The Origin of Expectation Pt 1

 The Origin of Expectation

Expectations are required in accountability. In the mind of an anxious individual, accountability and habits are required to give some structure. Structure provides control. Control provides comfort.

Anxiety is the overwhelm when faced with too many options. Much different from sadness which is derived from a lack of options. 

The anxious being uses expectations as a guide, a crutch, to avoid being misguided by the addition of too many options. When expectations are in place, it makes it much easier to feel like you have some sort of direction and focus. But the downside of expectations, is when they are strong, and they go awry, it leads to complete mental derailment.

A lot of expectation-forming in your adult life comes from the disappointment you felt in your primary years when you did not fulfill someone else’s expectations. Anxious individuals will commonly see that during their younger years they faced a lot of feelings of disappointment from not fulfilling the expectations of those around them. It could be their parents, mentors, teachers, friends, coaches, anyone whose opinions they valued.

It is difficult to blame these figures in our lives for the anxiety that they caused us, because they have typically felt the same type of pressure that also caused their anxiety. After all, every trait is learned. But that is an argument of nature versus nurture.

As a result of the experiences in your life, you start to form unconscious expectations of what you believe you should do in your own life. These unconscious expectations will lead to a more anxious mind, unless consciously focused on and changed.

It becomes very easy to feel and not think. What I mean by this is that you feel anxious, and because of it you feel angry and misunderstood. You can’t quite place why you feel this way so it is easy to look outside and blame the factors around you. In these scenarios, the best action to take is to search inward.

Some questions to ask yourself when you feel this way:

• What am I feeling?

• What is making me feel this way?

• Why is that making me feel this way?

• Am I choosing to feel this way or is something else influencing it?

• What experiences have I gone through that have influenced my current state?

Breaking down everything in your head makes it easier to understand and typically completely disarms your mind and puts an end to your anxiety. 

Nobody controls how you feel except you.

As soon as you give the blame to some outward force, that outward force is what has control over you. When somebody makes you feel that way they have complete control over you. Being the only one to control your emotions is empowering. It makes you feel invincible. Like nobody can hurt you.

It must also be stated that there are good expectations. Good expectations are those that you form for yourself because they lead to the core values you have in your life. Creating these expectations of yourself guarantees that what you are expecting will actually get you the result that you desire, as long as your desires are your own personal desires, not residual desires of the people whose opinions you value.

That is another part of choice though. Some people desire to make those around them happy, and if that is what is desired, it makes complete sense to form the expectations based on others’ desires.

Form expectations based on what you really want.

The other side of the argument comes from those who say that expectations in general create anxiety. My argument would suggest that if the expectations are formed fairly based on real, personal desires, the “anxiety” that is felt isn’t actually anxiety, it is stress.

Stress has a negative connotation in today’s world, but there is a positive form of stress. Stress is what makes you achieve what you wish to achieve, escape when you need to escape, and survive when you need to survive.

The stress felt in certain scenarios causes your heart to speed up, your pupils to dilate, and your alertness to increase. These are the things your body needs to happen in order to spring into action and keep you alive. 

It is easy to see this natural, beneficial stress reaction as the same as the daily anxiety you feel after you have scrolled Instagram for 3 hours and don’t feel alright anymore. They are much different. One is physiological stress. Stress that is naturally human and created within us to give us the ability to survive. The other is what I will call manmade stress. Stress that has been created because of what man has created. Stress we are not sure how to deal with yet because it is formed from something our species has not spent enough time with.

I believe over time, our stress response to these things will adapt and grow, but at that point, there will just be another new piece of technology we have to form a new coping mechanism for.

Use stress as your superpower.

The higher achievers in this world are those who use stress as their motivator. They create expectations of themselves to create a stress response that helps them spring into action. Using this thought processing, it is easy to understand why procrastinators find so much success waiting until the last second. When the constraint is tighter, your survival instincts take over and you feel like you must survive.