The Role of Expectations and Mental Health

The Role of Expectations and Mental Health

Have you ever stopped to think about expectations and the role they play in your life?  Which expectations do you carry that are tied to “wants” or “should bes”, as opposed to what truly is?  How much frustration might be eliminated by managing those expectations?  We have become a society of convenience and quick fixes based on those (perhaps unrealistic) expectations of what should be, but at what cost? 

We are now beginning to see and understand the effects of this on our global environment through things like plastic pollution and climate change (the entitlement of convenience at all costs), but what about the toll this is taking on our own personal environment?  What effect does this have on our bodies and minds? 

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an expectation is “a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future”, or “a belief that someone will or should achieve something”.  Read that again, a B-E-L-I-E-F.  Not what actually is.

Now, what happens when an expectation is not met?  If you are anything like me, I would venture to guess you might feel a sense of disappointment and frustration.  And what does that feel like in your body?  Does it present like anxiety?  Do you feel your body clench and/or your heart race?  Do you feel yourself get red hot with anger, or perhaps feel your head throb?  And what about your mind?  Do you find yourself spending a lot of energy perseverating on what isn’t or what you feel should be, instead of accepting what is and moving on?  Do you feel your thoughts derailing?  And how much time does it take your mind to recover from what isn’t as you think it should be before you can focus on your next steps? 

What if you could harness the negative energy that might be wasted on those reactions and use it for solution-based thinking instead?

As Wayne Dyer so poignantly put it, “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than how you think it should be”.

I can attest to the truth of this statement.  I feel the significant difference in my mind and body since investing the time to retrain my mind.  This does not mean that I do not have hopes and dreams for myself that I stop working on when obstacles present or stop me from achieving my what I want to achieve, it simply means that I have stopped wasting my energy on the things that I can’t change that I have no direct control over, and move my way around them, finding other solutions instead.  I have stopped getting mad at things I wish were different, and instead accept them for what they are.  I expect that when I call a company I may be placed on hold for a long time; I expect that when I wake up in the morning there is as much chance I will wake up to sunshine as to rain;  In the winter, I expect there will be cold days – even many of them;  I expect that there is as much chance that a planned day will go as planned, as it will not.  

Is this an easy thing to do?  Well, I suppose that depends on how you look at it - how you interpret that word “easy”, and funnily enough, what your expectations are.  The mind tweaks are not difficult concepts, but just like preparing to run a marathon, it takes patience, practice, perseverance, and upkeep.

What I can say for certain, is this…. Through managing expectations to accept all possibilities, far less time is spent feeling those negative lower dimensional feelings of those “shoulda, coulda, wouldas”.  You no longer give as much of your sacred energy away to those things you cannot change and instead have more of that energy to use on propelling yourself forward, and that is an extremely powerful and freeing feeling.