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Life can feel hard for all sorts of valid reasons. However, if everything feels like a struggle, it can be partly self-inflicted. In key ways, most of us think in patterns that limit us and restrict our successes and happiness.
Let's tackle three common, but not commonly discussed, thinking errors that make life feel harder than it needs to. After explaining the errors, I'll show you how to be less susceptible to them.
1. The Belief Outcomes Are Proportional to Effort
This thinking style is captured by well-known sayings like "you get what you pay for," "no pain, no gain," and "nothing worth having comes easy."
If you believe that the time, money, and or effort you put into something is directly proportional to the outcome, it creates two main problems:
- You’ll overlook easy wins.
- It incentivizes overworking and overthinking since you believe this will result in better outcomes.
You might become the proverbial person who walks by dollars to pick up pennies.
In general, thinking in linear ways comes most naturally to us. Try thinking more non-linearly. See other patterns, like these:
- Potential exponential or compounded growth.
- Icing on the cake effects, where a little bit of effort can lead to a disproportionately large payoff.
- Stepwise models, where you won't get a lot of additional benefit until you hit the next threshold.
When you practice thinking in non-linear ways, it can help you see opportunities for outsized gains from your time, money, or effort, and train yourself out of habitual overthinking or overworking.
2. Status Quo Bias
Status quo bias can manifest in these three ways:
- You continue to do what you currently do, such as keeping the same routines.
- You assume that the way most people do something must be a good way (the sheep effect).
- You assume that if a lot of other people aren’t doing something, there must be a reason. It must be hard or unrewarding.
These errors restrict happiness by limiting the novel experiences we expose ourselves to. In turn, this cuts us off from positive emotions like surprise, excitement, and satisfaction.
This bias has other effects. For example, it may cause you to persist too long in trying to follow a standard course that doesn't work for you. Or, you might dismiss unconventional ideas if you lack personal role models, that is, if you don’t know others like you who are engaged in that course of action.
3. The Narrative Fallacy
The narrative fallacy is when we connect events to form a story in a way that's overblown. For example:
- You might connect instances of individuals being unhelpful into a narrative that people are generally unhelpful or unwilling to help you specifically.
- You might create a narrative of bad luck or personal ineptitude based on isolated incidents.
- You might form an inaccurate story to explain your successes, such as believing that you’ve achieved what you have solely through perfectionism or excessive help from others.
How you can be less susceptible to these errors.
- If you ever have a sense that you're not making the most of your opportunities, look for thinking errors you might be making, such as the ones mentioned in this post.
- Make specific notes about times you've fallen into each of these thinking traps, and how the thinking errors influenced your behavior.
- Experiment with other ways of thinking. When faced with specific situations, challenge yourself to see them in alternative ways. Ask yourself, "If it weren't true that [insert error], what else might be true?" Then answer the question.
Correcting the thinking errors covered here will pave the way to you experiencing greater happiness and less stress through seizing easy wins, embracing novelty, and viewing your life and opportunities with greater clarity.
On a related note, I recently wrote about how another common bias, the illusion of control, can lead to hesitation and rumination, especially for people prone to anxiety. If you're interested in correcting biases that affect your happiness and success, give that post a read now.
