EXPECTATION

mind

The “expectation effect” is not about notions of magical magnetism, it is about a scientific understanding that what you expect has real, tangible power to shape your world.

Words NIKKI DAVIES

Photography Getty Images

The way you think about the world profoundly shapes the way you navigate it. Your attitudes, beliefs and expectations influence each other to determine how you see the world, yourself and others. These elements contribute to what you think, what you feel and how you behave. So much so, according to the science, that they impact every aspect of your physical and mental health and the overall quality of your life.

The mind–body connection is the link between your beliefs and your physical health, and while the mechanisms involved have been a mystery we now know and understand a lot more than we once did. With this understanding comes the opportunity to harness the rational magic that exists within us all.

Research into the mind–body connection suggests that your beliefs and attitudes influence your behaviour and your physiology, contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that science writer David Robson calls the expectation effect. In his book The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, Robson outlines research that provides profound evidence that describes, among other phenomena, how people who think they are particularly prone to cardiovascular disease are four times as likely to die from cardiac arrest, and how your beliefs about ageing can either increase or decrease your lifespan.

The expectation effect makes it clear that what you think will happen changes what does happen, but this is in no way about magical thinking. Instead, the expectation effect can help you to rethink your beliefs to better influence outcomes around your health, wellbeing and opportunities for success. Indeed, when you learn how to reset your expectations research has found that your health, happiness and productivity can vastly improve.

While the idea of the way in which positive and negative thinking impacts your wellbeing has long been investigated, the idea of how your expectations influence your wellbeing to the point of altering your very physiology comes down to the meanings you assign to events and the specific beliefs you hold about what will happen to you. In his book, Robson describes the brain as a “prediction machine”, which refers to the way your brain often takes shortcuts, searching for patterns in your environment as an energy-saver, given the extraordinary amount of information it receives every second of the day.