A shared universe › Blog › Imagining you don’t have it · Español
In It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s film of 1946, an angel shows George Bailey what his town would be like if he had never been born. When he returns to his usual life, he sees it with different eyes. More than sixty years later, some psychologists wanted to know whether that scene also works outside the cinema.
The good things that come into your life thrill you a great deal at first and, with time, become part of the daily routine. The house that cost so much effort, the person you share a table with, the job you once celebrated. They do not stop mattering, but they stop surprising you, and what does not surprise is barely noticed.
Psychology has been studying this tendency to get used to good things for decades. The exercise in this article is a way of turning it around: it adds nothing new to your life, it invites you to look differently at what is already there.
Minkyung Koo and Timothy Wilson, of the University of Virginia, Sara Algoe, of the University of North Carolina, and Daniel Gilbert, of Harvard University, asked a group of students to choose something good in their lives: an achievement, a friendship, an opportunity that had come their way. They then gave them one of two written tasks.
Those who imagined its absence finished the exercise in a better mood: they said they felt happier and had more pleasant emotions than the other group and than those who had written nothing. Curiously, they did not report feeling much more grateful than the others. What changed was their mood in general. The authors gave their paper the name of the film.
The most striking part came afterwards. The researchers described the two exercises to other students and asked which would make them feel better. They could not see it: they thought both would help equally and, if anything, that remembering how the good thing arrived would feel better than imagining it never came.
They then tried it with couples. This time 88 people took part, university staff and people who responded online, all with at least five years of relationship, almost fourteen on average. For fifteen or twenty minutes, some wrote about how they met their partner and others about the ways in which they might never have met. The second group ended up more satisfied with their relationship.
When another group was asked which exercise they would prefer to do, almost all chose to tell how they met. It is a lovely story and you want to tell it. But it was not the one that moved people most inside.
The authors explain it by surprise. When you think about how something came about, you find reasons and everything seems logical, almost inevitable. When you think about how easily it might not have come, it seems like an unexpected gift again, and the unexpected moves us more.
The study has its limits, and the authors themselves point them out: the effects were modest, they were measured just after writing once, and most of the participants were students.
There is an important difference between this exercise and another that resembles it. Imagining that something never came into your life is not the same as imagining that you lose it tomorrow. The first is what was studied in 2008. The second is something else and can awaken fear, above all in someone who already tends to worry.
Other research reaches a similar idea by a different route. In 2008, Jaime Kurtz, of Pomona College in California, asked students who had six weeks left before finishing their degree to write for two weeks about their university life. To some he presented graduation as very close and to others as still far off. The first group made more of those weeks, made more plans typical of university life and felt better. Knowing that something is not for ever can help you enjoy it while it lasts.
It takes a quarter of an hour. In the studies it was done in writing, and writing forces you to be specific.
After writing it, some people feel like saying something to that person or looking after what they have a little more. If that happens to you, you can make the most of it.
To try it out, it may be enough to do it now and then, for example once a week and with something different each time. Repeating it daily with the same thing risks turning it into a routine that no longer surprises, just the opposite of what is intended.
This exercise does not suit every moment or every person.
What is intended is to look more fondly at what you have, not to frighten you with the idea of losing it. If the exercise leaves you uneasy, you can stop it and come back to it another day, or not come back.
If the exercise has brought to mind a chance friendship or an opportunity that came just in time, give thanks for it with a “For someone” star and “What I’m grateful for”. You don’t need to give names.