So it’s last week, Monday evening, and I’m upset. The last four hours of work have been rough, and I’m feeling frustrated and anxious and burned out. I think to myself, I need to go for a walk in the park.
But then I think to myself, What’s the point? I’m in such a bad mood that it won’t help. I hesitate. I waffle. And then, reluctantly, I put on my shoes and step outside.
One minute into my walk, I’m in a sun-dappled patch of forest, following a winding trail. I pause at a patch of thimbleberry bushes, still flowering. Bumblebees are hard at work, pollinating the flowers, which means that in a few weeks there will be delicious berries to eat.
As I walk on, I start noticing all the wonderful details of spring in the park. I find the first ripe salmonberries of the season and gleefully devour them. I start bounding up the trail with newfound energy. My mood has done a complete 180.
I stumble across a pair of birdwatchers, staring into the forest. “Find something good?” I ask.
“A barred owl,” one replies.
A moment later, a gorgeous owl takes off from a nearby tree, swoops silently through the air, and lands gracefully on a branch in the clearing. I watch it for a while, mesmerized, before walking on. Incredible. I’m so lucky.
How We’re Bad At Predicting Our Future Emotions
This experience shows just how bad I am at predicting my future emotions. I was certain a walk in the park wouldn’t improve my mood. I was sure. And I was completely wrong.
This isn’t just another case of “you shouldn’t believe everything you think;” it actually reflects a deeper issue. You see, humans are notoriously bad at predicting their future emotions.
In Stumbling on Happiness
, Daniel Gilbert describes research showing that “most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want, or feel differently than we do now.”1
Here are just some of the blunders we make when predicting how we’ll feel about things in the future:
- We tend to think that our current emotional state is permanent (or at least long-lasting),1 even though we routinely experience a wide range of emotions each day, and our feelings can change in an instant.
- Our current emotional state colors our predictions of the future.1 If I feel this way right now, I think I’ll continue to feel this way later.
- We overestimate how much pleasure we’ll get from things we want, and we overestimate how long the ensuing happiness will last.2
- We (wrongly) predict that terrible setbacks like losing our job or becoming paralyzed will make us miserable forever.1
Strategies For Better Predictions
I chose to go for a walk that day because, according to my memories, going for a walk in the park is a reliable way to feel good. So I ignored the stubborn certainty that it wouldn’t help and went anyway. For minor decisions like this one, consulting our past experiences is a good method for overcoming our inability to predict our future emotions.
However, our current emotions can also color our memories.1 So if you’re feeling bad, you might fail to remember that a particular behavior usually makes you feel better. To combat this, I recommend strengthening your memories of happiness-inducing activities via gratitude journaling.
For more serious decisions, such as which career to pursue or what city to move to, you can’t rely on your memories because you don’t have any. But this doesn’t mean you have to fly blind. Gilbert suggests that we ask people who are currently living the options that we’re considering.1 Want to be an architect? Talk to some architects and find out what their work is really like. Considering moving to Austin? Talk to some people who live there now. This method isn’t perfect, of course, but it’s way better than just guessing how you’ll feel.
A third tool is to run little experiments on yourself. Since you can’t predict how various actions and lifestyle changes will make you feel, play scientist and run some tests. Obviously, you can’t do this with major life choices, but you can certainly use it for the minor stuff. Maybe you usually exercise in the evenings after work, but you’d like to know if working out in the morning makes your day go better. Try it out for a couple of weeks and see.
Not sure what to try? No problem. You can use the findings of positive psychology to guide your experiments. The science of human flourishing has a lot to say about what behaviors are likely to make you feel better. Or you can use other people as inspiration. What works for your friends and coworkers might also work for you. And especially pay attention to the behaviors of your role models and heroes. (Note: This was the inspiration for Tim Ferriss’s book, Tools of Titans, which catalogs the habits of highly successful people from a wide array of domains.)
Lastly, when someone suggests a new activity that you’ve never tried, keep an open mind. You can’t predict whether or not you’ll enjoy it, so give it a try. Last month, my partner bought water coloring supplies. When she told me we were going to try water coloring I was not excited. I hadn’t made any kind of visual art in years and didn’t think I would enjoy it. Honestly, I was pretty sure it would be boring. And boy was I wrong. I loved it! Water coloring turned out to be both fun and relaxing.
Take Action
Although we’re generally bad at predicting how we’ll feel in the future, there is one prediction you can make with confidence:
If you don’t like how you feel right now, and you just keep doing what you’re doing, you’re probably not going to feel better later.
To get out of an unpleasant emotional state, you’ll probably have to do something different. This is challenging, of course. Sitting on the couch feeling depressed doesn’t exactly make you feel motivated to take action – it makes you feel like staying on the couch.
But motivation is actually another example of how we’re bad at predicting our future emotions. When we’re not feeling motivated, we tend to think that we’ll be stuck that way regardless of what we do. But if we start taking action, self-perception will usually cause us to become motivated, producing the very feeling we were sure we didn’t have access to.
And whether you need to stop procrastinating or you need to go for a walk to feel better, it’s helpful to remember that you can often change how you feel by taking action.
In other words, one of the best ways to do your future selves favors is to recognize how bad you are predicting how those future selves will feel.
1 Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. Vintage, 2007.
2 Wright, Robert. Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
. Simon & Schuster, 2017.