When we dream of winning the lottery, we imagine that we will always be happy. But what if the way we imagine the future doesn’t reflect the way we really experience it? Affect bias explores the phenomena by which we tend to overestimate our emotional response to future changes in our environment.

In this post, we explain what influence bias is, 5 ways it makes you unhappy, and how you can seek to address these issues.

What is influence bias?

It refers to the tendency to overestimate the extent to which future events will affect our mood. We also tend to overestimate how long certain feelings will last as a result of major events in our lives. This is especially true for extreme events, whether positive or negative.

When it comes to extremely negative experiences, it may be due to what Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert euphemistically describes as the “psychological immune system.” If we imagine a very negative event in the future, it is less likely to happen. However, if trauma occurs, it is more likely to set it in motion and enable us to cast a positive outlook on a seemingly inevitable situation.

When it comes to very positive events, if we imagine them, we tend to focus only on the positive change in our circumstances. However, if we come to experience a very positive event, our focus will be broader than the very positive event.

Events in our daily lives, from a rough night’s sleep to challenges in personal relationships, will be within our scope of attention. This also applies to negative events as we may ignore the positive aspects of our lives when we imagine something painful in the future. As such, affect bias is also evident when we imagine both positive and negative events.

“The great source of both misery and disorder in human life seems to arise from an overestimation of the difference between one permanent situation and another.” – Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

How does influence bias make you unhappy?

So what does all this mean for our happiness? Here we list 5 ways affect bias can make you unhappy and what you can do to avoid it.

1. “The grass is greener” thinking.
   We all like to think that we are good predictors of what will make us happy. However, according to research by Wilson and Gilbert (2003), this is not the case.

We may think that our lives would be better if we could only get a bigger house, a faster car, a promotion, or a new partner. However, when we seek to predict our emotional response to changes in our future, we invariably fail.

We may invest a lot of time and energy waiting for a new dawn of positivity. Unfortunately, when the moment comes and we realize that nothing much has changed, it can lead to severe disappointment. Realizing that we tend to reach for the next thing indefinitely can help us learn to appreciate what we have here and now.

2. False expectations of wealth and happiness
   As with the “grass is greener” analogy, much of what we expect from the future never comes true. This is particularly evident in studies of wealth, such as books such as The Soul Level by Katie Beckett and Richard Wilkinson.

People often intuitively expect that as their wealth increases, their happiness will continue on an upward, upward curve. However, The Soul Level shows how beyond middle-class security, or essentially a comfortable subsistence life, the connection between money and happiness all but disappears.

If we focus too much on money and wealth rather than on what truly makes us happy, we may not be able to recognize the source of our unhappiness.

3. Narrow focus
   When we think about the future, we tend to focus on one thing. If we plan change in our life, we only imagine the change and not everything staying the same. However, unless we go out into the woods and cut off all contact with society, most of the decisions we make will only affect a small percentage of our overall life experience.

As such, when thinking about the future, it is important that we try to broaden our horizons. Consciously broadening your focus will help you avoid the effect of bias.

4. Things won’t be as good (or bad) as you think
   If you won the lottery, would you be happy? If your relationship ended would you be devastated? Will you never be able to overcome the loss of a vital sense or a limb?

People may intuitively think they know the answers to all these questions. However, our intuition may not be as good as we think. Moreover, if we fail to recognize the dominance of one of our competing fast and slow thinking systems, we may fail to reap the benefits of slow thinking according to science.

Likewise, when we envision the future, we fail to take into account human capacity to understand what is happening to them. A person seeks to justify what happened and find the reasons behind it, whether good or bad. When we do this, we mitigate the impact of any event on us, reducing the impact of good and evil.

This is perhaps best highlighted by a study comparing the happiness of lottery winners and people who have lost the use of their limbs. A year after each event, happiness levels for each group were the same.

5. Failure to live in the present
   “The secret of a healthy mind and body is not to grieve over the past, worry about the future, or anticipate problems, but to live in the present moment wisely and seriously.” – Buddha

We cannot accurately predict our level of happiness (or unhappiness) in the future. Does this mean that any expectations we place on future happiness are necessarily a waste of time?

Clearly, our hopes for the future play a positive role in our current mental health. Therefore, knowing influence bias should not make us stop dreaming. However, it is important to realize that our expectations will definitely not match reality.

Moreover, the present is ultimately the only experience that exists in time. If we focus on the past or future, we often let the present pass us by.

Practices like yoga can help you train the mind to be present in the moment, and there are many other life lessons you can learn from them. Focusing on enjoying the present is one of the key ways to overcome affect bias and prevent us from planting the seeds of future unhappiness in our minds.