it actually is this idea of negative visualization and mental contrasting is nothing new really uh the stoics who i'm a big fan of ancient greek school of philosophy they called this pre-meditation malorum i always have to look that one up it's called premeditating adversity and that basically encourages us to think about all the different ways in which something can go wrong and in the modern day we call this defensive pessimism now in a couple of different studies researchers found that by setting low expectations and envisioning worst case scenarios defensive pessimists optimize their performance on a variety of tasks from darts and maths problems to fulfilling real life goals this approach might even work across our entire lifetime for example there's this other really cool study that they did over NUMBER_TOKEN years on NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN germans and they found that people who were older were more likely to underestimate their future life satisfaction like they were more pessimistic about how much fun they'd be having later on in life but those people who did that ended up living longer and having more positive health outcomes now obviously this is correlation rather than causation but it's kind of interesting how there is this effect of thinking slightly pessimistically about the future rather than optimistically about it and how that actually potentially translates to a real world health outcome and so negative visualization is great like i do this all the time or i think like whenever i'm making decisions i think okay what is the absolute worst case scenario here what are the things that could go wrong um and a usually i find out that those things aren't actually so bad like if i got rejected or if you know a thing a youtube video doesn't work out or if someone leaves a negative comment like these things really aren't that bad but also it means that once i visualize the negative outcome i can then take steps to try and mitigate the risks of that happening and there's this nice quote from the stoics that says that we often suffer more in imagination than in reality and so premeditating adversity defensive pessimism negative visualization all of this is stuff that helps us recognize the suffering that we do in our imagination and hopefully wouldn't translate into reality now as you guys know if you've been watching this channel for a while i'm a huge fan of stoicism it is the school of philosophy that i most follow and it's what i generally attribute to my baseline very high levels of happiness and tranquility and the fact that people say that i'm generally unflappable i mostly put it down to the fact that i've just been drinking the stoicism kool-aid for like NUMBER_TOKEN years now and if you're interested in learning more about stoicism you might like to check out my skillshare class on how stoicism has made me happier that's a class that i've done jointly with my friend sam who is a researcher and teacher in philosophy and he does a lot of research in stoicism and we talk about the real world effects that stoic philosophy has had on our lives and how it's made us happier if you want to check that out you can sign up to a free trial of skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video uh
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN in learning more about stoicism you might like to check out my skillshare class on how stoicism has made me happier that's a class that i've done jointly with my friend sam who is a researcher and teacher in philosophy and he does a lot of research in stoicism and we talk about the real world effects that stoic philosophy has had on our lives and how it's made us happier if you want to check that out you can sign up to a free trial of skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video uh END_SPONSOR_TOKEN