Don't Trust Your Mind When It Tells How Something is Going to Feel Like
Our minds are incredibly good at creating a simulation that feels realistic of what happens when we actually do something. I say “feels realistic”, because the simulation is not, in fact, realistic. I haven’t been keeping a score, but my gut feeling is that more often than not what I think a specific experience is going to feel like is radically different what it actually feels like. This happens so often that I’m not sure this simulation of how something will feel is a reliable signal at all.
One of the most extreme examples from my recent own experience is cold water swimming. I’ve always thought that I’m particularly reluctant to feel cold in my body. I felt coming out of a closet shower into a warm bathroom was uncomfortably cold. Swimming in outdoors, even in the summertime, felt too cold even if the water temperature was over 20 degrees.
Then one day, out of morbid curiosity and in the heat of the moment, I joined couple of friends to a sauna trip in a place that had a “hole in the ice” (“avanto”, in Finnish). I dipped in to the icy water up to my neck. While it did feel extremely cold and uncomfortable, it was surprisingly easy at the same time. It was doable. Few moments after getting out of the water, I felt what I could only describe as one of the best highs I’ve had in my entire life.
Sitting outside with nothing but swimming shorts, after the cold dip, the temperature outside being few degrees minus celsius, I felt such calm, peace and such overwhelmingly good bodily feeling that I’ve yet to discover in anything else.
I’m not saying that everyone should start dipping in cold waters. I’m not saying that at all. Some people don’t even get any highs from the ice water dipping. And even if you did, I still understand that some people don’t want to do it and that’s completely fine.
What I am saying, at least from own experience, is that I cannot trust my mental simulations of what real, actual experiences of doing things will feel. Instead of trusting that initial feeling (or, “simulation”) I’ve tried to instill into me the idea that I cannot trust this and that I need do the thing (say: going into a awkward social situation, do something completely new to me) and then decide if I want to continue doing it. Even if the experience turns out to be terrible, it’s only for the one time.
Of course, we do not have time to try out every possible hobby or experience or social situation or whatever there’s it at offer. But I think we’ve generally already narrowed down those close to our preferences. If around our preferences are experiences that we avoid because “we know it’s going to feel terrible”, some of those might be the ones we could just try out once and decide that we can never do again if they turn out to be, actually, terrible.
Following this very rough and approximate principle of “trying out things even if I think they’re going to feel terrible with the intention of doing them only once if that turns out to be true” has made me do things, in addition to cold-water swimming, that I probably never would have done otherwise and I’m extremely happy that I had tried them out. There are many things that turned out to feel terrible, too, but I think the positives of the surprises outweigh the negatives by a far margin.