How Your Expectations Create Your Reality (Prime yourself to succeed)

0:04 This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy. And more happy. Hello and welcome back to the Crappita Happy Podcast. My goodness, it has been a couple of weeks since I published an episode. I have to apologize. I've been quite consumed with building a new website. And when I say building a new website, I don't mean like outsourcing that and paying somebody to build a website. I've literally been building a new website, whole platform to house all of my online programs and my mailing list, and it has been quite the project right before I head off overseas, and it has literally been twenty four to seven Well not literally, but it's been very, very all consuming.

1:17 So I'm very pleased to report. That that is pretty much all done now, but a few other things have gone by the wayside while I've been obsessed with that if that isn't a little ADHD hyper focused, I don't know what is all of these things that I now understand ADHD symptoms but I didn't realize ever before. But that's a topic for another day. Will be a topic for another day, because I am having so many people contact me. People I know, people in my community, clients of mine who have been saying the day to have realized that actually ADHD is what has been going on for them, and they are taking their own steps to get a diagnosis. And it's a whole new world. But that is not what we're here to talk about. I want to talk to you today about really really interesting psychological phenomenon which is known as the expectancy effect. Now, if you are a paid subscriber and you've been listening to Beyond Happy, you will know that I've talked about this in our most recent series, our mini series, which was all about how to create a life you love, And essentially what that series was about was about how we can use science to support these kind of we woo out their ideas about law of attraction and manifestation, which are very popular and which you know, don't get me wrong, like I'm all about the manifesting, and I love the law.

2:42 Of attraction as a theory. But for those who are not so interested necessarily are not so sold on the spiritual nature or the kind of magical nature of it, then I wanted to ground it in a little bit of science, and therefore I made a series talking about how there is actually a lot of neuroscience that underpins some of these ideas and some of these results that we get in our lives when we do really focus clearly and positively on what it is that we want to create. Now, for you, when I hear that series, you can you know what to do. You can pay to subscribe. But this idea of the expectancy effect was so interesting to me that I thought it really needed to be heard by you, like it needed to be heard by a much wider audience, because I think it is so important and so helpful and potentially relevant to all of us.

3:32 So this idea is. That essentially that we create, like our own experience in life, even our physical experience, physiological symptoms, the functioning of our body and what exists in our world is largely created by what we expect, not by what is like not hardcore objective reality, but what we perceive or what we expect, we actually create our own reality. So let me tell you how this works and why I think this is so important. So essentially, the way our brain works, and you know our brain is what we see, what we hear, what we feel, what we experience, the sensations in our body, what we focus on, how we process information.

4:27 Our brain is not like a camera. That is just passively receiving information or recording information. That exists outside of us. Our brain is essentially a prediction machine and through the way it is predicting what it expects is going to happen, and what it predicts and what it expects is based on all of our past experiences. Like you put your hand out where you expect that there's a doorknob, It's going to be right because of all of your experiences in the past of where doorknobs are positioned on doors. It's that kind of thing. But what that does the way that our brain is actively constructing what it expects to see or what it expects to experience, we are actively generating what we do experience. We're actively generating what does exist in the world around us and what we do experience what we do see and what we do here.

5:22 If that sounds a little complex or you're wondering, like, so what are you talking about? If you think about, like, apart from the door knob example, you know those ambiguous drawings that you see where if you look at it, it can be a young woman or an old woman, depending on how you look at it, and so there's no objective truth about what exists in that drawing. When you look up to the clouds in the sky and you start to see shapes, there's no objective truth to what the shape the cloud is making. Your brain is predicting what it is, it's interpreting, and it is creating an image, and so your perception, my perception, somebody else's perception is going to be different. Now take the ambiguous drawing for example. There was one study that was done where at a zoo where people were walking in, there was a picture of an animal on the wall or something, and people were asked what the picture was of, And interestingly, when you look at the picture, it could be a duck.

