How we Come to See the Bright Side of Even Our Darkest Moments

We overestimate how bad things will be, and underestimate our ability to see the good in even the worst times. Armed with this knowledge, maybe we can be braver about taking risks.

“Getting Herpes Was a Gift”

That certainly ranks as one of the most arresting headlines I’ve ever read. It was the opening of an article by writer Rafaella Gunz.

Rafaella had met the man of her dreams on Tinder. “This super beautiful guy,” she told me. “Blue eyes, full lips. I was so into him.”

But soon after they starting dating, Rafaella began to experience cold-like symptoms – a sore threat, fatigue. Then a text from her new boyfriend arrived… suggesting she might want to take a herpes test. 

The result was bad news. But things quickly got even worse - Rafaella’s “dream guy” disappeared; she experienced a painful herpes outbreak; her oldest friend shunned her for getting an STI; and she was left feeling like her life was in tatters.

“I was just sitting in bed crying. I wanted to die. It was the worst thing in the world. Not only was I physically uncomfortable. How am I going to date someone? How’s anyone going to love me?”

So how do you go from feeling that herpes is “the worst thing in the world” to writing an article calling the sexually transmitted infection “a gift”?

Enter the psychological immune system. 

Just as the happiness boosts we can get from jobs promotions, new cars or lottery wins fade faster than we expect over time (as I described in this article), the misery we experience when bad things happen also wanes more quickly than we think. In both cases, we tend to return to our baseline of happiness quicker than we’d ever have predicted. 

This gulf between expectation and reality is what psychologists call the impact bias. We expect good things to be a source of unending joy – but a job promotion can see you given stressful tasks; a new car can get vandalized; a lottery win can result in squabbles with friends and family.

When bad things happen, we map out all the downsides we’re in for, but we completely forget that we’re good at the process of rationalization. Humans often can’t help but start finding positives in even the darkest chapters of their lives. 

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says that even parents who have suffered a bereavement are able to identify the unexpected good things that happened as a result of a death. 

“If you ask a people who have lost a child, they never say: ‘Gee, I'm glad that happened.’ But if you ask them to name the good and the bad things that have come from it, they tend to name more good than bad things. Now that's a very stunning fact.”

In Rafaella’s case, the herpes outbreak ended; she identified who her true friends really were and met new people by talking openly about STIs. She also found a boyfriend who acted with far greater care and compassion than her supposed “dream guy”.

From crying in bed – genuinely think that her life was over – Rafaella soon found that everything was “just fine” and that in some ways she’d even benefitted from the STI experience. 

I asked her point blank if she’d could make this whole chapter in her life disappear as if by magic, would she? “I'd keep it,” was her reply. 

“There are people that have much, much worse problems than little red bumps,” she rationalized. 

Over the last couple of articles, I’ve argued that we put too much stock in chasing things like money or possessions as a way of improving our happiness. And I hope I’ve made you question these widely held cultural assumptions. But we also need to challenge the idea that negative events will feel as bad as we think and that the hit our happiness takes after a painful event will be permanent.

This is something I struggle with too. I’m often afraid to take risks because I fear failure and rejection. And this worry about how I’ll feel after bad future events shapes the risks I’m willing to take, and the moves I’m willing to make. But I’m falling prey to a classic bias known as immune neglect - I’m forgetting that when bad things come my way, my psychological immune system will kick in to help me feel better.

Dan Gilbert - who discovered this important concept of immune neglect - offered me some hope. 

“I think if you understand the power of the psychological immune system, our remarkable ability to rationalize in the face of adversity, it makes you braver,” Dan says. 

“You realize that you will make mistakes and it will be okay.”

Stay well and stay happy,

Laurie