Impact bias, things are never as good (or bad) as we imagine...

In august last year I read a post by @Syattfitness that caused a deep impact on my way of thinking and changed me for the better, by helping me remember I can always take the emotional component of any decision with a grain of salt. 

Jordan Syatt is a fitness expert I deeply respect, I follow his content across platforms on a dialy basis and when he posted this on facebook 

(https://www.facebook.com/220897687966326/posts/3438045356251527/) 

He mentioned the term impact bias which I was completely unfamiliar with, so I decided to look more into it. 

Impact bias is the tendency we all have to overestimate the lenght and intensity that future emotional states and events will have in our lives. 

 

We try to predict how an event will play out and how it'll make us feel, to make decisions, however when making this predictions we are subject to biases we don't take into consideration thinking we know for sure how something will make us feel in the future. 

(You know the "If I win this scholarship I'll be the happiest person on the face of earth and my life will be perfect... however if it's not granted to me, I'll be devastated and will never show my face again" kind of thinking) 

It's innefective forecasting at it's finest, but since in this case we are our own (extremely innacurate) weather person, we don't always think about questioning ourselves when we make these wild predictions like we would question them if such massive foretellings were thrown at us by someone else, which may leave us in a loop where our predictions/beliefs, impact our decision making and in turn could prevent us from taking actions. 

Being able to recognize our own biases is a gift we can give ourselves, after all events tend to have less impact, less intensity and less duration than we may have originally calculated. 

I'd like to leave you with this thought from @theschooloflife:

 “If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.” 

This is an essential Stoic premise. We must always try to picture the worst that could happen – and then remind ourselves that the worst is survivable. The goal is not to imagine that bad things don't unfold; it's to see that we are stronger than we think.

Thank you for reading!

Art "Brilla" by @anasofiacastanon from her series Beautiful creatures. 

www.anasofiacastanon.com