307: You’re Not Good At Predicting The Future

Chris Sandel: Hey. If you want access to the transcripts and the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can go to www.seven-health.com/307.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and I help people to fully recover.

I’m currently taking on new clients. I believe that you can fully recover, despite what your eating disorder may say, and after working with clients for over 15 years, I’m very good at doing this. What I’m going to do as part of this episode is I’m going to go through a certain section of how I work with people. When I think about the way that I work with people, there’s really three main areas I work on. What I’m going to cover today really fits into the area of developing constructive coping skills and developing resilience.

I would say if this episode resonates with you and you’re sick and tired of living with an eating disorder and you’re exhausted from that existence and you really want to reach a place of full recovery and have the support to do that, then please get in contact. I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put in the subject line ‘Coaching’, and then I can reply and get you the details of how we can have a discovery call and we can figure out if we’re a good match for one another, and we can get working on your recovery.

As part of today’s episode, as I said, I want to go through one of the things that is connected to a particular area that I really focus on. When I think about so much of the struggles that are getting in the way of people making a full recovery or taking the action that they need to reach that place of full recovery, one of the things that comes up a lot is fear. There’s this fear of “I’m not going to be able to handle this.”

This can be connected to lots of different things, but it’s this anticipation of “When this thing occurs, I’m not going to be able to handle this.” So the thought of putting on weight – “If I gain weight, I’m not going to be able to handle that experience.” That’s really what the fear is about. It’s that “That’s going to happen and I’m going to be in a situation where being in that body or someone will make a comment or something will happen and I’m not going to be able to handle that.”

There can be the feeling of “I’m not going to be able to handle life or be able to cope if I don’t have the eating disorder. The eating disorder is the way that I cope, and if I lose that, I’m not going to be able to handle life without that.”

There can be the fear of the thoughts of other people or the comments of other people, so friends or family or colleagues; “They’re going to make a comment and I’m not going to be able to handle that. That’s going to be so uncomfortable, so upsetting that I’m just not going to be able to do that.”

There can be the fear of losing one’s identity. “I have built up this identity” – and it can be lots of different types of identity. It can be “People think I’m the healthy one” or “People think I’m the fit one and that’s my identity, and I don’t think I can handle losing that.” But it could also be “I have this identity of being the sick one, and that’s how I get attention, and what will people think if I get over this? Are people going to stick around when I’m no longer ill?”

So there can be lots of identities that someone can hold connected to the eating disorder where there’s this fear of “I’m not going to be able to handle this if this thing goes away.”

The thing with so much of eating disorder recovery is that there’s all of this ‘what if’ thinking, all of these scenarios – and typically pretty horrific scenarios – that the eating disorder generates where you come to this idea of “I can’t handle this” or “I won’t be able to handle this.” Really, from my perspective, I can put out podcasts like this, I can cover what I’m going to cover as part of this episode, but the thing is that nothing really compares to running the experiment and actually going through this.

Because at this stage, if all that’s happening is you’re thinking about these things, these thoughts are coming up, the eating disorder is generating these thoughts, and then you hear me on this podcast or on this YouTube video or on Spotify or wherever you’re listening to this and I’m then giving my thoughts, it’s then just one person saying something and your mind saying this other thing, and there’s no real proof to any of this. It’s just ‘he says, she says’.

So what I’m always doing when working with clients is, “Yes, I know these are the thoughts that are coming up and I know this is the expectation that is being generated; let’s run the experiment and see what happens.”

00:04:50

Humans are not effective at forecasting

There’s an area within psychology – I think it’s actually part of behavioural economics; people like Dan Gilbert have done a lot of writing on this – called effective forecasting. This area is looking at our ability to predict the future and predict how an event will leave us feeling and how long that feeling will last.

What I want to go through today is a couple of the different reasons why we’re actually just not very good as human beings at being effective with our forecasting. And this is true whether someone has an eating disorder or doesn’t have an eating disorder. I think generally, human beings on the whole are pretty terrible at predicting the future and at forecasting in terms of how certain events or situations will leave us feeling, whether that be in the short term or the long term. But this is very much impacted when you’re living with an eating disorder.

So what I’m going to go through is a number of different ways of why we can get this wrong in terms of our forecasting. Some of the examples I’m going to use will really apply to you; some of them will feel like “That’s just not how I think about things or that’s not a concern of mine.” So not all of them will apply, but I want to run through a few different examples connected to this.

