The Expectation Effect
A couple of months ago I hit a bit of a “wall” at work. Early in the year I had a bit of a knock to my confidence that set me back and I reacted to that knock by disengaging from what I perceived was the problem, essentially licking my wounds.
Fortunately I have access to a coach who has been helping me work through this, he had noted the disengagement and through our sessions he got me talking about what I felt had changed my behaviour in how I dealt with the set back.
After listening to me rant on about how a difference in lived life experiences and approaches to work made it harder for me to communicate my ideas he asked me a question — Were these differences that I felt something I myself was projecting onto others and essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I was given some homework off the back of that — to read The Expectation Effect by David Robson, a book I was told would explain how the expectations we have shape the way that things play out.
Me being me, I bought the book immediately after the session (a couple months ago) and I’ve only just read it ahead of the next session next week.
My takeaways from my read
The book was a fun read, it started off with some interesting stories around the way that placebos worked and how someone once went to hospital having overdosed on a placebo pill only for the clinical team who couldn’t see any physical reason for the symptoms they exhibited to find out that they were in the placebo-taking group of a clinical trial and after telling the patient this the patient recovered shortly after.
There was also a story about how a soap opera in Portugal triggered a mass outbreak of a disease that spread from person to person purely based on people perceiving it as real.
These stories helped to illustrate the power that expectation had on people which then made it easier to get onboard with the rest of the content.
As I was reading there were some things that stood out:
- People with botox struggle to read people’s emotions as we naturally mirror the emotions of people we look at and they can’t move their face muscles too well
- When dieting and seeing all the people who have achieved their goal it’s not as useful to use them as inspiration as you end up doing an “upward comparison” which then puts your expectations out of whack, instead focus on your own goals
- There was a really interesting section on how certain foods are considered healthy and others bad even though the bad food can actually have less calories and keep hunger sated for longer because of the way our brains think about the foods we enjoy and don’t enjoy
- While I don’t suffer from it often there was a really good section on dealing with anxiety and how to take that fight or flight response and reframe it into how your body is providing you with the energy to take on a task instead of seeing it as a negative response
I really appreciated the section on sleep which covered how some people who get the right amount of sleep still feel tired and how some who don’t feel amazing and how focusing not on trying to sleep but doing the thing on your mind is better for you.
I used to fall in the group of people who don’t get enough sleep but feel amazing. At multiple points in my life I’ve found myself working a 9–5 day job, having a post-work nap and then working 5+ hours at night on something else, and I never felt tired the next day.
However when I took my sabbatical at the end of 2022 I found myself keeping that habit of staying up but I wasn’t working during the day and that meant that I was getting up later and going to bed later to the point where I was going to bed at 10am and getting up at 6pm!
I eventually got to a point where I had to go to the doctor to figure out how I could stop being nocturnal and that started a bit of a change in my relationship with sleep. I was told to practice good sleep hygiene and to worry about getting enough sleep and to force myself to get in bed at midnight to ensure I slept.
This set an expectation within me that my natural circadian rhythm was not right and as such I would sleep at the “right” time, get 7 hours or more and still be absolutely knackered. Mostly because I wasn’t fulfilled, where I had to cut my evenings short and therefore didn’t do the stuff that actually made me sleep well.
The section that I think was most aligned to why the coach suggested the book however was around “stereotype threat”, while I am very much in the most privileged group of people I’ve always felt apart from my peers in software development due to my social-economic background — I have a big working class chip on my shoulder.
For most of my career that working class chip has been a big source of motivation, essentially me having boundless anger at my situation and approaching a lot of situations with a “fuck you, I deserve to be here as much as you” kind of attitude.
But when I had that sabbatical and started to think about if all that was healthy, I lost that anger and I tried to focus on not feeling that way and being more in-tune with my body and mind in order to protect them.
Without that anger though I was then faced with looking at the actual situation I was in, I couldn't turn that red-hot anger to tackle a problem because that would lead to me burning out again so I had to try a more measured approach and that measured approach is where I’ve ended up feeling disjointed with things.
Interestingly, when the book talks about how to deal with this “stereotype threat” it suggests self-affirmation and focusing on building up a list of characteristics and values that show you that you have the skillset to tackle things and belong.
This is what I had before I tried to “look after” my mental health, I didn't worry about those small things that became apparent when I stopped to smell the roses because I was too pissed off that I couldn’t afford to have a house with a garden with roses and even if someone I encountered was a 7th generation rose tycoon I could stand there confident in myself.
How I’m going to use it
I think the first thing will be to write out those self-affirmations, make sure that I can build myself up again and also use those characteristics and values and align them towards a big goal, so I can get that anger back.
Then I think I’m going to use that anger to realign the value I see in worrying about things that I currently seem to feel are blocking my progress, I can either drop them cos their pointless or I can use that anger to focus in on removing the blocker.
And I’m going to stop thinking about protecting my mental health like I have been since that sabbatical, it’s actually worse for my mental health to think about it than it is to ignore it.
