Happiness ≠ Reality — Expectations
The story of why “personal expectation management” isn’t necessarily your (or the world’s) best solution
Although 2020 might not have been a year where many of us could as easily respond to tough times by saying “I knew this would happen”, let me tell you… I still tried. Continued rises in Covid-19 cases, mass political disruption in the U.S., and extreme economic uncertainty all seemingly felt less painful because as soon as Covid-19 hit, I knew these things would happen… But is there any way I could have fully known they would happen? Nope. A global pandemic reached North America in March and any confidence in my perspective on the future went out the window to be entirely scrapped for something new.
Now don’t get confused by this introduction seemingly misaligning with the title of this piece. I’m not here to outline the errors and weaknesses in my approach to foresight (albeit that might be an article for the future). The truth is that this entire time my confidence in the future, although still conscious and purposeful, wasn’t predominantly rooted in rational evaluation of events. Instead, it was rooted in convincing myself that the worst possible outcome was going to be reality so that I would be content if I was right, and could only be happier if I was wrong. Something I’ve fondly called “personal expectation management”.
Maybe you’re familiar with this mentality. Maybe you or your friends do this too. You definitely have if you commonly think to yourself:
- “If I expect the worst, I won’t be as disappointed”
- “That’s okay, I saw this coming” or
- “I’m keeping my expectations low”
These are all sentences that align with the old adage “happiness = reality — expectations”, an equation that in recent years I completely internalized in every facet of who I was and how I approached uncertainty. The origin of this equation was the 2012 book written by Manel Baucells and Rakesh Sarin, Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life. The theory goes that if you have too high or unrealistic expectations as to an outcome, you will be minimizing your happiness because reality is unable to live up to the vision you have crafted.
Even though I only had a surface level understanding of this simple three variable equation, it trickled into how I had processed every facet of the world. Dating, “well it’s not like it was going to work out anyways”. Work, “they’ll say no to my request for a promotion”. School, “there was no chance I was going to be able to ace that exam anyways”. By doing that, I had convinced myself that when the outcome didn’t align with my imagined worst expectation, the victory tasted so much sweeter — something I was confident was an excellent approach to my mental health.
Well… it turns out it’s not. Despite being convinced that this equation was setting me up to be the golden child of emotional stability, the impact of internalizing this mantra didn’t lead to reaping the benefits of some sort of cutting-edge, postmodern philosophy but instead led to the manifestation of pessimism cloaked in such a way it was an easier pill to swallow. I had come not to practice the healthy, anxiety-reducing technique of briefly thinking through the worst possible outcomes to remind myself that I will be okay, but instead had allowed myself to get lost in it and completely convince myself the worst outcome will be true. And this distinction made me realize my approach to “personal expectation management” may be doing me more harm than good. Let’s take a minute to discuss why exactly breaking away from this mentality and practicing optimism is so important.
Optimism & You
It makes sense that those that are more optimistic in nature are more resilient. Like any muscle, resiliency needs to be exercised to be strong and thus, the more frequently you have to recover from the pain of disappointment, the better you become at it. But why would I need to be an expert at resiliency when I can just avoid negative feelings by consistently keeping my expectations low? Just like you can appear to be fit but still not handle a minute of running, you can get comfortable with negative outcomes and still end up in a pervasively dysfunctional state due to the death of your cat. The issue is that despite whatever mental kung fu you try to play, you will feel negative emotions and you will experience events that for better or for worse that you simply couldn’t expect at all. In these moments of crisis, how you respond is actually critical to the outcome.
Studies have shown that resilient individuals are better able to tolerate stresses such as poverty, health problems, or family conflict and are less likely to turn to negative outlets such as violence and substance abuse. They are also likely to have a higher life satisfaction. The Broaden-and-Build theory is one theory that attempts to address how optimism influences responses to challenges. This theory states that positive and negative emotions have different adaptive functions — negative emotions narrow your thoughts and actions down to a “fight or flight” response, and positive emotions broaden your thoughts and resulting actions. When an individual experiences positive emotions they are able to allow their mind to explore beyond the immediate issue and produce “patterns of thought and actions that are notably unusual, creative, and flexible”. Whereas the fight or flight response (although having some evolutionary advantages) when experienced in a prolonged state has been shown to be damaging for both physical and mental health.
A study published in Emotion found that positive emotions mediated the relation between baseline and final resilience but life satisfaction did not, and that changes in resilience mediated the relationship between positive emotions and increased life satisfaction. These findings suggest that it is in-the-moment positive emotions and not general evaluations of one’s life that forms this link of happiness, and that people feel more satisfied because they develop the appropriate resources for living. This finding also supports the theory that those who experience more positive thoughts in times of struggle are able to better practice necessary coping mechanisms. Additionally, another study found that psychologically resilient people were also physiologically resilient. When exposed to a negative experience or stressor, researchers found that both low and high resilient people experienced equal levels of cardiovascular arousal, but high resilient people recovered faster — a recovery which was partially mediated by the participants experiencing positive emotions in the midst of distress.
