You'll Get Over It

"People act like getting disappointed is like a death in the family. It's not. You'll always get over it."
(from my tweets, 2015)

I tweeted about disappointment a lot in those years, probably more than any other feeling. I was trying hard things, so I got disappointed often. For long stretches, it happened almost every week. And what struck me wasn't how much it hurt. It was how many people around me were avoiding goals altogether so they would never have to feel it.

Another tweet from that time put it simply: "The people who are never disappointed are the people who never try."

It turns out psychologists have studied exactly this, and the findings are oddly comforting.

We are bad at predicting how bad we'll feel

In 1998, Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson and their colleagues ran a series of studies on what they called immune neglect. They asked people to predict how unhappy they would feel after a negative event, such as being turned down for a job or a romantic relationship ending, and then measured how they actually felt afterward.

Again and again, people overestimated both how bad they would feel and how long the feeling would last. Researchers call this the impact bias. The reason, Gilbert and Wilson argued, is that we all have a kind of "psychological immune system": we make sense of setbacks, find lessons in them, and move on far faster than we expect to. But because that system works quietly in the background, we forget it exists when we imagine future disappointments.

In other words, my old tweet was right, and there's data behind it. You'll get over it. Usually sooner than you think.

What people actually regret

If the pain of disappointment fades faster than we expect, what doesn't fade?

In 1995, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec reviewed research on regret, including studies where people were asked about their biggest regrets in life. In the short term, people tend to regret things they did that went wrong. But over the long run, the pattern reverses: people's most lasting regrets are about things they didn't do. The chances not taken. The goals never set. The thing they never tried because they were afraid it might not work out.

So the choice isn't between disappointment and no disappointment. It's between a disappointment you'll recover from and a regret that may stay with you for years.

Failure as information

Psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades studying how people respond to setbacks. In her book Mindset, she describes the difference between a fixed mindset, where a failure feels like proof that you lack ability, and a growth mindset, where a failure is information about what to try next.

It's worth being honest about the research here: large reviews, including a 2018 meta-analysis by Victoria Sisk and colleagues, found that programs designed to teach growth mindset have smaller effects than early studies suggested. Mindset isn't a magic switch. But the core idea still holds up in everyday life: how you interpret a setback shapes what you do next. One of my tweets from that time said it this way: "Failing is usually not an evaluation of your talent but more an evaluation of your strategy."

Suffering more in imagination

None of this would have surprised the Stoics.

The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius: "There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality" (Letters, 13). That's the impact bias, described almost two thousand years before anyone measured it.

Epictetus offered a practical habit for dealing with it. In the Enchiridion he advised reminding yourself, before you go after anything, of what is and isn't in your control. Your effort, your preparation and your response belong to you. The outcome often doesn't. Going in with that understanding doesn't mean caring less. It means a disappointment can't take away the part that was yours.

How to make peace with disappointment

• Remember your track record. Think of three disappointments from your past. Notice that you got through every one of them. That is your psychological immune system at work.
• Name the regret test. When you're hesitating, ask: "In five years, will I regret trying this, or regret not trying it?"
• Separate effort from outcome. Before you start, write down what is in your control. Afterward, judge yourself on that list.
• Let yourself feel it. Getting over disappointment doesn't mean pretending it doesn't hurt. Feel it fully, and then let it pass.
• Look for the lesson, not the verdict. Ask "What would I do differently?" instead of "What does this say about me?"

Today's reflection

Disappointment is the price of hoping for something. People who never pay it are usually people who stopped hoping.

So today, consider one thing you've been holding back from because you're afraid it might not work out. The research suggests that if it doesn't, you'll recover faster than you think. And if you never try, that might be the thing you remember.

Sources

• Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638.
• Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of regret: What, when, and why. Psychological Review, 102(2), 379–395.
• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
• Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549–571.
• Seneca. Letters to Lucilius, 13.
• Epictetus. Enchiridion, 1.