<ul><li>Research suggests that expecting too much of future experiences may contribute to unhappiness.</li><li>Your brain is always on the lookout for surprises-you don't change your beliefs when everything goes as expected</li><li>You want to have realistic expectations because accurate expectations are useful for making good choices.</li></ul>

Expectations Are Important for Happiness

Recent events have a bigger impact on happiness than earlier events, so it can be a good strategy to save a couple of things that have a chance of a big positive surprise for the last few days of your trip.Do you think outside influences tend to push us toward having too high expectations for future experiences?If you have low expectations all of the time, you may not be motivated to try new things or take risks, because you don't expect things to go well.

The Science Of Happiness

You go on a vacation with your family, and it rains. That wasn’t something they were imagining; so, the beach is not as fun as they expected it to be, and they could be disappointed. If you are almost about to leave on a trip and you can tell that someone’s expectations are a little too high, because you know about the long train ride or you actually looked at the weather forecast and saw rain in it, you might want to let them know about those things at the last minute and reduce their expectations to something that’s more realistic. That will decrease the odds that they end up disappointed.

Lowering Expectations: The Vacation

Researcher Robb Rutledge says that expecting too much of your future experiences, including vacations, may be contributing to unhappiness.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How to Manage Expectations to Maximize Happiness

As children, our environments (parents, schools, friends) usually determine our actions, but later we might realize our family’s bloodline (natural skills or abilities) has already decided for us. Both sides of this coin are powerful motivators, but there’s a third option: self-reliance.You learn to make decisions independently when you grow older and wiser. You realize that destiny is perhaps more in your control. Such autonomy is important, even life-changing, no matter what driving forces have influenced your life to that point.

Nature Vs Nurture

Physical input affects our senses. Our physical memories affect how we react to similar items or events later in life.Mental or intellectual input affects our education. Formal schooling lasts for about 17 years, depending on personal, societal, and financial expectations or desires. Parents, teachers, friends, and strangers help expand our general knowledge. Emotional input affects our attitudes. From intimate relationships to exciting travels to frustrating computer apps, limitless experiences bring us the joys, sorrows, and thousands of other emotions that make life worth living.

The Three Types Of Environment

Our daily physical, intellectual, and emotional changes can bring good or bad results. It’s up to us to react accordingly to create the best situations for ourselves.Not every situation is controllable, but we do our best to avoid or prepare for them. People make this decision every day, and it’s their choice.We each have internal forces to deal with as well.

Environmental Control

While environment (external influence) is in our lives to varying degrees, heredity (internal influence) genetically provides physical traits or mental characteristics. If you inherit specific <a href="https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/genes-and-genetics">genes</a> at birth (colorblindness, deafness, psoriasis, etc.), you experience the world from a particular unavoidable perspective through no fault of your own.So, we’ve got external and internal controllers, but we’re not entirely at their whim. Most of us have an ace in the hole.

Heredity

Our environment may surround us, and heredity may lie within us, but don’t forget that we also have initiative. We can make decisions if we wish to change. It’s not always easy — damned hard, sometimes.But we humans are too full of knowledge, dreams, and spirit to float through life, always at the whim of other forces.We begin life as products of our environment, but we grow and experience and become self-reliant, sometimes overcoming incredible odds.

Self-Reliance

We begin life as products of our environment, but we grow and experience and become self-reliant, sometimes overcoming incredible odds. With some exceptions, we can safely and responsibly use our environment to improve our lives or those of our peers.

The Bottom Line

In the 1983 comedy Trading Places, the millionaire Duke brothers conduct an experiment that swaps the lives of commodities broker Louis and streetwise conman Billy Ray. All due to a bet on heredity…

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

parenting

Parenting

Self-reliance May Be Your Unsung Hero

On a career ladder, you might "lose" a rung or have to start climbing again at a new organization. It feels like a step back. A river's curves and changes in direction are all part of the journey. What came before informs what flows after. This takes some of the pressure off job-hunting decisions, too. While a career ladder has only one direction, a career river can create a delta of many different paths, all equally valid to pursue. Not only is it ok to shift directions, it's expected. We need to give ourselves the freedom to explore what matters to us instead of locking ourselves to one inflexible path.

