It Won't Hurt as Much as You Think: How We're Bad at Predicting Pain and Pleasure

All the things you are banking on to make you happy - the big house; the long vacation - won't have quite the lasting impact you think.

“Would you rather have a weekend in Paris or gum surgery?”

This is a question once posed to me by Dan Gilbert – the Harvard psychologist and author of a book I recommend to my students: Stumbling on Happiness.

Dan’s question seems like a no brainer. Clearly we all would rather be sitting by the Seine, sipping coffee and brushing buttery croissant crumbs from the corners of our mouths than sitting in some dentist’s chair. 

But Dan’s thought experiment is important because it can help us question the expectations we have about future events. In our minds, all parts of the Paris trip are amazing… while the gum surgery is going to be just awful. People can’t help pushing each potential experience to the far ends of the pleasure and pain spectrum. 

“What they don't realize is that the weekend in Paris won't be as good as they think it will be and the good feelings won't last as long as they expect. The same is true thankfully for the gum surgery,” says Dan. “The good things won't be as good, the bad things won't be as bad, as your mind leads you to believe.”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been talking about how we overestimate the power of money to make us feel good. And specifically, about how we compare our own finances with the people around us – often to the detriment of our happiness. 

I want to look at another aspect of the complicated link between money and our feelings of life satisfaction – the fact that “good things won't be as good … as your mind leads you to believe… and that good feelings won't last.”

A lot of Dan Gilbert’s work shows that we overestimate how happy a job promotion, pay raise, or new purchase will make us feel. For example, he asked young professors at the University of Texas to forecast how they’d feel when they got tenure - that permanent teaching position all new faculty crave. On Dan’s happiness scale, the average answer was six out of seven… ‘I’d be pretty damn happy when I get tenure’. 

But the reality was different. When Dan gathered data for those who were actually given tenure, most professors reported only reaching five out of seven on the happiness scale. They were happy, but not that happy. And that one point is significant. Good things aren’t as good as we hope. 

Being at five out of seven on the happiness scale isn’t nothing – but Dan warns that we often forget that any wellbeing gains we get from a new job, car or house (or indeed a superyacht) are fleeting. 

Say hello to hedonic adaptation.

Hedonic adaptation is our psychological tendency to get used to stuff - both the good things in life like money and new material possessions, but also the bad things in life like getting sick or being rejected. Hedonic adaptation can be very useful – it helps us recover from painful setbacks and keeps us striving for new goals. But it can also cause unhappiness and dissatisfaction – the feeling that we’re running on a treadmill never getting closer to the contentment we crave. 

As you’ve seen in my other Bulletin posts, there are things we can do to boost our baseline level of happiness - things like prioritizing social interaction, sleeping better, and exercising all contribute to long-term improvements in the level of life satisfaction we feel. 

But there are lots of other things we assume will have a permanent impact on our happiness that simply won’t. Annual bonuses, luxury cars or $750m yachts might bring us a happiness jolt… but the effects soon wane, and we rapidly return to our baseline. This can be quite jarring – since as a culture we really do believe that improvements to our material comfort translate directly to greater emotional wellbeing. 

But as Dan put it: “Happily ever after is only true if you have three minutes to live.”

Stay well and stay happy,

Laurie