6:13 It looks very much like a duck with like a pointy beak, you know, like a V shape beak out of the side like the profile of a duck's head with a V shape beak, or it could be a rabbit, which is the profile of a rabbit head with V shaped like ears poking out of the back, depending if you look at the image phasing to the right as a beak, or you flip it and actually the V is coming at the back of the duck's head and it's actually a rabbit. Now. When they asked people in October, what did they see in the image, ninety percent of people interpreted it as a duck. Looks like a duck. When I saw the picture, I thought it was a duck come east time. When they surveyed people, and particularly when they surveyed children under the age of ten, one hundred percent of children saw a rabbit. So again, children under ten, they are the group that is most likely to be on the lookout or have in their mind the idea of a rabbit around Easter time. And so therefore, because they're all about it's Easter, and all their experiences is easter bunnies, and that's what they're thinking about when they look at the picture, they see rabbit. Back in October, it was a duck. So the picture hasn't changed, but what we think the picture is changes based on all of our own mood, our personal history, our past experience.

7:41 So much goes into influencing what we see or what we experience. If you have heard that there's a lot of break ins in your neighborhood, and you're sitting at home alone when you hear a noise, a noise that normally wouldn't bother you at all, or you would immediately think is a cart walking over the back fence. Immediately you start perceiving that it could be somebody trying to break in. You have a different response because of your expectations, because of what you are primed to be thinking about or focusing on. I've mentioned before on the show that if you are feeling stressed, if you're feeling shy, if you're feeling anxious, you are more likely to perceive neutral facial expressions as hostile. If you are shown a photo of a person with a neutral facial expression, whether you perceive that that person is angry, you know, harsh rejecting all comes down to how you feel.

8:37 You literally see. That face, interpret that face in a different way because of how you are, not because of how that face is with the expression that that person has on their face. You can see the implications of this, can't you. In fact, they did another study with university students and they had them watching a video of students, adolescents kind of just interacting with each other. So they're watching on a video other students interacting with each other, and they track their eye movements to see what they were looking at. In the images, there's lots of people, lots of things going on, lots of people engaging.

9:17 With each other. The students watching the video who were quite popular, very well liked, who had an active social life. When they looked at that video, they noticed with their eye movements that they tended to be looking at and focusing on the students in the video who were nodding, smiling, encouraging, socializing, active, friendly. There's students who in real life were more lonely and more socially isolated. When they watched that same video and they tracked the eye movements, they tended to be focusing on the students in the video who seemed a little more hostile and a little more unfriendly. So when we talk about a self ful feeling prophecy, what we are experiencing shapes our expectations of what we're going to likely encounter.

10:08 And then the way our brain works, this expectation machine, this prediction machine that it is, it starts finding all of the information that confirms our existing view. It's a confirmation bias, you know, Like that's what confirmation bias is. It's we actively filter out information or diminish or minimize the information that doesn't support our existing worldview, our existing belief We actively seek out, not consciously, unconsciously, we actively filter in all of the information that confirms our existing view. This is how we get so entrenched in our particular opinions, in our views about things, especially I mean, this is a whole other topic, but especially with the way that we are so online at the moment and so frequently on social media, which uses algorithms to continue to just feed us more of the information that supports our existing views, and so we become more and more and more entrenched in our existing worldview. And we know that that is a problem. Back to this expectation effect though, this expectancy effect.

11:10 If you're afraid of heights and you're asked to estimate the height, the distance off the ground, that a balcony is. People who are fearful of heights tend to estimate that the balcony is like five feet higher than what it actually is. They see it differently, they perceive it differently. It is so important to understand that the way we see the world is not how the world is. The way we see the world is how we are and how and what we expect to experience. If I tell you that what I'm serving you for dinner is a delicious chicken breast filet, and you like chicken, then you'll be primed to think that that's going to be delicious.

11:50 Now if I tell you it's a delicious chicken breast filet and it's actually something else, God, I don't even know. I'll kin't even come up with an example of what it might be. But if it's not, then you're likely to still think that's delicious chicken breast because that's what your brain is expecting. If, on the other hand, I tell you that delicious chicken breast is something else which is really gross, then it's going to change the flavor of that. It's going to change how you even taste the food. This is apparently really well known, and it's really widely used in restaurants when they described you the food that you're going to eat, and they talk it up and they describe it in all of this detail because it primes you to expect it to taste good, and therefore it tastes better. So this is all very interesting.

12:37 I mean, also, our memories aren't even accurate. Like when you recall an event, you don't actually recall what happened. You have a perception of what happened, which is like a snapshot that your brain took at the time. Which again, the snapshot that you take is how your brain has processed that event. It's not an actual snapshot that is the reality of what happened. So you'll have had all of your own filters interpreting that event. You lay it down in memory. Now, every time you call that memory up, you're essentially creating a new version of that memory. So memories can change over time. Because if one time you pull the photo out, sorry, you pull the memory out, and on that occasion, for whatever reason, you think that the car was blue and it wasn't red, then the next time you pull the photo out, you'll recall that it was blue because that was the most recent memory that you are drawing on.

