It’s the new year, and many people around the world have made resolutions encapsulating ways they’d like their lives to improve over the next few months. Setting goals and habits is all well and good, except that most resolutions do end up broken before Easter time! Making a new year’s resolution is also a classic exercise in raising your expectations about what you will achieve in the future. In this post I discuss what this may mean for our happiness.
The idea that being positive is a positive is pretty well accepted. With some very notable exceptions (such as the news), we’re fed messages that paint the world as a happy, upbeat, joyful place where everyone is having fun, with the implicit assumption that we should be as well. Social media is crammed full of other people’s highlights featuring celebrations, adventures and achievements. Carefully crafted scenes in advertisements and magazines are explicitly designed to plant desires and often unrealistic expectations in us. We’re expected to appear cheerful and upbeat in many situations, especially in public or when selling ourselves. Above all, most self-help books and gurus drill home the importance of positive thinking.
But what if all this positivity sets us up for failure as far as happiness is concerned?
It’s thought that: Happiness = Reality – Expectations
So to increase happiness you can pretty much do one of two things:
- You can set about trying to improve reality.
- This is the approach that most of us follow and are taught to follow from a young age. The problem is that science tells us we’re prone to being caught in a hedonic treadmill effect (LINK). As our circumstances improve (through effort or luck) our expectations shift upwards as well to meet and then exceed our new position in life. Reality can never keep up with our expectations. We’re pretty much programmed to always want more. That is unless we make a conscious effort to stop seeking more, as in the below strategy.
- You can lower your expectations, or at least stop inflating them. There are several reasons why this may be a good strategy:
- It’s much easier to lower your expectations than to change your circumstances. Your expectations are (or should be!) 100% under your control, and this process doesn’t require any money or much time and effort.
- Your level of expectation is not as vulnerable to change as your circumstances. Anchoring your mood and outlook to what is going on in your life means you’re much more likely to fluctuate up and down as reality inevitably changes. Whereas your mood will likely stabilise if you focus on controlling your expectations.
- You’re less likely to feel disappointed when things don’t work out, as you expected this could well be the case.
- You’ll be pleasantly surprised when things turn out well and generally be much more appreciative of everything good in life
- You’re less likely to build up stocks of hope in misplaced areas. Having high expectations can lead you to work really hard and make sacrifices for something you’re trying to achieve. This is all good if you really want what you’re trying to get. But harbouring excessive amounts of hope can sometimes cloud thinking and perspective about the importance of what you’re trying to achieve. High expectations, especially if they emanate from external sources, can lead us to get caught up in the moment of achievement, without paying attention to the process, value or personal meaning in what we’re doing.
If you’re feeling convinced that lowering your expectations could help you be happier, and want to give it a try, how should you go about it? I’m certainly no expert, but I’d suggest some of the following:
- Expect failures, mistakes and steep learning curves as a matter of course.
- Remember that we’re all imperfect. People will do stupid things and let you down. But it’s not really their fault. They’re probably not doing it on purpose. We all do things that don’t make sense or end up hurting people. But most of us don’t mean to (even if we did mean to, we can’t necessarily be blamed, our circumstances probably drove us to it!). We’re all flawed, it’s just part of being human. We’ve (hopefully) got millions of years of learning, improving and evolving to do yet.
- Have goals and dream, but don’t be overly stringent about how you envision achieving them. Also let your goals change as you progress through life. In my admittedly limited experience, it’s probably best to avoid pinning all your hopes on one or two things or to stick religiously to a set path. We’re all changing all of the time, even if we don’t think we are, and our circumstances constantly fluctuate. Try to be open-minded about where life can take you.
- And finally, it helps to bear in mind that the world is a complex, crowded and irrational place where things constantly go wrong, for everyone, even if it seems some people are blessed with all the luck in the world. Try not to feel vindicated when bad stuff happens. It’s rarely personal or deserved, rather just sheer chance.
So, overall, I’d recommend: Expecting problems along the way. Expecting other people to be imperfect. Being open-minded about what and how we achieve. Avoiding feeling vindicated when things go wrong.
To summarise, you might assume that ↓ expectations would = ↑ grumpiness. But check out these two simple diagrams:
Star: Better than expected; Circle: Neither good nor bad; Lightning bolt: Worse than expected
We’re happier in more circumstances under the scenario of lowered expectations!
Of course there are dangers and downsides to harbouring low expectations. We all need some hope and goals to strive for. And there’s always a danger of sinking too far into outright pessimism. Perhaps better than lowering your expectations, is to work towards having no expectations at all? Simply let life play out before forming expectations about what should be.
Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments!
Interested in learning more? Here are two inspiring videos on the issue:
Jenna marbles, my favourite Youtuber, on why low expectations are good
The School of Life on Pessimism
The post Could lowering your expectations make you happier? appeared first on Sian Atkins.