Guest post by Russ Costa, PhD, Westminster College

I’m tired. I’m tired at the end of a long semester, and tired of having to re-learn how to do everything in new ways. I’m tired after nine months of managing unexpected new demands and stresses placed on my own health and safety, as well as on that of my students, colleagues, family, friends, and neighbors. Oddly, I’m tired from spending more time sitting and staring at laptop screens as opposed to working on my feet. But I’m not fatigued like I often am after a long ski tour or a bicycle ride. I’m mentally fatigued from making a lot of arduous decisions for the past nine months. And I’m sure many of you are feeling this mental fatigue too as we enter a new snow and avalanche season.

Early in my training in neuroscience, and later from a Buddhist backcountry mentor, I was taught to eradicate the Western notion of dualism of mind and body from my understanding of human thought and behavior. The brain, and thus the mind, IS the body. As such, mental fatigue is physical fatigue, even if humans don’t typically notice, or respond and adapt to tired minds/brains like we do tired legs or lungs. And this mental fatigue has consequences – consequences that can be serious, even deadly, in high-risk spaces such as avalanche terrain.

Theories and empirical data from many corners of cognitive science suggest that mental energy is limited in supply. Neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud theorized that the rational ego could become depleted, allowing for the instinctual and irrational id to dominate behavior. Cognitive psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman argues that attention is like mental fuel, and when in short supply in times of distraction or fatigue, humans are more likely to default to cognitively cheap and easy heuristics, or mental shortcuts, in their decision-making. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister coined the term decision fatigue to explain how the quality of decisions deteriorates as individuals tire during long sessions of decision-making. Models of decision fatigue have been applied to many high-stakes settings, including parole decisions by judges, where researchers found that favorable decisions decreased as judges’ daily decision-making sessions went on, concluding that tired judges deviated from more rational, deliberative reasoning as they tired mentally. Interestingly, decision quality rebounded significantly after judges took food breaks. This is all worth pausing to think about in your backcountry outings and decision-making sessions, especially as these become crammed into busy life schedules with new demands and altered routines during this global pandemic.

Moreover, there is reason to believe that beginning backcountry users, a population that will continue to proliferate, may be more prone to decision fatigue and its effects. Cognitive models of skill acquisition suggest that as we learn a skill, we spend less mental effort executing it. For novices, practice is deliberate and effortful, physically AND mentally; for experts, it is efficient and “autonomous,” and can be performed relatively effortlessly and intuitively (reflect on your own experience learning to ride a bicycle or drive an automobile). These 20th century cognitive-behavioral models have also been supported by 21st-century cognitive neuroscience research, where experts not only show great behavioral efficiency in performing tasks from chess memory to radiological diagnosis faster and more accurately, but also with less associated brain activity. While the human brain constitutes only 2-3% of the human body’s mass, it expends 20-25% of the body’s oxygen supply! Physical fatigue means mental fatigue.

So what can we do about this? First, develop checklists and adhere to them especially through the chaos of this pandemic. Such checklists can serve as external memory aids for novices, who have not routinized the intricacies of backcountry travel and preparation, and as speed checks for experts who have stopped thinking about them consciously. While I painted a rosy picture of expert performance above, experts are not immune to error and many sectors that deal with risk, including aviation and medicine, have adopted such procedures to reduce rare but critical errors resulting from the autonomous, routine performance of experts I describe above. Second, and with apologies to the skimo-ers, slow down or, in the words of longtime avalanche professional Blase Reardon, “give it a rest.” High-quality thinking and high-quality decision-making take time and, given the consequences of decisions in high-risk environments, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to take this time to think about the snowpack, weather, and terrain and your decisions about these elements. Use the decision points throughout your day to breathe and eat to replenish the brain’s oxygen and nutrient supply, and to communicate with partners about their perceptions and about critical decisions. Finally, debrief. Cognitive science tells us that it’s a long path to developing expertise, and there are no shortcuts to the top of that hill. But reflection and feedback help. Put in the time and maximize learning from your time in the backcountry by, in the words of Reardon again, “expand[ing] your end-of-day conversation to more than high fives.” What did you do well? What didn’t you do so well? What can you do better next time out? Routinely exploring these reflective questions with your partners will lead to better, safer performance as individuals and as a team.

I note all of this not only as a cognitive scientist but also as a ski mountaineer. Most of the close calls I have had with disaster in my two decades in the backcountry have come during times when I was distracted, rushed, and/or fatigued. Those “free lessons” have not just been lessons about snowpack or weather or terrain, but also cognitive science lessons about my own mind/body state when I was making decisions, cognitively or intuitively in the backcountry. As a result of the pandemic, many of us found ourselves in these states more than usual late last season and will surely find ourselves in them again during this one.

Learn more about decision fatigue from Russ Costa's talk at the 2020 Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop.