not a willpower problem)
There’s a name for what you’re describing. Ego depletion. Decision fatigue.
Deliberate, effortful decision-making runs on a resource that depletes with use, the same way a muscle tires. When it runs low, your brain defaults to the path of least resistance. You can’t delay gratification as easily. You make reactive choices instead of intentional ones.
One pressure, on it’s own is manageable. The problem is, they rarely show up alone. Stack up a difficult client, a tight cash month, a health wobble, something going on at home, and the well-regulated version of you simply isn’t available anymore. I call this the pressure stack, and it’s the single biggest variable in how well any business owner or leader actually makes decisions, far more than skill, experience or how good the strategy on the page is.
This is why a smart, capable person can make a decision that looks nothing like them. It’s not that they forgot how to think clearly. It’s that the version of them making the call wasn’t the regulated one. It was the one running on empty. Call it poor judgement if you want the clinical term for it. It amounts to the same thing.
Why “get back to your best self” advice doesn’t actually help
Most leadership and productivity content is built for the regulated version of you. Rested. Resourced. Thinking clearly. Better morning routine, better boundaries, better habits, and you’ll be back to your best self in no time.
But that advice presumes that the pressure is temporary. Sometimes it is. Often though, like running a business, it isn’t. You can be in an extended hard patch for weeks or months at a time, and you still have decisions to make, clients to serve, a team looking at you. Waiting to feel regulated again before you trust your own judgement isn’t a strategy. It’s a delay tactic dressed up as self-care.
The reactive version of you isn’t broken, by the way. It’s the same person, under load, with your actual strengths working against you instead of for you. The decisive person becomes the person who creates urgency just to feel like something’s moving. The thorough person becomes the person doing one more course instead of launching. The generous person starts saying yes to everything and resenting all of it. Same traits, wrong conditions.
Trying to eliminate the reactive version entirely isn’t realistic. Understanding it is far more useful.
The question that actually changes something
Before any decision that matters, and I mean the ones with real weight behind them, not what to have for lunch, ask yourself this:
Which version of me is making this right now?
Not so you delay everything until you feel perfectly calm, because sometimes you genuinely can’t wait. But so you make the call with your eyes open. You factor the pressure in. You get a second opinion before you commit, rather than after you’ve already sent the email.
This is the bit almost nobody talks about when it comes to decision fatigue and business owners. It’s not about eliminating pressure. You can’t. Growth creates pressure. Running anything worth running creates pressure. The pressure stack isn’t a bug you can troubleshoot once and never see again. It’s a permanent feature of doing anything ambitious.
So what do you actually do about it
You stop waiting for the pressure to life and you build for the version of you that shows up when it doesn’t.
That means having people around you before you need them, not once you’re already three bad decisions deep. It means a second opinion that isn’t optional, built into how you work rather than something you reach for in a crisis. It means knowing your pattern well enough to spot it in real time, so the Firefighter or the Collector or whichever version shows up under your pressure doesn’t get to make the call alone.
The antidote to the pressure stack isn’t a better routine. It’s people. Support isn’t indulgence, it’s infrastructure. The same as anything else your business can’t run without.
Nobody makes their best decisions alone. Especially not under pressure. That’s not a nice sentiment. It’s the whole argument.
If you’ve read this far and you recognised yourself in those under-pressure patterns, and want to understand the 2 versions of yourself better, take my quiz, Which Version of You is Making Your Decisions?
