How Expectations Can Ruin Your Day

Everyday you have expectations. Your life is full of them. Before you wake up, you expect that your alarm rings. That your Smartphone will turn on, when you hit the power button. That your pen works when you want to write something. To this Article here is about and many more…

But what are expectations?

Expectations are a anticipation of events, from certain ways of thinking and/or goals that lie ahead.

Wait, what?

Let’s try to understand this. When you have expectations, you have an idea how something should work — and you act like it. So expectations influence and define how you act and the way you think. Please, read that again. Expectations influence and define how you act and the way you think.

Some people build a world of expectations around them. They have a strict idea of how their lives should work. And that is a problem. Because when you have an exact idea how things work — you definitely get disappointed in some way. You can’t prevent that.

Does that mean when I change my expectations, I can (kind of) change my life? Because when I act and think different than before — I will be a different person. Right?

That’s correct. You wonder why?

When you have no expectations, you can’t be get disappointed. We tend to see expectations as a minimum of value or property a thing have or do. This comes from an experience.

Experience leads into expectations.

When we see a thing for the first time and it reacts in a specific way, we assume that it will react in that way again. And when that thing doesn’t work or do things as we expected — we are disappointed. Expectations reduce the incident and what really happens down to our own experiences. We are too focused to prove that expectation right or wrong that we ignore the rest.

But, to have no expectations to anything is nearly impossible to us. We as humans will always have some — even unconscious. But that does not mean that all expectations are evil. In fact, some expectations are good. For Example in contracts: You expect that the other person stick to the contract you both agreed on. And that’s perfectly fine. But the most expectations are misleading your decisions and behavior. So the solution is to lower your expectations. The less expectations you have, the better you will feel. The benefits of lesser expectations are clear:

• You will be less disappointed and therefore more happy
• You will have an open mind with less restrictions
• You can look at things without prejudice
• …

So the next time you have an expectation, ask yourself:

• Why?
• Is it based on my experience?
• and how you can lower that expectation?

And maybe this way you can look at things with a clearer and fresh view.