Are you afraid of making an important decision?
Read this before you do, because you need to know how we try to predict how we’ll feel after making a decision, where we make our biggest mistakes and how badly we underestimate our ability to deal with whatever consequences might follow.
You can make a decision today because you’re afraid of how you think you’ll feel six months from now, or do exactly the opposite because you’re convinced that getting something will make you much happier than you are now.
The problem is that you’re making a real decision based on how you imagine you’ll feel in the future. And you can’t exactly ask your future self whether you’re right. Because, basically, that person doesn’t exist.
Look, in psychology we’ve spent decades studying how accurately we can predict how we’ll feel after something happens. It’s called affective forecasting, which, put simply, means trying to guess how we’re going to feel in the future.
Get the newsletter
Three times a week, I send psychological insights worth knowing, explain what they mean for your life, and show you how to use them. Deep psychology, in plain English.
Now,
I’m not saying we can’t know how we’ll feel in the future, because quite often we can make a pretty good guess. For example, if you got fired tomorrow, you probably wouldn’t be thrilled about it. Or if you got something you’d wanted for years, chances are you’d be delighted.
But where we really screw up is when we try to work out how much something will affect us and for how long.
In other words, we can get the general direction of the emotion right and still be quite wrong about its intensity or duration. You might be right to think, “If this happens, I’m going to feel awful”, and wrong when you add, “And I’ll still be just as fucked six months later”. At that point, you’re not only imagining catastrophic consequences. Worse, you’re underestimating your own ability to deal with them if they actually happen.
We can imagine that getting a certain job will make us much happier for months, that a break-up will devastate us for much longer than it actually does, or that a rejection will still be weighing on our minds just as heavily six months later.
The problem is that when we make that prediction, we tend to picture the event itself very clearly, but we’re not always very good at imagining everything that will happen afterwards. Generally speaking, and I see this all the time in my practice, we underestimate our own abilities. There’s a name for this mistake our minds make: immune neglect.
When we imagine something bad happening to us, we’re usually fairly good at anticipating the emotional blow, but we forget to factor in everything we’ll do afterwards to adapt: try to make sense of what happened, lean on other people, reorganise our lives, get used to the new situation or simply find that other things are taking up our attention again.
In other words, we can imagine the blow quite clearly, but we’re much worse at imagining our ability to recover from it. And that’s why we can end up believing something will affect us with the same intensity for much longer than it actually does.
But, when the time comes, we discover resources we’d never needed before or didn’t even know we had. That’s why some of our predictions come from a version of ourselves that hasn’t yet had to face the very thing it’s trying to imagine.
It’s very simple. Look:
When you think, “I couldn’t cope if that happened to me” (a loss, a break-up, a failure, call it whatever you like), you’re predicting how you’d feel afterwards based on who you are now, before you’ve lived through the experience, adapted to it or discovered how you’d actually respond.
Imagine one of the toughest decisions you could face. For example, you’re considering leaving a ten-year relationship. Oof!
Chances are, one of the reasons you haven’t gone through with it is that you’re convinced that six months later you’ll still be completely devastated, alone and waking up every morning regretting what you did.
Now, I’m not saying the break-up won’t hurt. It’ll hurt like fuck (unless you’ve already done your grieving beforehand, but that’s for another newsletter). The problem here is that you’re trying to imagine six months of your life based solely on how you think you’d feel during the first few days.
But, my dear friend, plenty of other things will have happened during those six months: you’ll have met new people, established new routines, had better days and worse ones, developed worries you don’t even have yet and, most importantly of all, discovered how you actually respond when you have to adapt to a real loss rather than an imagined one.
I’m not saying that leaving the relationship (or fill in the blank with your own equally important decision) is the right choice. What I’m trying to tell you is that the feeling of “this will be unbearable” is still a prediction, not information brought back from the future.
Okay,
we’ve already seen one of the ways we get things wrong when we try to anticipate the consequences of our decisions. But before making an important decision, we don’t just misjudge how we’re going to feel. Our minds also make some spectacular mistakes because they’re ridiculously optimistic when estimating how much time and effort certain things will take and how many complications they’ll involve. But, but… I’ll tell you about that in another email.
If you’ve ever avoided a decision because you were afraid of how you thought you’d feel afterwards, 30 Decisions is a free ebook about those few decisions that can change the direction of your life and the mechanisms that can trip you up even when you think you’ve considered them carefully. Not for snowflakes. Download it here:
Love,
Noemi
P.S. Click the link above to download the 30 Decisions ebook for free.