00:06:11

Impact bias

One of the things that they talk about with effective forecasting and where we get it wrong is a thing called impact bias. This is that we tend to believe something will have a bigger impact on us than it actually does. If I’m thinking about this from a recovery standpoint, the number of times people have had this really, really, really strong fear to take time off exercise and think that this was going to be the most difficult thing that they ever did, and yet then when they did it, it turns out to be much easier than predicted. So they had this idea that this was going to be this monumental impact, and then in reality the impact was much less than what was anticipated.

The same with eating earlier in the day. For a lot of people, there is this skewing of eating or consumption to much later in the day. This could be that either nothing’s happening in the early part of the day, or there is something happening, but if we look at the percentages of what’s being consumed, it’s really the latter part of the day accounting for the vast majority of what is coming in. There can be this big fear of “I can’t eat earlier in the day; if I do that, what happens if I still get hungry? I just don’t think I’m going to be able to handle this. I need to get the eating in the latter part of the day under control and then I can start to focus on the earlier part of the day.” There’s all of these reasons why the eating disorder convinces you that this is not a good idea to do.

And yet then when people do start to do that, after a little while of getting used to it, there can be lots of benefits that they notice through doing that. They have better energy throughout the day. Their mood is more stable throughout the day. Actually, a lot of the eating that happens in the latter part of the day either reduces or just isn’t being put up on the pedestal in the same way that it was before. There’s not the same guarding of that meal at the latter part of the day where “I will make sure that no-one interrupts me so I can have this particular meal.” All of that starts to shift.

So this thing of eating earlier in the day, which was going to have this huge, monumental impact and “I wasn’t going to be able to handle it” – what someone discovers is, yeah, there’s some challenge to it, but it’s not to the same degree that they imagined, and actually there’s some benefits that come alongside with that.

I would also say that the eating disorder does this in a lot of ways, but it then doesn’t actually come through on the promise of what it said it was going to deliver and then has some ways of being able to twist this around. For example, it will convince you that if you lose weight, then everything will be so much better – and so much better in lots of different ways depending on your situation. It could be “This is going to really reduce the level of anxiety that I feel” or “I’m going to feel more confident in social situations” or “I’m going to feel like I have more freedom to then eat at other points of the day, I feel like I’m going to have more of a buffer so that’s going to allow me to have this freedom.”

And actually, none of those things tend to happen. You lose the weight and now you’re in this place where “I’m now more scared of weight going up again.” So it doesn’t actually deliver on the thing that it was going to deliver on. It doesn’t have the impact that it convinces you that it’s going to.

And the same with skipping a meal. There could be this feeling of “Man, today’s just been so intense. There’s been so much going on. Work’s been so hectic, or there was this conversation that I had with this colleague, and I just feel that it’s so overwhelming”, and the eating disorder convinces you, “Why don’t you skip lunch?” or “Why don’t you skip your afternoon snack, and then everything is going to calm down and it’s going to feel much better from doing that.” There may be some momentary relief from doing that, but really it doesn’t genuinely deliver. And then the next day, there’s this fear of “I didn’t have lunch yesterday, or I didn’t have my afternoon snack yesterday, so now I can’t have it today.”

So this thing that was meant to be this great relief and this great release actually doesn’t do that, and it just puts you further into the hole in terms of your capacity to make changes or to really do the things that are just keeping you afloat.

It can be the same thing here with exercise. This feeling of “If I just go out for this extra walk, then everything’s going to feel much better. Then I’m going to have this clearer head. Then it’s going to be such a difference” – and again, while there may be some momentary change as part of that, it really doesn’t deliver in the same way.

I think what I would suggest with this one is look at different changes that you make or look at different things that you’ve done to appease the eating disorder and how much that’s genuinely, truly helped you. I think what you’ll find is that these things are not having the amount of impact that you think they are. In the very first day or two of making a change, it can feel very overwhelming, but as long as we start to then do this again and again and again, you really start to notice that this doesn’t have the impact that you believed it would or that your mind is creating the thought that it will.

00:11:12

Poor recall

The next one is poor recall. Really, our memory is very inaccurate. It’s highly fallible. This is true, again, across the board of all humans, but I think this is very much the case with an eating disorder. What happens here is we have these inaccurate memories about what happened in a situation, and this then impacts on how we think about future situations and how we’ll feel in the future when certain things happen.

I have a really distinct memory of working with a client. We were talking about fears around weight and weight gain, and she was telling me about this memory – I think it was actually a photo, but it was from her in this particular dress, and talking about just how good she looked in that particular dress. There was always this pull to get back to that moment of her being in that dress. So I said, “Tell me more about that day. I want to understand more about what happened in that day and what led up to you being in that dress, what happened afterwards.”

