Dr. Schunker explains why you're a bad judge of how much future events will hurt or help you. Your emotions return to a baseline after wins and losses, and change itself reshapes who you are, so your future self won't react the way you predict.
In your research, Dr. Schunker, you say that people are not great at predicting how change is actually going to impact them. Can you explain? We are notoriously bad affective forecasters.
All that means is that we are so bad at predicting how we are going to feel about events in the future. We overestimate how bad the bad things are going to be, and we also overestimate how good the good things are going to be. I lost my job, for example. Yes. It's going to completely ruin me and I will never regain the current happiness level I have. And then I also think if I get this promotion, I'm going to be happy forever. But actually, we just revert right back down to what's called our happiness set point.
Okay. So whether it's a loss or it's a gain, after you experience the emotion of the loss or the gain, you tend to settle back to where you used to be.
Yeah, or at a minimum, it's never as bad or as good as we thought it was going to be. Now, why is it important to know that? The reason it's important to know that is because at the outset of a change, when we're feeling so daunted by our ability to get through it, we want to have that reassurance that it's actually never going to be as bad as we think. But one of the biggest reasons why we get it wrong is that we forget that we too will change as a result of the experience. We are a work in progress, and we forget that as the world is changing around us and as a change is happening to us, it is also creating lasting change within us.
I just saw what you were talking about, that you, with the person you are in this moment, you think you can predict how you're going to feel and who you're going to be in a future moment. But the truth is, the person that you are right now will not be present for the future moment because you are going to have changed based on what's happening to you next.
100%. We somehow think that the version that we are today is like the— is the final version, the fully enlightened version of Maya. But here's the thing, we become different people on the other side of change. And so when you are feeling so scared and daunted, everyone listening right now who is afraid of a change that is, they're currently navigating or they're going to have to navigate in the future and they think, I can't possibly get through this. The right question is not, how am I going to get through this? It's how will I, with new abilities and perspectives and values and capabilities, how will that new version of me navigate this change. Because time and time again, everyone I talk to says, you know, I wouldn't have willed this negative change to happen, but damn, am I grateful for the person I became as a result of it.
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