Lowering Expectations Increases Happiness and Satisfaction

Lowering Expectations Increases Happiness and Satisfaction
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The research proposal discusses one strategy for avoiding disappointment: decreasing one’s expectations for getting a desired albeit uncertain result. It is predicted that individuals will accept this method when two particular (contextual) criteria are satisfied. When they expect self-relevant feedback, and secondly when they expect this feedback to come soon. This hypothesis will be supported by an experiment manipulating the self-relevance and feedback timing regarding the outcome. The expected findings indicate that participants reduced their estimations of their test score only when feedback regarding it is self-relevant and imminent. The implications and usefulness of using this method are examined briefly. The article suggests that by decreasing expectations, one might prevent disappointments raising their happiness and satisfaction levels.
Lowering Expectations Increases Happiness and Satisfaction
Nowadays, people are feeling more pressure and stress during their daily life. Even those who have a stable life routine would also feel bored and stressed after a long time. People are starting to care less about themselves and receive more worries from the outside world, such as jobs, family, and social interaction. However, these are the factors that are hard to change. People cannot change their social status like switching TV channels. However, what can be changed is the mental process, thoughts, and people’s ideas, in order to create more happiness and satisfaction in daily life. I believe that lowering our expectations on something can help us achieve more happiness and satisfaction, such that if things do not come the expected way, it should not be disappointing.
Previous research has stated the elements that make people feel stressed or unsatisfied in their daily life. For instance, Qin et al. (2018) show that people, especially young workers in society, have intense depression and stress levels from health conditions, educational levels, and personal income. The authors take the individual life satisfaction level as the dependent variable and personal, family, and social characteristic factors as the independent variables. Using interviews and graphs to collect responses from the participants, they show that people of different ages and statuses are influenced mainly by the amount of income, which allows them to handle different emergency or needful situations. At the same time, life satisfaction is also influenced by people’s educational level. Research shows that those who received higher education usually have less anxiety about the future and job considerations (Zhang et al., 2022).
Previous research also found that psychological elements provide positive emotions which increase life satisfaction and build ego resilience through daily self-monitoring and encouragement (Cohn et al., 2009). The article collects data by using websites that let participants submit their daily emotion reports and using a 4-point Likert scale to collect data from resilience (as the dependent variable) and a 7-point Likert scale from life satis...