How Well Can You Estimate Your Future Feelings?
Imagine for a moment if you won the lottery. How would you feel? It seems like a an easy thing to imagine. Most of us, myself included, envision all the things we would buy and the places we would travel to as our first impulse. But what then? After we buy everything we want that we believe will make our lives easier and make us happier and travel to wear we've dreamed of going we are back to where we were prior to the winnings. Just for the record experiences have been proven to make us happier than owning things.
Research shows that regressing to the mean, which is going back to whatever our emotional state was prior to a significant event, happens on both sides of the spectrum. A lottery winner isn't much more happier than a person paralyzed in an unfortunate car accident is unhappy after that respective event. Those emotions wear off relatively quick and we go back to equilibrium sort of speak. We also do a pretty bad job of estimating what our future emotional state will be for any situation.
In Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan he writes about how people are happier if we sprinkle small amounts of happiness in our lives frequently as opposed to waiting for the lump sum. Someone who makes $100,000 a year over the course of ten years will be in a better emotional mood than earning nothing for nine years then getting one million dollars in the tenth year or getting one million dollars in the first year then earning nothing over the next nine years.*
Understanding where we are emotionally in the moment is a high form of emotional intelligence. It is something we are all capable of achieving if we work towards becoming mindful of this and make it a priority in our lives.
Reference: *The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb
#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset
Research shows that regressing to the mean, which is going back to whatever our emotional state was prior to a significant event, happens on both sides of the spectrum. A lottery winner isn't much more happier than a person paralyzed in an unfortunate car accident is unhappy after that respective event. Those emotions wear off relatively quick and we go back to equilibrium sort of speak. We also do a pretty bad job of estimating what our future emotional state will be for any situation.
In Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan he writes about how people are happier if we sprinkle small amounts of happiness in our lives frequently as opposed to waiting for the lump sum. Someone who makes $100,000 a year over the course of ten years will be in a better emotional mood than earning nothing for nine years then getting one million dollars in the tenth year or getting one million dollars in the first year then earning nothing over the next nine years.*
Understanding where we are emotionally in the moment is a high form of emotional intelligence. It is something we are all capable of achieving if we work towards becoming mindful of this and make it a priority in our lives.
Reference: *The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb
#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset
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