On Halloween day, 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was out surfing with a friend. While she was paddling on her board she felt a sudden, sharp tugging sensation just below her left shoulder. A tiger shark had bitten off her entire arm.

Hamilton lost 60% of the blood in her body and went into a state of hypovolemic shock. In a strange twist of fate, her father had been scheduled for knee surgery that same day. When she arrived at the hospital, her father was removed from the list so that she could receive life-saving treatment.

You might think this experience would put Hamilton off of surfing forever. Instead, she was back on the board within two months. Just 19 months later, she won the Explorer Women’s division of the 2005 NSSA National Championships.  “It was a terrible thing that happened to me,” she said later in an interview, “but so many good things have come out of it that it has turned into a beautiful thing.” ¹

Hamilton’s story is a remarkable one. It’s also not that unusual.

In April 2003, just a few months before Hamilton lost her arm to a shark, avid mountaineer Aron Ralston was hiking in the wilds of Utah when his arm became pinned underneath a boulder. After five days of living off his last rations and doing some soul-searching, he decided to self-amputate with a dull-bladed multi-tool. He has since described his experience as a “blessing.” ²

There are plenty of documented accounts – some more famous than others – of people who have become paralyzed, gone blind, lost limbs, or experienced some other life-altering event. All of them experience distress at first; some even fall into deep depression. After a while, though, they learn to adjust. And then they learn to thrive.

The strangest part of all? They’re often glad about what happened to them.

“Good for them,” you might think. “But I sure hope I never become paralyzed from the neck down, or lose my right arm. I’d rather be dead.”

Humans tend to have very strong opinions about what will make them happy and what will make them unhappy. We’re also pretty bad at actually predicting either of these.

Strangely, that’s a good thing. It means the possibilities for our happiness are broader than we might assume.

We just have to change our perspective.

Impact Bias: We Overestimate How Much Things Will Affect Us

A big culprit in our flawed thinking is something known as “impact bias.”

Impact bias means we often overestimate how big of a deal something will be months, and especially years later. 

A study in Germany, utilizing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, followed several thousand individuals over a period of 14 years. It found that those who experienced widowhood, job loss, and disability tended to overestimate how unhappy they would be in the years following their loss. In all three cases, these individuals became more satisfied with their lives over the next five years rather than less satisfied, until they returned to roughly their original level of life satisfaction (or even higher).

On the other hand, other individuals in the same study tended to be overly optimistic about how they would feel after getting married. In both cases, it seems that people fail to realize that they may feel differently in the future than they do in the moment when it comes to both good and bad events. ³

One of the most helpful things we can tell ourselves when something goes wrong is, “It’s okay I feel this way now, but I won’t always feel this way.” Our brains might resist this approach because it’s counterintuitive and requires faith. Over time, we can rely less on faith on more on confident assurance with each challenge that we overcome.

Most things in life aren’t as big of a deal as we thought. 

The Curse of Presentism

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has unofficially dedicated his career to understanding why people are bad at predicting what will make them happy. ⁴

A big part of it, of course, has to do with impact bias. But another culprit he’s discovered is a closely related phenomenon called “presentism.”

Presentism, explained simply, means that we assume that how we feel about something right now will also be how we feel about it in the future. 

For example, the idea of losing our right arm sounds horrible right now (and indeed it does feel horrible to people who lose their right arm in those first few hours and days) and so we assume that we will continue to feel sad and awful about being one-armed for the rest of our lives.

This is because our brains aren’t capable of knowing how we’ll feel – good or bad – about something that hasn’t happened. So the next most logical thing for our brains to do is to assume that we will continue to act and feel the same way tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and ten years from now. 

Our brains create a chart of what our future happiness levels look like based only on the data they have access to – in other words, how we feel and what we think right now.

Once we understand both the beauty and the limitations of how our brains think, we can “hack” our thinking and open our minds to possibilities we would normally not consider. This doesn’t mean we should grab a surfboard and head out into shark-infested waters, but it does mean that we don’t have to assume how we feel about something now means that we will feel that way about it forever.

We Hate Losing More Than We Love Winning

Here is another strange, but related quirk about happiness and the human brain:

When we think about what will make us happy, we tend to think about having things we don’t have. This could be anything from a pay raise to a new car to an alpine cabin with a first-class view of the Matterhorn.

But when it comes to what will make us unhappy, we often think about losing things we currently have. Our right (or left) arm. Our job. Our spot in line for a Black Friday sale. Because we are so preoccupied with not losing what we already have, we fail to see how certain losses or sacrifices now can lead to better things later.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman refers to this as “Loss Aversion,” and he’s documented plenty of instances of people making irrational choices in order to not lose something. One example of this is driving through a dangerous snowstorm to “not lose” the money you spent on tickets to a basketball game that night. Another example is demanding much more money to give up an item you own (like a pen or a mug) than you would be willing to pay for the same item if you didn’t own it in the first place. ⁵

Nobody likes losing stuff. It feels unfair, frustrating, and even violating. But when we focus on avoiding losses without seeing the bigger picture, we end up making irrational choices that keep us from real growth.

“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to,  but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” 

On the other hand, getting new stuff feels great at first but the excitement of it tends to wear off fairly soon. This effect is known as the “hedonic treadmill.” No matter how amazing that alpine cabin view is, you’ll eventually find yourself looking for an even more beautiful view somewhere else.

Perhaps the all-time best example of the hedonic treadmill is lottery winners. Winning the lottery is a classic example we love to use when we talk about getting lucky or solving all our biggest problems. As it turns out, real lottery winners don’t feel like the luckiest people in the world. They’re definitely not the happiest.

While lottery winners do feel pretty excited about their success at first, their initial joy tends to wear off over time, and within a year or so they go back to feeling the same way they did before. In fact, in many ways, they are unhappier than non-lottery winners because they fail to derive as much enjoyment from the smaller, more mundane things in life.⁶

It turns out that neither having nor losing stuff is a key factor in our happiness at all.

Keep an Open Mind When It Comes to Happiness

Most of us will not lose our arm to a shark or a boulder.

Most of us will not become paralyzed or have a rare genetic condition that makes us blind, deaf, or unable to speak normally.

All of us will experience setbacks and adversities.

It’s natural to make assumptions when it comes to our happiness. It’s also natural (and good) to have a vision for our future and to make goals based on what we want in life. The trouble comes from not being adaptable. 

The people who thrive in this life are not the ones who have all their limbs and all their motor abilities – they are the people who are creative enough and flexible enough to keep going.

For some, like Bethany Hamilton, it means finding a way to keep doing what you love. For others, it might mean finding a totally new calling and direction. Nearly 2,000 years ago the philosopher Epictetus wrote, “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” 

It would be flippant in every case to say what happens is “for the best.” Some events are just too harrowing; some involve a heartbreaking loss, such as a loved one. But if we trust in Epictetus’s advice when it comes to the majority of our challenges, our lives will go well. 

They will just be different from the lives we had originally planned. And that’s okay.

***

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1. Mallozzi, V. M. (2011, April 2). 30 Seconds: With Bethany Hamilton. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/sports/03seconds.html
2. You can learn more about Ralston’s story here
3. Odermatt, R., & Stutzer, A. (2018). (Mis-)Predicted Subjective Well-Being Following Life Events. Journal of the European Economic Association, 17(1), 245–283. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvy005
4. Gilbert has written an excellent book, Stumbling On Happiness, dedicated to this topic.
5. Kahneman has done many landmark studies over the years; his book Thinking: Fast, and Slow is a great, comprehensive reference.
6. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-27. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917