The Differential Between Our Expectations and Our Actual Experience

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For exposure therapy to work, you need a big enough differential between how bad you think it is and how bad it actually is. The research on it shows that we remember our expectations much better than we remember our actual experience. So if I'm afraid of something happening and it's not that bad, afterwards, what I remember much more clearly is my fear of the experience rather than it being not so bad.

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To increase our chances of success (in whatever domain and using definition of success), should we focus on boosting our strengths or shoring up our weaknesses? Are we harsher in our critiques of ourselves than in our critiques of others? What should an ideal inner monologue be like? What are some useful taxonomies of pain? Are there times when irrational, magical, emotionally-driven, and/or delusional types of thinking are useful?

Anna Paley is insatiably curious about how best to live our lives. She is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She received her PhD from New York University, Stern School of Business in 2017. You can reach her at a.paley@tilburguniversity.edu.

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