Decision Fatigue Cost Me €150k: A Founder Story

Two years ago, my battery was empty by lunch.

Mornings, I could still function. But by early afternoon, nothing was interesting. I'd end up on the sofa, scrolling, with no drive to do anything that mattered. The hard decisions, the ones a founder is actually paid to make. I just didn't have the balls to make them. I'd defer, delay, look away.

It wasn't only work. My self-esteem was at an all-time low. My sex drive was gone. Looking back, those weren't separate problems. They were the same problem showing up in different places. The whole system was running on empty, and the afternoon collapse was just the part I noticed first.

Here's the part that matters most, because it's where most founders get stuck.

I noticed the signs. I'm not someone who ignores this stuff. So I did the obvious things. I worked out, I tried to eat well, I tried to sleep properly. The smart-life-choices checklist. And it barely moved the needle.

Why? Because my stress load was so high that I couldn't feel the difference. The interventions were probably helping a little, but the underlying fire was burning hotter than anything I was pouring on it. This is the cruel trap of real depletion: the standard advice (sleep more, train, eat clean) assumes a system that can still respond. When you're far enough down, the usual fixes don't stick, and you conclude you're the problem. You're not. The biology is just past the point where willpower reaches it.

What I was treating as a discipline problem was, underneath, a biological one. The kind of thing that shows up in bloodwork as low testosterone and a flattened stress-hormone pattern, not in a productivity app. No morning routine fixes that on its own.

A year after that low point, I made the hard call I'd been avoiding: I quit the business.

The cost of getting there, of running that long on empty and leading a company at half capacity, was about €150,000. That's the real price tag on decision fatigue when you let it run. It doesn't show up as a line item called "fatigue." It shows up as the slow accumulation of calls you didn't make, opportunities you didn't take, and eventually a business you walk away from.

I don't tell that to be dramatic. I tell it because the founders I work with are often exactly where I was: treating a biological collapse as a character flaw, grinding harder, and paying for it in decisions and money without seeing the connection.

I came back from it. Not through one fix. I rebuilt the system from the foundation up. What protects my decision quality today:

• A strict morning and evening routine. The part I'm genuinely glad about is that I actually enjoy them now. That matters more than it sounds. A routine you endure won't last; a routine you look forward to does. Finding the versions that bring me joy is what made them stick for the long term.
• Hard decisions go in the mornings, and early in the week. I front-load the calls that need a full tank. When my prefrontal cortex is fresh, that's when the heavy thinking happens. Not at 4pm on a Thursday. (This is the mechanism working for me instead of against me.)
• Phone on airplane mode an hour before sleep. A recent addition, and one of the highest-leverage. The evening wind-down protects the next morning's decision capacity.

I'm not going to pretend it's perfect. I still scroll in the evening sometimes. That's my remaining bad habit, the one I haven't fully beaten. I'm putting it here on purpose, because the founders selling you a flawless protocol are lying, and the ones admitting the gap are the ones actually doing the work.

The difference between two years ago and now isn't that I'm perfect. It's that the foundation is solid, so an occasional bad evening costs me an evening. Not a quarter, and not a company.

If your battery dies after lunch and the hard calls feel impossible (and you've already tried the workout-and-eat-clean checklist) consider that your problem might be biological, not a lack of discipline. Willpower is the wrong tool for it.

Get the bloodwork before you get the productivity app. Find out what your testosterone, cortisol, thyroid, and the other markers that fuel your drive are actually doing. Grinding harder on a depleted system cost me €150,000, and I wish someone had told me two years ago that the fix starts one layer below the one everyone points you to.

If you're reading this and recognizing yourself in the darker parts (the flatness, the loss of drive), please know that's worth taking seriously beyond business performance, and worth talking to a doctor about. Decision quality is the small version of that conversation.