13:30 So you're constantly revising and updating even your memories every time you recall them. So this is how your even your memory is so like unreliable. But where this gets really interesting to me is not just how it impacts us socially, which I think is really important and really interesting. You think about the implications of that in terms of when you go into any social situation, when you're in the workplace, when you whatever expectation you have, your brain is creating very reality. It's a prediction machine. It is filling in gaps, it is filling in blanks, it is interpreting situations based on what you expect. Now, taking that one step further, you think about something like the placebo effect. Now, the placebo effect, as you know, is when people are given a sugar pill basically like a non therapeutic and non active substance water, sugar something, but told that it has some kind of therapeutic or healing benefits. And it's widely been proven. It's very well known that a certain percentage of people will experience actual physical health benefits, will their physiology will change because of their expectation that they have been given a medication that is going to reduce their symptoms or improve their outcomes, or change what's happening in their body. Physiology literally changes symptoms, actually reduce. I'm

15:01 talking about not just your perception of pain, though that is one. It's not just your perception of pain. It's even things like blood pressure, like physiological markers of health, like the amount of certain proteins and enzymes and antibodies and things that actually exist in your body. They change because of your expectation. And there was one really interesting experiment that they did where people had experienced a bypass had had bypass surgery. Now, bypass surgery is really kind of major surgery, right, It's pretty intensive, it's pretty invasive. So what they did was they got people who were having this bypass surgery. This study was called sy heart as in psy like psychology, I guess. And so what they did was they had two meetings and three phone calls with these patients who having this bypass surgery. And these meetings and these phone calls were designed to basically improve the patient's expectations of a positive outcome. They would talk about the procedure, what was going to happen and all the ways that they could alleviate their heart disease, you know, the things that they could do to be more proactive in terms of their health. And I guess the focus was really on focusing on the potential positive benefit, like the positive outcome that they might experience, rather than just talking about the problem and the disease and what they were going to do. And then they got them to fill out this personal recovery plan where they got them to focus on the positive benefits that they would

16:33 experience after that had this surgery. So they were encouraging them to be optimistic about what was going to be on the other side of this surgery, the positive things that they could experience, And so they got them to make plans and to be optimistic, but you know, not unrealistic. They weren't putting that they were going to go on climb everest or anything like that, but you know that they would be able to travel and see friends and get back into things that they had previously enjoyed doing that they hadn't been able to do, just really positive stuff like that. They also they got them to do a positive visualization where they would imagine their life six months after the operation and where they're at and what they'd achieved, and you know how much better and improved things were. Now. Obviously they always need a control group.

17:16 So with the control group, they just gave them some basic emotional support. They had the same number of sessions, but they didn't really discuss any expectations about the surgery. And the reason for this is often that when an experiment involves meetings or you know, one on one time or things like that, there can be a risk that the benefits that people get is as a result of the social support. So often with the control group they try to replicate that social contact, the social support aspect, but they just don't give them the activities. I guess that they're trying to measure the benefits from. And then they had a third group in this case, which was people who had none of that. They didn't get any of the group, they didn't get any discussion, emotional support.

17:59 They just basically went through the bypass surgery. So straight away after the surgeries, the first thing they noticed was that the people who had been in this active recovery positive visualization group were discharged on average four point seven days earlier. They were ready to leave the hospital significantly earlier than the other bypass patients and then later. So they followed up and they had questionnaires about how the surgery had been affecting all aspects of their life, their social life, their sleep, recreation, family life, et cetera. And the people who had the positive expectations tended to show the fastest improvement. They tended at the six month mark to be the most ready to go back to work, the most ready to get back to doing the things that they had been doing before. But then, importantly, the other thing that they did so that this was not just all the subject's own self perception, was they took measures of things like their inflammatory markers in their blood, and the people in the positive expectation group had much lower levels of these pro inflammatory markers, So there were actual physiological changes, significant differences. The process of planning, looking forward, being optimistic, and visualizing a positive outcome actually experienced a much more positive outcome, fast recovery, way faster to get back to normal life benefits across the board. Now, if you think about that, that's really great for the individuals who did that study, and we can all take something from that in terms of how we approach things that