When we talked about it, she realised that she’d spent about two or three hours trying on different outfits, being in this panic of not liking anything that she was trying on, wanting to cancel going to the event, having huge anxiety about going to this thing. She then went, and in retrospect, she was like, “I didn’t really enjoy myself being there. It felt uncomfortable. I was really worried and anxious.” She didn’t stay that long at the event. I can’t remember if it was 10 minutes or 15 minutes or half an hour, but it wasn’t a particularly long amount of time.

Then she left and she went to get food, and the normal restaurant that was part of her safe foods that she would normally go to turned out to be closed, so she was then in tears and really upset about this because she’d really wanted to go to this place after she’d had such a tough time going to this event. Then I think she wandered round for quite a while to try and find somewhere else that would serve food that she deemed safe.

So she had this one memory – again, I can’t remember if it was a photo or it was just her being in that dress – where it meant that she wanted to get back to that place, but actually when we expanded it out, it did not sound like a pleasant day. It didn’t sound like “This is the kind of day I want to be having again and again.” So this poor memory then had an impact on where she wanted to get back to, and she imagined how great and at ease she would feel in that dress and in that scenario, and actually that was just not how it felt even at that time.

This is a very good example of where there can be this inaccurate memory that has an impact on how you would then feel about this thing occurring again.

There’s another client I’m thinking of where there was this real terror about putting on weight and really concerned, like “I just don’t think I’m going to be able to handle it.” The reality is that she had been at that higher weight in the past, and when she was at that higher weight in the past, she had much more freedom. She was able to do many more things. She was able to eat many more things. She was able to be more confident in herself. She was having a much better quality of life.

One would think if she could just remember what it was like in that scenario, then there’s not going to be this fear connected to getting back up to that weight. But the problem is that the eating disorder doesn’t really allow her to see that fully. When it thinks of weight gain, it’s thinking of all of these other different scenarios. It’s impacting her memories of what it was like in those different points, even though there’s clear evidence that she was doing much better at that point.

So again, for you, reflecting on how much of your memory is being impacted upon by the eating disorder. And this is true for all of us – again, outside of having an eating disorder. If you are having a particularly challenging time of life, you have a lot of memories that come up that are connected to that that make it feel like that’s how life often is and has always been this way. If you don’t have a very good night’s sleep, a lot of the thoughts and the memories that come up can also be not so positive. It can then have this really big impact. And then when life’s going a lot better, the kinds of memories that naturally come up are memories of “Yeah, this is how life is a lot more often.”

So I just want to really get across the point that our memory of what life is like, about particular events, is really impacted upon by the state that we’re in and is not a true representation of what actually happened. This is something that I’ll come back to in a moment.

00:16:01

Emotional effervescence

The net bias or the next way that we get effective forecasting wrong is a thing called emotional effervescence. I really love that as a phrase. It comes from Dan Gilbert. He says that “people fail to anticipate the extent to which they transform events psychologically in ways that ameliorate their impact.”

What this really means in regular speak is that if something is really bad and it’s really bad for long enough, you have a way of twisting that so that the psychological impact that that thing is having is having less of an impact. So on Day 1, it can be really bad, but by Day 30, by Day 90, you’ve twisted things, you’ve figured out a way so that that doesn’t seem quite so bad.

This is also true the other way around, where something amazing can happen and you think every day is going to be blissful happiness, and on Day 1 of finding out about this thing or this thing occurring, it feels absolutely amazing, but 30 days in, 90 days in, the power that that thing is having is diminished.

It’s largely diminished because lots of other things are then happening within our life that have an impact on how we experience that thing. This, again, comes back to the impact bias piece. It’s not having as much of an impact because there’s all of these other things that have started to change or have started to come in.

The example that is often used is around winning the lottery. It feels like “If I won all of this money, I would be so happy.” But we’re thinking about just that one thing and forgetting about everything else that’s going on. So yes, we could’ve won that money, but then we’re having relationship troubles at that time. There’s something going on with our kid and they’re really struggling in school, there’s been counsellors that have to be called in. There could be an elderly relative or your parents who are then diagnosed with cancer.

So there’s this thing that we think is going to transform how happy we’re going to be, and then life gets life-y. Life comes in and has all of these other things that have an impact on our experience. I think this is really true with the eating disorder, coming back to this emotional effervescence piece, where we psychologically ameliorate the impact. We will transform them in our mind.

This is why someone can be living in a situation that is really, from an outside observer, not an enjoyable life at all. There can be so much fear, there can be so much worry, there can be so much hunger, there can be so much exercise even though they’re exhausted, and someone’s just doing this again and again and again. But the reason they’re doing that again and again and again – one is because they’re stuck in the eating disorder, but two, because it has been going on for so long, you get used to this. This then becomes ‘the norm’.

