What to Tell Your Future Self

Why one should not despair at the presentation of a bad outcome, important aspects to consider regarding your subjective well-being, and how to minimize bias or errors in thinking to improve your affect.

In this community of pre-meds, we all recognize that every single detail counts. When you apply to medical school, everything about you will be put under a microscope and analyzed ten times over. So it is natural to find even the littlest of mistakes or flaws detrimental to your future career. In turn, those things can become detrimental to our subjective well-being because it is easy to connect our happiness to career outcomes.

As humans, we make affective predictions about our emotional reactions to future events. We imagine that when something goes in our favor, our happiness will skyrocket, but if it does not happiness would be nowhere to be found. However, our forecasts are always flawed. Impact bias says that we tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of a particular event on our future thoughts, actions, and emotions. It is important to recognize this phenomenon, because we tend to make important life decisions, such as which schools to apply to, based on these affective predictions.

This is what to tell your future self if when you do fail a test, or a class, or do not get accepted to your first-choice medical school: Your feelings right now are because of your impact bias and tendency to engage in focalism (i.e., the tendency to focus on a single event while overlooking the rest). You are forgetting how resilient you are; this is your immune neglect causing you to underestimate your psychological immune system.

You can prevent or minimize the errors when engaging in affective forecasting by using distractions to your advantage. Instead of focusing on a single probable event, consider the context of the situation and other peripheral events that will help you evaluate the situation more realistically. It would also be helpful to ask others who went through something similar for their input. Since our affect is grounded in physiological response, your reactions are more likely than not to resemble that of any advisor you may have.

Whenever you are experiencing a bad event, do not despair. Your psyche is well equipped to bring you back to equilibrium. This is similar to how your body counteracts certain processes to maintain homeostasis in the body, for example, your heart pumps harder in response to hemorrhage. In conclusion, trust the process and make well-informed forecasts.

If you would like more in depth knowledge, I suggest the following articles:

• DOI: 10.1177/0146167203256867

• DOI: 10.1126/science.1166632

• DOI: 10.1126/science.1129688

• DOI:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x