19:30 might be difficult and things that might potentially be scary or have a difficult outcome. You think about how we can potentially impact our own experience by how we perceive it, like where we choose to put our focus. So it's really profoundly beneficial, not just for the individual, but even from it like a public health perspective. You think about if people can get out of hospital quicker, if we can take some of the burden off the public health system, like you think about the implications of that across the board. It's actually really real interesting. There are so many other examples of things like how people's experience of life, people's experience of health and wellbeing or not, or sickness. People die earlier when they have a strong belief or that they have an expectation of something terrible going wrong. It cannot be stressed enough that how we think what we expect changes our experience, not just in terms of what we perceive when we go about the world, your whole physiology, your physical experience, actually changes the flow and effects of that to every aspect of your life. Because of the way this becomes self reinforcing, you have an expectation. Therefore, you have an experience. When you have that experience, it feeds back in and reinforces your expectation. If you are a person who is and look, everybody's going to go through rough times in life. But if you are a person who is anxious or depressed, you are literally experiencing a different world. You are walking around in a different world than somebody who is top of the world and feeling positive and happy. And we

21:03 can't always help some of these mood disorders and the states that we get in and life can be challenging, and we all go through really difficult times, and you maybe have a terrible health diagnosis, so maybe you going through a crappy time in your relationship will financially or whatever. But it is just so important to remember that when you are in a tough state, like when you're in a negative state, you are actually not necessarily seeing things the way they are. You're not necessarily getting an unbiased, objective view of reality. What your brain is trained and primed to see in other people's exchanges with you, what your brain goes out to look for when it is filtering in the information that it thinks is relevant to you.

21:48 You are going to be more likely to filter in and to absorb the experiences that reinforce your negative state. So whatever you can personally do to help help you to shift into something that's more positive, and it's never about being a polyanna and pretending things are fine when they're not. It is about understanding the science. It's about understanding the neuroscience. There is no objective reality. Objectively, there are not like ten people criticizing you in a room. You are seeing expressions on people's faces that don't necessarily exist. Depending on your own mental state, you might also be perceiving that they're really happy with you and they're not. I mean that can go both ways. Let's fase it.

22:28 But everything is going to be self reinforcing. So it's really important to take a step back. If you are assuming that everything's going badly and everything's going wrong for you, and you know, we've all been in that place where it just seems like nothing's going right and people are against us and nothing's working out. If you can shift yourself into a state where you prime yourself to focus on something that's more positive, you will start to perceive things differently, and then that has a positive kind of upward spiral effect. But we have to really train ourselves. To shift our focus. But this is why great things like gratitude journals are so helpful too, because when you focus on what you appreciate and you really tap into that sense of appreciation and abundance even when things are crappy, boost that that gives your mood, like the shift in your perspective when you can just really intentionally shift yourself into a state of being appreciative and focus on what's good and the people that you care about.

23:25 Like that intentional. Shifting of your mood and changing your state has the effect of changing how you perceive the world around you, and that can make just the most enormous difference and then go on and have a flow on effect and lead to much more positive outcomes. There is so much more in terms of the science of that we could go into. I just really wanted to give you some specific examples of how this works and to give the opportunity to just understand how this potentially because it potentially impacts all of us, how that potentially could be impacting you and what you're experiencing. So I hope that is helpful. I am off on a holiday with my parents who are over from Australia for the next.

24:08 Couple of weeks. Apologies that the Crappy to Happy podcast is not as regular if you're a member of our paid community, the Beyond Happy podcast series. We will be having a live call when I get back in October and that will hopefully make up for the lack of new episodes. We'll be having a live call on how to live with purpose, how to have a purpose driven life. If you think that that might be something that you want to jump on a webinar with me and talk about or for free, well not for free, you just have to be a paid subscriber. But if you want to hear about that, jump on a call with me. That will be happening in October and I will see you then for now, Think positively, expect good things and I cannot wait to catch you on the next. Episode of Crabby to Habby.

24:53 Crabby to Happy is created and produced by me Cas Dne. If you enjoy the show, please hit the follow button wherever you listen to an sure you never miss an episode. Share with a friend to get me into the ears of more lovely listeners, and I would love for you to leave a five star rating and review. Thank you so much for being here and I cannot wait to catch you next week for another fabulous episode of Crappy to Happy