Predicting how you’ll feel in a future moment in time isn’t an inherent strength for us humans. By and large, we’re pretty bad at it-and that impacts our productivity, our goal setting, and our overall happiness. The key to setting truly satisfying goals, then, comes down to better understanding and predicting your emotions, including how they’ll change over time, how external events will affect them.
What Is Affective Forecasting?
Affective forecasting is “predicting how one will feel in the future”
- When you look forward, you aim to predict four different aspects of your feelings
- Valence – whether you’ll feel positive or negative emotions
- The specific emotion (e.g., anger or fear or frustration)
- How long the feeling will last
- Inversely, how intense it will feel
The Perfect Trio: Affective Forecasting, Goal Setting, and Happiness
By working to better predict how meeting those goals will make you feel, you can set smarter goals that actually lead you closer to that happiness benchmark
Why Aren’t We Better At Forecasting Our Feelings?
You’re irreparably biased by the now
- Impact Bias: This refers to your tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of future emotions
- Projection bias: However you feel in the present, you tend to project that onto the future
- Focalism: You tend to focus only on the future event to the exclusion of everything else that may happen or affect how you feel
Use mindfulness to get in touch with your emotions
Mindfulness can help you better understand how you react to certain situations or events and why you feel that way
Affective Forecasting Can Help You Set Better Goals
Happiness, Gilbert and other affective forecasting authorities theorize, is a deliberate cultivation of the circumstances we predict will make us happy.
- If you can better predict your emotions later on, then you can make better decisions about scheduling work when you’re most likely to actually do it.
Consider outside forces and their effects
Acknowledging the things that will happen between now and the future can help you forecast better to achieving your goals no matter how large or small they are in your mind
- Consider how the events of eating dinner, spending time with family, taking the dog for a walk, and more will affect your emotional state.
Goals Set This Way Are More Satisfying
When goal-setting, many people think more about what’s next
- Affective forecasting shifts that mindset, forcing you to view your goals through the lens of what you really want, what will make you happy, and how achieving those goals will feel
- A few examples
- The traditional capitalist mindset says you should always set a goal to earn more money than the year before- but freelance writer Kaleigh Moore learned the hard way that earning more isn’t what makes her feel happy or fulfilled
- Instead, she reframed her goal from an ever-ascending financial benchmark to one centered around taking better care of herself
Understand the barriers to accurate affective forecasting
Understand the things that stand between your present self and your future self
- This includes those natural biases, but it also includes situations and events you just can’t predict.
- By taking the time to think through all eventualities, you’ll be better prepared to react and adjust your goals if need be.
