Expectations Revisited

Published in Mental Health / Wellbeing - 3 mins to read

I am a big believe in the idea that one’s happiness is the difference between one’s expectations and one’s reality. I’ve also previously hypothesized that one of the biggest causes of my historical unhappiness is my unrealisticly high expectations of myself and my life, and that I might be happier were I able to lower those expectations. That might sound easy, but in practice it has turned out to be substantially harder than I had expected.

As much as I am enjoying this wave of newfound contentment, I am not so naive to think it will last forever, and it seems prescient to plan for one when things inevitably venture south once more. A good first step seems to be to try to internalise some new expectations.

The first trap is to think that if you set your expectations very, very low then you will be incredibly happy. If I repeat to myself 5x in the mirror every morning that my sole expectation is to wake up roughly once a day and respire consistently, then I’d be the happiest guy on earth. In actuality, our expectations run much deeper than that and are far more conditioner than at least I had initially realised. In all honesty, I’m not sure what the best way to change these internal settings is - but I think a good start would be to write them down, so here goes.

These seem like they are still fairly lofty goals, but perhaps I will have to come down slowly. Good luck me.