Your Standards Are Way Higher Than They Should Be

TL;DR

Lower your expectations (accurate predictions) but not your standards (minimums), because the gap between expectation and reality is the direct source of psychological pain.

Key Points

• 1.Expectations and standards are neurologically distinct things. An expectation is a brain prediction about the future; a standard is the minimum you'll accept — conflating them causes unnecessary suffering.
• 2.Mental illness is correlated with maintaining inaccurate expectations. Psychiatrist Dr. K explains that psychotherapy's core function is helping patients make accurate future predictions, reducing the prediction-error gap that generates pain.
• 3.The brain resists updating expectations through denial and narcissistic defense. When prediction errors cause pain, compensatory mechanisms like denial kick in, which is why people repeatedly expect an absent parent to show up despite consistent evidence otherwise.
• 4.Compensatory standards are a hidden trap. After failure, people overcorrect to unattainably high standards — Dr. K dropped classes the moment he got a B after failing, costing him 5.5 years to graduate instead of setting a realistic C standard first.
• 5.A Stanford PhD patient spent four years unemployed refusing entry-level roles. This illustrates how unrealistically high standards — demanding a VP title straight out of a PhD — block progress entirely; starting at the minimum and iterating is how excellence is actually built.
• 6.Wanting and liking use entirely separate brain circuits. Dopamine drives wanting, endocannabinoid drives liking, and serotonin drives contentment — meaning what you desperately want (e.g. a competitive game) may bring no actual enjoyment once obtained.