Is Dropping Your Expectations the Key to Being Happy?

Do high expectations do more harm than good?

Did you know we’ve already mathematically proven how to be happy?

In 2014, University College London created an equation to predict happiness.

A core finding of the study was that feeling happy depends not on how well things are going overall, but on whether they are going better than expected right now.

While this one study may not be definitive proof of how to be happy, it does beg the question: is it time we dropped our expectations and carried on through life content in the knowledge that “it could be worse”?

The merits of lowering, or even dropping, expectations have long been the subject of art, science, and philosophy.

Seneca once said that “Expecting is the greatest impediment to living”.

The poet Alexander Pope believed that “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed”.

Stephen Hawking reflected on his own life how, “When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have”.

Even the great modern philosopher-cum-actor Ryan Reynolds has chimed in with the assertion that “When you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment”.

And who can argue with that, right?

Well, I would like to. Or at least, I would like to investigate both the good and the bad sides of having expectations, specifically, high expectations.

We all know that high expectations are a double-edged sword, but what does this look like in practice? And what does it mean for how we should live our lives?

What is an expectation?

Without resorting to quoting a dictionary, an expectation is simply a belief about how things “should” be. We have expectations for how we should perform, how others should act, and how things should turn out.

Let’s look at each of these three areas and see how high expectations can affect your level of happiness.

1. Your Personal Performance: High expectations dictate failure and success

“There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.” – Jodi Picoult

Expectations are a powerful driving force.

When you expect great things of yourself, or if others place high expectations on you, you almost certainly will perform.

Science has long confirmed the link between high expectations and high performance. Studies such as that by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal show that students who are expected to perform well, do. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which Rosenthal dubbed “The Pygmalion Effect”.

It’s not hard to translate this into work, either. Other research has shown that managers who have high expectations and treat their employees as capable of reaching them get better output.

The question we’re interested in, though, is how important high performance is for happiness?

On the one hand, high performance often leads to success. Succeeding at important tasks, such as life-defining exams or career-defining opportunities, does arguably make you happy. Your performance directly results in you getting into college or getting a promotion at work. It improves your life.

As a direct result, you now have more opportunity and more money — two things that, at least in some quantity, are vital for a happy life within society.

What’s more, when you perform well, you get a great sense of personal accomplishment.

It feels good to be good at things. It feels good to accomplish your goals. And these accomplishments tend to stack, leading to exponentially better results, thereby further increasing your positive internal feelings and abundant external circumstances.

However, high performance can also mean pushing yourself beyond your limits. This is especially true when trying to live up to expectations that others have placed upon you.

Studies show that external pressure and expectations often go hand-in-hand and that the result is high performance — but at a cost. The individual sacrifices themself in the short term, ultimately leaning to burn out and collapse. You can, of course, also impose this fate upon yourself by having wildly high and unachievable expectations.

Here, high performance is not a success if it causes your life to fall apart. Rather than stacking confidence with each win, you stack anxiety about having to achieve the next newer, harder, bigger goal.

Overall, it seems that high expectations for your own personal performance do often lead to the success you desire, which can increase your happiness. Yet whether you’re able to do this without overdoing it is where things get tricky.

2. The Actions of Others: You get what you put up with.

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” – Sylvia Plath

If you’ve ever tried dating, you’ll know one of the common pieces of advice thrown around is to “have high standards”.

And if you’ve tried having high standards, you know just how difficult that can be.

It’s horrible and isolating when the 1000 people you’ve swiped on and the people you meet in real life all just seem to suck.

But just because it’s difficult, does that mean it makes you unhappy? In the short term, yes — it’s miserable. But being miserable alone is far less bad than being miserable and tied together emotionally, legally or by children with someone you always knew was wrong.

What about in other areas of life? Is it wrong to expect a career you enjoy? Are you setting yourself up for misery if you expect good friends and reliable family?

What my nan says is certainly true: “You get what you put up with”.

The sad truth about life is that whatever happens, you need to take responsibility for it and live with it. No one is coming to save you.

Having high standards for the important areas of your life is vital to ensuring you don’t allow other people to f*ck your life up.

You want your job to be lucrative and fulfilling. You want to have friends you can rely on. You want a partner whom you love.

High expectations, even if they cause suffering in the short term as you struggle to establish them, are much more likely to create long-term happiness in these core pillars of your life.

But what if you get too attached? What if you’re wanting too much? What if, as most of us do, you have practically impossible expectations that you want your job, your friends, and your partner to live up to?

The danger of having high expectations for the people in your life is that other people don’t have the same expectations as you. This means they won’t act the way you want them to.

And sadly, this is often the case with those closest to you. If you’re a self-help junkie and are actively improving your life and raising your consciousness, then applying these same standards to your parents or to an old friend will only cause needless suffering.

Having high expectations for others means that people can and will let you down. Yet simultaneously, if you don’t have them you risk never actually being happy with the company you keep.

3. The Way Things Turn Out: Be careful what you wish for

“Winners make a habit of manufacturing their own positive expectations in advance of the event.” — Brian Tracy

How much control do you have over your reality?

Sure, you can’t dictate the weather. But you can decide how you react when it rains. Is there really a difference when it comes to our happiness?

In spirituality, positive thought itself is taken to be able to have a positive impact on the world. Crudely put, the idea is that if you build up enough positive energy by repeating affirmations, envisioning the outcome of your goals, and feeling your desired state of accomplishment, you’ll draw it to you. This is called the “Law of Attraction”.

Regardless of whether you believe in it or not, it’s hard to deny that choosing to be positive and align yourself with your goals has a detrimental effect on your happiness. Even if it doesn’t magically align you with “the Universe”, spending time envisioning your goals and relishing in the sensation of accomplishing them sounds like something a winner would do.

However, this, too, can lead to misery. Even if you do manage to do all your affirmations and meditations, at the end of the day concrete action is still needed to achieve anything.

You can wish to play in the NBA all you want, but it ain’t gonna happen now matter how hard you “positively intend” for it to. This can lead to you feeling crushed when situations don’t line up with your expectations.

It’s also the case that expectations about how events will turn out can cause us immense suffering. I don’t know about you, but if I’ve got something important to do at work tomorrow, I get pretty nervous thinking about it beforehand. I’m expecting it to go a certain way, and I’m never expecting it to be positive.

The truth is, of course, that when you show up and do the thing, it’s almost never as bad as you’d thought. Your expectations lied to you.

But this just takes us back to the start: maybe it was high expectations that drove you to take that opportunity in the first place and work extra hard to pull it off.

It seems that wherever we turn, expectations appear an unavoidable component to both success and failure. And, by relation, happiness.

The question that remains, then, is… Does it have to be this way?

Are we doomed to forever be at the mercy of our expectations?

To be pushed up by the pressures of others and dragged down by our own disappointment?

Or is it possible to be happy and to achieve success without expectations?

The answer has to do not with the expectations themselves, but with attachment.

Watch this space to find out.