Why Bracing Yourself for the Worst Is Not Always Best

Each day of your life is filled with a certain degree of uncertainty. You’re waiting to find out if your friend is going to text you back after you send a silly message complete with your favorite emoticons. Maybe, you worry, your friend will find this offensive. Other daily events take on greater magnitude. You’ve applied for a new position, and it’s now the deadline for the decision to be announced. Bracing yourself for disappointment, you let your mind drift to worst-case scenarios.

Because the future is always uncertain, your ability to cope with possible disappointment would seem like a good quality to develop. Although you’ve come to believe the maxim “Expect the worst and hope for the best,” you wonder if this is really the best strategy. Wouldn’t it be better to enjoy each moment that brings you closer to an outcome rather than worry all the time?

What Is Bracing and Why Is It Bad?

According to a major new study by University of Miami’s William Villano and colleagues (2024), bracing consists of a pessimistic and “preemptive response to an uncertain, potentially disappointing outcome.” This happens because “when people lower their expectations, the outcome is less likely to be worse than their new expectations.” The tendency of expectations to drift in a negative direction, though, could lead people to become worse at predicting the future over a long-term basis. You’ll be more, not less, likely to be surprised when good—or bad—outcomes actually occur.

Another problem with bracing yourself for the worst is that it reinforces the tendency to engage in “magical thinking,” or wrongly believing that your expectations actually affect outcomes of events you don’t control. You figure it’s unlucky to imagine yourself as holding the new position you’ve applied for because you’ll jinx your chances.

All of this begs the question of whether going through life by expecting bad outcomes alters your actual ability to anticipate the future through the important vehicle of learning from the past. People should improve, Villano et al. argue, about how to adjust their expectations after an event they expected actually comes to pass. Better accuracy should lower the chances of unpleasant outcomes for events you anticipate, and surprises for events you didn’t.

Testing Bracing’s Bad Effects

The U. Miami-led research team tested a model of “expectation drift” on a sample of 625 undergraduate students who provided ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) throughout a semester while they took, and waited for, the results of at least two out of four consecutive exams in organic chemistry classes.

Professors in the courses agreed to share the exam results with investigators who then released them to the students via text message. That way, the EMAs could be conducted both before and after students received their grades. Throughout the semester, but more frequently before and after exams, students provided EMAs of their positive and negative affect through assessments of a range of emotions that included positive (happy, excited, attentive, relaxed) and negative (upset, irritable, anxious). The students also provided estimates of their expected grades for the next exam both after the exam and immediately before receiving their grade. This procedure allowed Villano and colleagues to compute prediction errors by calculating the difference between actual and expected grades.

The findings revealed that students did engage in expectation drift, reducing their anticipated future exam grade by 2.74 points in the interval between exam 1 and exam 2. Furthermore, although the most frequent change across time was 0, of those who drifted, 43 percent did so in a negative direction and only 12 percent did so in a positive direction. The effect of negative expectations was even more pronounced for students who lacked confidence in their exam grade estimates.

Turning to the emotion side of the equation, students whose mood tended toward the negative in the waiting period were indeed more likely to make pessimistic estimates of their grades. As the authors concluded, “pessimistic drift may be an emotion-driven response that is beholden to one’s affective state during an uncertain waiting period.”

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In terms of outcomes, having a pessimistic expectation did serve as a buffer against the emotional damage caused by a bad grade but only to a point. In the case of extreme disappointment, people with more pessimistic outcomes actually did worse, suggesting that bracing “fails to mitigate the emotional impact of highly unexpected and disappointing (i.e. worst-case) upsets.”

Finally, people who engaged in the most pessimistic form of bracing became less accurate in their predictions of future exam scores. As the authors noted, “pessimistic expectation drift may counterintuitively sustain the degree of uncertainty surrounding future outcomes by reducing the fidelity of prediction errors, even as people accrue experience.”

Avoiding the Pessimistic Expectation Bias

You might conclude from the findings of this innovative study that, so what, this was just a bunch of undergraduates dealing with a normal part of their lives. Your own experiences bear little resemblance to the emotional lives of organic chemistry students. However, the situation they faced was, for them, high-stakes and goal-relevant, as Villano et al. note. Maybe it’s more like your own daily battles with uncertainty than you realize.

Translating the study’s findings to your own life, you can think of the results as showing that, when you face repeated instances of uncertain outcomes, pessimism will only make you less certain rather than more, while also dragging down your emotions. There may have been a slight buffering effect of pessimism, but when these students were really wrong, they felt far worse than if they hadn’t braced for the outcome.

To sum up, the next time you find yourself in a waiting period, the U. Miami findings suggest that you literally take your mind off of it or, at least, don’t let your expectation drift downward. If the result isn’t what you wanted, use the outcome as a learning tool to improve your actual ability to predict future outcomes. Feeling bad about a disappointment will only make future disappointments more likely. Permit yourself to expect the best, and it just might come true.