And then what becomes scary is change. You don’t know how this thing’s going to turn out if you do start to make a change, so you get into that situation of ‘better the devil I know’ where “I will suffer through this” because there’s all of this worry about the potential things that could occur. And again, we’re getting back into the idea of “I won’t be able to handle this.” “I’ll put on weight and I won’t be able to handle this” or “I’ll lose the eating disorder and I won’t be able to cope.” You’re in this situation where you haven’t had a chance to get used to what that change could be, so you just imagine it, and it creates a lot of fear and worry and panic, and it feels like “Actually, let me just stay with what I currently know.”

00:19:39

The state you’re in

The fourth and the final one that I want to mention is the state that you’re in and how much this affects the kinds of thoughts and feelings that naturally come up, that affect the forecasting that you’re going to be doing. I’ve almost already touched on this a little bit.

If I think outside of eating disorders, you can have a situation where you eat something and you get food poisoning, and you are there with food poisoning and you remember that on Friday night, you were meant to be going out for a meal with your friends, and the thought of going out for a meal with your friends in that moment just sounds absolutely terrible. You think, “I will never want to go to that meal on Friday night with my friends. The thought of trying to eat food now is just so off-putting.” It has an impact on how you think you’re going to feel at that future event.

You then get over the food poisoning, Friday rolls around, you go out with the friends, you feel very differently about it because you’re now in a different state. You’re no longer suffering with food poisoning.

Or, again, you can be ill, you have the flu or a cold, and you then think about a party that you’re meant to be going to with some friends next Saturday. Again, the thought of going to a party, being with people, having to stay up late to maybe do some dancing, whatever is involved as part of that party, just feels not like anything you’re going to want to do because you feel so exhausted, you’ve got a pounding headache, you just want to stay under the covers and you just feel horrible. Again, you then get over that, the weekend rolls round, on Saturday you have a great time at the party, and you feel very differently about that experience.

The same is true with an eating disorder. When you are in the eating disorder, it has an impact on the way that you perceive things are going to be, on the forecasting that you are making about what events are going to be like in the future.

The reality is that what actually happens as you make your way out of the eating disorder is not how your mind predicts it to be. Or at least, it’s not how you predicted you would feel in that moment. Because what often happens is, one, so many things you were worried about and concerned about as part of recovery don’t actually happen, so it’s just inaccurate in terms of “The things I thought would happen didn’t happen.” But two, you have this experience of “This thing that I was worried about did actually occur, but when it occurred, it didn’t impact me in the way that I thought it would. It didn’t derail me in the way that I thought it would.”

This is where we get the forecasting piece wrong. And again, as I said at the top, this is why I want people to move out of all of the ‘what if’ thinking and trying to solve every potential problem before they even get started, because the reality is you’re not going to be able to solve every potential problem before you get started. You just won’t get started. But two, when you get there, things are going to be different to how you imagined.

00:22:49

You are able to handle recovery

Really the last point I want to say with this is you are able to handle recovery. Despite what thoughts or feelings your body may be generating at this moment, you will be able to do it. There will be days where it is easier, and there will be days where it’s harder, but whatever comes up, you will find a way through.

What you’ll discover is that the skills that you learn as part of going through recovery – so these different coping skills, this resilience that you’re able to develop – are things that are going to benefit you for the rest of your life. So much of what I work on with clients in terms of these skills is stuff that I do in my everyday life. I’m not recovering from an eating disorder, but they’re skills that are really helpful for me as a parent, for me running a business, for me having employees – all of these different areas of my life, I will use these same skills in terms of coping and resilience that you will then learn in recovery and you will also use for the rest of your life.

Really, our ability to predict the future and how well we’ll be able to cope or what will happen is highly, highly inaccurate. This is especially the case with an eating disorder. The number one thing that I hear from people who have fully recovered is “I wish I did this years ago. I had all of this worry and concern and all of these thoughts about what would happen, and that kept me stuck. That stopped me from doing anything. And actually, now that I’ve made my way out, I realise that things were very different in recovery than I expected. Some were similar, but a lot of it was very different, and how I felt as I moved forward with it really did go in a different direction to what I imagined.”

So that is it for this episode. As I said at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If this is something you would like help with, then please, you can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put in the subject line ‘Coaching’, and then I can get the details over to you.

That’s it for this week’s episode. Have a good week, and I will catch you again with a new episode next week. Until then, take care of yourself.

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