Part 2: Why Our Emotional Forecasts are Often Wrong
If you’ve ever thought, “Once this happens, I’ll finally feel happy,” you’ve made an emotional forecast.
We all do it. We imagine what it will feel like to get the job, finish the project, take the vacation, move to the new house, retire, fall in love, lose the weight, solve the problem… or simply make it through Monday. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
Imagining the future can be motivating. It can help us make decisions, set goals, and move toward things that matter to us. The trouble begins when we confuse an imagined feeling with a guaranteed feeling.
That’s what happened to me with the outfit. The night before, I didn’t simply choose what I would wear. I created a little emotional forecast.
I imagined myself waking up the next morning, putting on the outfit, looking in the mirror, and feeling hopeful about the day.
Then reality intervened… Poor sleep. An unexpected email. A different emotional starting point. And suddenly, the future I had imagined didn’t feel anything like the future I actually encountered.
Psychologists have identified several ways our emotional forecasts can go wrong.
One is called the impact bias: we tend to overestimate how intensely or how long a future event will affect us emotionally.
We imagine the promotion will make us happier for a very long time. We imagine the rejection will devastate us. We imagine the difficult conversation will ruin our week.
But human beings are remarkably adaptable. The emotional impact of an event often isn’t as large—or doesn’t last as long—as we predict.
Another problem is what researchers describe as focalism. When we’re imagining a future event, we tend to focus heavily on that one thing and forget everything else that will also be happening in our lives.
Think about imagining a big vacation… We picture the beach. The beautiful weather. The food. The freedom.
We don’t necessarily picture the delayed flight, the headache, the noisy hotel guests, the email from work, or the fact that we might simply be tired by day three.
Likewise, when we imagine getting a promotion, we may focus on the excitement of the new role without imagining the long meetings, the difficult decisions, or the stress that comes with greater responsibility.
Our imagined future is often strangely uncomplicated; but real life rarely is.
And then there’s something even more interesting. We tend to make our predictions from the perspective of who we are right now. The person imagining tomorrow’s outfit is rested, hopeful, and looking forward to a fresh start. But tomorrow morning’s version of me may be tired, irritated, distracted, or dealing with something I couldn’t possibly anticipate tonight.
In other words, we’re asking today’s self to predict tomorrow’s emotional experience without knowing what tomorrow’s self will actually encounter.
No wonder we get it wrong.
Think about the decisions you’ve made because of a prediction about how you’ll feel.
Have you ever stayed in something because you were afraid of how you’d feel if you left? Or avoided something because you assumed it would be uncomfortable? Taken on something because you imagined how satisfying it would feel to accomplish it? Put off something difficult because you told yourself you’d feel more ready later?
Our forecasts influence our choices. And our choices shape our lives.
Which raises a fascinating question: What if some of the decisions we make aren’t really based on what we know about the future, but on what we imagine we’ll feel about the future?
That distinction matters. Because we can’t eliminate uncertainty. We can’t know what tomorrow will bring. We can’t even know exactly how we’ll respond to it.
But we can become more curious about the stories we’re telling ourselves about our future emotional lives.
And that curiosity might give us a little more freedom in the present.