Finding your flow: career ladder vs career curve

Here's how you can begin pursuing your own career river:<ul><li>Identify your ocean. What will your legacy be? Knowing where you want to contribute will help you visualize what you can do to get there.</li><li>Embrace variety. Accept that your career will go through fast and slow periods, and explore the many different paths available to you.</li><li>Navigate obstacles. Sometimes it might be better to just go in a different direction than try to clear what's blocking your way, and that's fine. What matters is that you can keep going.</li><li>Find strength in collaboration. Who has contributed to your career? How are their contributions still present in your work? And who can you help along their own journey? Look for those heading to the same ocean to strengthen your career, and see how you can support others.</li></ul>

Career rivers: a better framework for your professional journey

career

Career

Busting the career ladder myth

<ul><li>Intensity - Going through an enlightenment experience regardless of belief makes people experience intensity through feelings of love, joy, or awe. These intense experiences is likely associated with increased activity in the limbic system which is the brain's primary emotional centre.</li><li>Unity - When we feel a profound sense of connectedness with the rest of humanity, God, or the Universe it is associated with a decrease of activity in the parietal lobe of the brain that stores sensory information.</li></ul>

The Five Elements of Enlightenment Experiences
(1-3)

<ul><li>Clarity - Our sense of clarity is related to the thalamus that is the central structure that connects various parts of the brain to each other and it is what establishes our consciousness.</li><li>A Sense of Surrender - With a decreased activity in the frontal lobes during intense enlightenment experiences we lose the sense of purposeful control.</li><li>Transformation - The feeling of transformation comes from the increased activity and thickness of the frontal lobes. This area regulates our emotional responses and our overall cognition. Therefore continuous usage of this area solidifies the aspect.</li></ul>

The Five Elements of Enlightenment Experiences
(3-5)

<ul><li>They can become more sensitised to the effects of serotonin and dopamine </li><li>The brains become more functionally connected, most especially the frontal and parietal lobes.</li></ul>

Other Benefits of Spiritual Practices or Retreats

Whether through daily meditation or on a week-long retreat, the experience of spiritual enlightenment transforms the brain

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

mindfulness

Mindfulness

health

Health

meditation

Meditation

How an intense spiritual retreat might change your brain | Psyche Ideas

The Sun makes sound in the form of pressure waves. Pressure waves are created by pockets of hot gas that come up from deep within the Sun and break through the solar surface. The result is that the Sun's atmosphere is bubbling like a pan of boiling water. The wavelength of the sound waves is measured in hundreds of miles, making them far outside the range of human hearing.

The Sun does generate sound

communication

Communication

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Does the Sun make a sound?

The most popular arts-related participatory activity in the United States is choral singing. The group activity seems to stand out for this reason: Singing has some effects that other participatory activities don't.
Choral singing makes people happy. In songbirds, a male singing to a female activates the pleasure centre of the male's brain. Scientists found that the effect of singing on birds' brains is similar to the effect of addictive drugs on human brains. But the effect doesn't happen when singing alone.

Choral singing makes people happy

Can singing make you happy?  Take a look at what happens to your body when you sing and find out if singing makes people happy.

timemanagement

Time Management

Does singing make you happy?

Most people want to live a happier life. But happiness is not easy to achieve despite the many proposed formulas: Get enough sleep. Exercise. Meditate. Help others. While they are linked to happiness, they don't work for everyone.
Researchers have turned to smartphones to try and understand happiness better. Thousand of people have contributed to The Happiness Project, a smartphone app that tracks happiness.

Research on happiness

Research found that happiness depends not on how well someone is doing but if they're doing better than expected.
However, high expectations can be a problem. Expecting too much and not finding it can cause unhappiness. On the other end, if you always expect the worst, it isn't easy to make good choices. Realistic expectations are generally the best.

Happiness depends on expectations

Most events don't affect happiness for long. If you've received a promotion, you'll be happy for a while until your brain has adjusted to the circumstances, then you are ready to make your next move.
It might be better to view happiness differently. Happiness is a tool, not a goal. As a tool, happiness can tell us if something went well or motivate us to keep going. When our happiness drops, it may be time to try something new.