These studies are where it started to click for me. By focusing so much on the worst possible outcome, I was dedicating more time and energy to negative feelings and consistently putting myself into “fight or flight” mode. There was no creativity in my approach to the task, no consideration for ways I might be able to improve my outcome. Feeling like I was able to predict a negative outcome gave me a false sense of control, where the outcome wasn’t in my hands at all, I just decided to accept the worst possible result and allowed external factors to take over the rest.
Optimism & the World
What continues to make this interesting is the impact of positive thinking and creativity on innovative behaviours. Researchers have found various characteristics that can tie to innovative abilities such as being capable, self-confident, and resourceful. However, research has also shown that “optimism has a specific and direct effect on innovative behavior, in addition to an indirect effect through creative self-efficacy”. The chain goes as follows: an increase in optimism increases creative self-efficacy and innovative behaviour, and an increase in creative self-efficacy increases innovative behaviour. See how well this aligns with the Broaden-and-Build theory?
This is where we can start to see the big picture importance of optimism because innovation matters to the world. Nathan Rosenberg, Professor of Economics stated that “it is taken as axiomatic that innovative activity has been the single, most important component of long-term economic growth”. Rise in living standards, national progress, more productive economic activity are all tied to past and present innovations. In fact, in recent years innovation is becoming a greater piece of the economic pie with intellectual assets such as patent valuations, firm-specific knowledge, and R&D activity becoming key aspects of value creation.
Innovation doesn’t just matter to economic output, but it matters to how we look to tackle significant big world issues such as aging societies, climate change, energy efficiency and security. What if those that helped discover insulin, antibiotics, and even the mRNA vaccine technique used in prominent Covid-19 vaccines responded to the first challenge they faced with “well I knew that wasn’t going to work anyways”? With the amount of antibiotics I’ve taken in my life, if that were the case I would be dead 10x over by now. Instead, they took on these challenges and exercised their creativity to figure out how to iterate or to determine new solutions.
Even if you’re not using your creativity to directly invent something, the impact of these innovations still often depend on the creativity of the end users. Computers began as calculating machines and have completely transformed the way we live, work, and interact. They have globalized our world and have been the platform of incredibly creative ways to connect amidst a world of mandatory social distancing. It may have been inventors who created the computer, the internet and Zoom, but it was the creativity of everyday people who have leveraged these technologies to create a Zoom “pen-pal” network to connect isolated seniors to children, to create a forum for those with absent families to get parental advice, and to organize nightly balcony-based applause for front-line workers during the pandemic. And to think, all of that creativity, innovation, and those world-changing inventions might just be rooted back to a little sparkle of optimism.
So What Now…
In the world in which we live today with instability in essentially every aspect of our macro-environment, it may sound ridiculous to suggest you exercise optimism, but I want to say it is still possible and it is needed. Let’s be clear, I am not a psychologist so please don’t consider this sound psychological counselling, but I can reiterate two suggestions from research papers that have helped me switch my mentality. Firstly, you still need to allow yourself to feel the negative emotions so that you don’t short-circuit your adaptive response. As I said earlier, despite your best efforts to buffer the emotional impact of negative experiences either through optimism or pessimism, it is impossible to consistently avoid negative feelings. Don’t pressure yourself to emulate a facade of positivity 24/7. Allow yourself to take the time you need to process what has happened especially as we are living through such historic times.
Secondly, there are mechanisms to practice the use of positive feelings and overtime these will become more habitual and potentially more automized. This practice won’t enable you to avoid negative experiences, but will allow you to recover more quickly from them. Two of the categories of technique include maintaining positive feelings and increasing positive feelings. Maintaining works to prolong positive experiences and can be done through things such as sharing good news with family or through conscious awareness of and deliberate attention to pleasant experiences (also known as savouring). Savouring can be promoted through relaxation therapies and guided meditation practices and has been shown to predict subjective well-being at all ages. On the other hand, techniques to increase positive feelings include practicing gratitude, positive reappraisal, problem-focused coping, infusing ordinary events with positive meaning, and modifying behaviour such as smiling when feeling sad. These approaches have been linked to notable advantages in coping with difficulties.
I never really considered myself a pessimist and that’s why Happiness = Reality — Expectations is so concerning to me. Whether the intention of the equation or not, I allowed it to subconsciously take away the joy of hope, the strength of my resilience, and the creative optionality of forming a better future for myself. Keeping your expectations low isn’t always a bad thing, but when it becomes pervasive in how you think and operate, you may be bordering on high-risk territory. The goal of well-grounded optimism isn’t to project an unsustainable joy amidst the worst of times and it isn’t blissfully believing that only good things will happen in the world or in your life. It is about finding confidence that you will be okay despite the outcome because you know how to recover from whatever life throws your way. By doing so, you can break away from the chains of fight or flight, look at things in a new light, and form new connections to create novel avenues for innovation. And during times like this… maybe kicking off 2021 by practicing a little more optimism isn’t just for the sake of your future, but for the sake of all of our future’s.
If you liked this article, learn a little bit more about me and my team at ATB Ventures and how we’re leveraging tools (such as optimism) to innovate for the future
