Isn’t it uncanny to find people who are truly content in circumstances of great deprivation and danger? It’s even more bizarre to find people who are miserable despite having all the luck in the world.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that, it is not really your circumstances but rather your expectations that dictate the quality of your happiness.

You are happy when you meet or surpass your expectations and miserable when you fall short.

If expectations drive happiness and expectations are in your control, is it really outrageous to say that you are in complete control of your well-being at all times?

I still remember the first time I found out the power of expectations.

It was “report card day” in 6th grade. I was expecting the best. However, as soon as I grabbed my report card from my teacher, my excitement vanished. I had fallen short of expectations. I was crushed.

It hurt for a while. But like all things in life, it was temporary. I got over it.

Four months later, I was sitting at same desk facing the same situation. The stage was set for another disappointment. But this time, it was different.

Right before the teacher handed down the grades, I closed my eyes and visualized failing the class. I visualized opening up my report card and seeing giant red “F”s all over it.

It worked!

Despite the fact that my grade was exactly the same as the previous term, I was not disappointed, I was content.

It is not your circumstances but rather your expectations that dictate the quality of your happiness.

While it may seem like a strange way to approach well-being, this was a commonly used tool among the ancient stoics, several millennia ago. Stoics were staunch advocates of a tactic called “Premeditatio Malorum” meaning Premeditation of evils. William Irvine author of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy elaborates on the stoic strategy in his book:

The stoics recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value — that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique — let us refer to it as negative visualization — was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus . It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit. By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life. Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate impermanence. I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts.

Negative visualization helps us to counteract our natural tendency to react with injured surprise when bad things happen to us. These catastrophes are written into the contract of life and are often outside our sphere of control. Therefore the best strategy is to be prepared for what fortune has in store for us. Ryan Holiday, a best selling author, shares the benefits of anticipation in a recent blog post:

We often learn the hard way that our world is ruled by external factors. We don’t always get what is rightfully ours, even if we’ve earned it. If it comes as a constant surprise each and every time something unexpected occurs, you’re not only going to be miserable whenever you attempt something big, you’re going to have a much harder time accepting it and moving on to attempts two, three, and four. The only guarantee, ever, is that things could go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation, because the only variable we control completely is ourselves.

When you try to persuade yourself that everything will work out for the best, you risk reinforcing your unspoken belief that it would be utterly catastrophic if they didn’t. Instead, try soberly visualizing how badly things could really go.

Everyday before lunch I close my eyes and ask myself, what is the absolute worst thing that can happen today? Losing all my possessions? Losing a family member ? Losing a sense such as my sight or my hearing ?

I pick one, visualize the event along with my strategy to deal with it. As morbid as it sounds, I have found that this 2 minute exercise has a surprisingly positive effect on my well-being.

Do you think you will be mad at someone who cut you off in traffic, if you have just confronted death? Will you be anxious about what your boss thinks, if you have dealt with losing a loved one? I doubt it. Negative visualization helps to put matters in perspective.

Anyone who has experienced a near-death experience will tell you that some things started to matter a lot more and some things a lot less. You do not need to have a near-death experience to realign your priorities in this manner, you can use the power of visualization.

When you visualize an event your brain believes it to be true. Research has shown that we stimulate the same brain regions when we visualize an action and when we actually perform that same action. Therefore, you can just trick your brain through negative visualization to obtain the same clarity as those who have had near-death experiences.

Negative visualization helps to lower my expectations, realign my priorities and develop the mental fortitude to deal with the curveballs life throws at me.

Managing expectations, however, is not the same as complacency. You should strive for greatness, work hard and do your best. But once the outcome is outside your control, it is time to dial back your expectations and wait to be pleasantly surprised.

Life is much more fun when you constantly beat your expectations!