Tool versus goal

Happiness is different for everyone in ways that scientists don't understand – yet.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Is there a happiness equation? Here's how we're trying to find out

Our genes, along with culture, curiosity and social instincts shape our tastes. And an overlooked factor that shapes our experience is our expectations.
Taste becomes highly subjective, and the same wine can taste different if labelled as a highly priced one, and can taste generic if labelled as a cheap wine.

Why We Like What We Like: How Our Taste Is Shaped

The exposure effect in how things taste is described as our increased liking of stuff that we have tasted repeatedly. Apart from food, music, languages and art seem to have the same effect. 
We also don’t like what we don’t know, and our tastes naturally evolve over time due to more exposure, experience and changing expectations.

Taste Of Things: Exposure Effect

While we are not in control of our tastes, we can shape them and acquire new ones with the following tips:
<ol>
<li>Explore new stuff, comparing your tastes with others, keeping an open mind. Learn about food, music and art from different cultures.</li>
<li>Slow down your experiences, chewing your food slowly, and not being in a hurry while travelling to new places, reading or meeting someone. Relish life.</li>
<li>Reflect on your past experiences and try to document your exploration.</li>
</ol>

Shaping Our Taste

Taste: why we like what we like - Ness Labs

<ul>
<li>Most people do not like to be in uncertain situations.</li>
<li>Instead of an uncomfortable conversation, we would like to let the bad situation be as it is.</li>
<li>Instead of doing something challenging and creative, we would rather be obscure.</li>
<li>When things overwhelm us, we would like a simple, quiet way to deal with troubling matters.</li>
</ul>
We need to come towards the edge of uncertainty, the place we don’t like much, but which is full of growth, learning, creating and inventing. It is here when we toil that we find meaning, intimacy, beauty, love and vulnerability.

The Edge Of Uncertainty

Complete uncertainty, when our lives seem in total chaos is not a desirable state to be in, and we rightly should avoid that. The edge of uncertainty is a stateless problematic than an untethered life. 
If we can find a little stability, we should move towards the edge of uncertainty, developing a growth mindset.

Deep In The Pit

<ol>
<li>Set aside a time by creating a reminder.</li>
<li>Pick a task that you feel afraid to do. It can be recording an audio, calling someone, or negotiating a deal.</li>
<li>Remember how meaningful it is to you or your loved one.</li>
<li>Do it for about 10 to 15 minutes.</li>
<li>Learn to embrace the uncertainty, feeling the physical and physiological sensations inside you.</li>
<li>Be compassionate to yourself and look for openness and gratitude.</li>
<li>Make the task accountable by involving your friends.</li>
</ol>

Living’ On The Edge of Uncertainty

Staying at the Edge of Uncertainty - zen habits zen habits

The silent conversations that people have with themselves influence how they live their lives. Some people benefit from internal dialogues, while others fall apart.
When we experience distress, research shows that introspection can do more harm than good. Introspection gives rise to negative cycles with potentially grave consequences for our mental and physical health. The ability to step back and reflect can help to get some perspective.

The inner voice

We speak to ourselves at a rate of about 4,000 words per minute. No wonder listening to it can feel so exhausting when we ramble or rehash events.
These inner voices can be paralysing and self-sabotaging if we let it. But those who are able to quieten their inner voice are happier.

Our inner voice can sabotage us

<ul>
<li>Distanced self-talk: Talking to yourself as if you were another person is calming and can help you make a better impression, or improve your performance. ("Hey, you should calm down; this is not the end of the world.")</li>
<li>The power of touch - Put your arms around someone.</li>
<li>The power of nature - Put your arms around a tree.</li>
<li>Activities that create "awe" - A walk in the mountains, or looking at a work of art.</li>
<li>Writing a daily journal.</li>
<li>Creating exterior order - Tidying up has an impact on your interior order.</li>
</ul>

Techniques to calm your inner voice

Your internal monologue shapes mental wellbeing, says psychologist Ethan Kross. He has the tools to improve your mind’s backchat

How to Manage Expectations to Maximize Happiness

Self-reliance May Be Your Unsung Hero

Busting the career ladder myth

How an intense spiritual retreat might change your brain | Psyche Ideas

Does the Sun make a sound?

Cory Sinclair