Why "What Should I Cook?" Is So Exhausting (And How to Fix It)

Published Feb 2026 · 5 min read

It's 6:30 PM. You're staring into the fridge for the third time. Nothing has changed since the last two times you looked, but somehow you're hoping for inspiration to materialize between the leftover rice and the wilting spinach. You close the door, check your phone, open the fridge again. This isn't laziness. It's decision fatigue — and it's more draining than the actual cooking.

The science behind decision fatigue

Psychologist Roy Baumeister's research established that willpower and decision-making share the same limited mental resource. Every decision you make throughout the day — what to wear, how to respond to that email, which task to prioritize — draws from the same pool. By evening, that pool is depleted.

Studies estimate we make roughly 35,000 decisions per day, with around 220 of those related to food alone. By dinnertime, your brain has already spent its decision-making budget on hundreds of other things. Choosing what to cook becomes disproportionately difficult — not because it's a hard question, but because you're asking it at the worst possible time.

Why cooking decisions are uniquely hard

Meal planning isn't just one decision. It's a cascade:

• What cuisine do I feel like?
• What ingredients do I have?
• What's about to go bad?
• How much time do I have?
• What will other household members eat?
• What did we have yesterday — and the day before?
• Do I need to go to the store?

That's seven interconnected sub-decisions hiding inside one "simple" question. No wonder it feels paralyzing. The paradox of choice compounds the problem: the more options available, the harder it is to choose. When every recipe in the world is one search away, having too many options is worse than having too few.

How to fix it

1. Add constraints

Paradoxically, reducing your options makes deciding easier. Instead of "What should I cook?" try "What can I cook with the chicken and vegetables in the fridge?" Constraints turn an open-ended question into a focused one. Tools like the IN MY FRIDGE bot apply this principle automatically — they narrow the universe of recipes to what's actually in your kitchen.

2. Use weekly themes

Assign a loose theme to each day: Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Stir-fry Wednesday, Pasta Thursday, Pizza Friday, Leftovers Saturday, Soup Sunday. The theme eliminates the "what cuisine?" decision entirely. You still choose the specific dish, but from a much smaller set. Many families report this single change cuts their meal-planning stress in half.

3. Build a rotation of 10 reliable meals

You don't need a hundred recipes. Most home cooks rotate through about 7–10 dishes naturally. Embrace this. Write down your household's 10 go-to meals and post them on the fridge or a meal planning board. [Amazon link placeholder — magnetic meal planning board] When you can't decide, pick from the list. No thinking required.

4. Embrace one-pot meals

One-pot meals (soups, stews, curries, casseroles) reduce both decision complexity and cleanup. Everything goes in one vessel. Ingredients are forgiving — swap vegetables freely based on what you have. A good one-pot cookbook can become your weeknight autopilot. [Amazon link placeholder — one-pot cookbook]

5. Decide earlier in the day

If evening is when your decision-making energy is lowest, move the decision to morning. Take 60 seconds over coffee to decide what's for dinner tonight. Morning-you has the mental bandwidth that 6 PM-you doesn't. Even just taking something out of the freezer in the morning eliminates the biggest bottleneck.

It's not about willpower

If you're exhausted by the nightly "What should I cook?" ritual, there's nothing wrong with you. Your brain is functioning exactly as designed — it just needs fewer decisions, not more discipline. Simplify the question, limit the options, and move the decision to a better moment. You'll spend less time staring into the fridge and more time actually enjoying what you make.