Why You Think This Pain Will Last Forever (And Why It Almost Never Does)

Why You Think This Pain Will Last Forever

In the middle of a recent breakup, it’s almost impossible to believe that this will ever hurt less.

That feeling has a name in psychology, and it has been measured in people who had just broken up. The Tao Te Ching, in a different language and many centuries earlier, was already pointing in the same direction.

This article crosses the Tao Te Ching with research on affective forecasting. It’s meant for general information and doesn’t replace support from a mental health professional.

A hurricane doesn’t last all morning

Chapter XXIII of the Tao Te Ching is brief, almost a meteorological observation, but its conclusion points directly at the human state of mind:

“Speaking little is natural. A hurricane doesn’t last all morning. A downpour doesn’t last all day. Who makes these things happen? Heaven and earth. If even the things of heaven and earth cannot last forever, how much less the things of man?”

And chapter XL, much shorter, sums up the same idea in a single line:

“Returning is the movement of the Tao.”

Returning, in this context, doesn’t mean everything goes back to being exactly as it was. In our reading, it means no state, however intense, stays fixed: the tide rises and falls, the storm clears, and distress, by this same logic, doesn’t settle in permanently either, however convincing that idea feels while it’s happening.

The impact bias: why the brain miscalculates how long the pain will last

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, of Harvard University, and Timothy Wilson, of the University of Virginia, called this phenomenon the impact bias: the tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of a future emotion, whether negative or positive. They summed it up in a 2003 review covering dozens of studies, from exams and elections to breakups.

In an earlier study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1998), Gilbert and his colleagues still spoke of a “durability bias” and proposed a mechanism they called immune neglect: people predict their future distress poorly because they fail to account for the fact that their own mind has automatic mechanisms (rationalization, reframing, meaning-making) that cushion pain over time, without anything having to be done deliberately to switch them on.

Put differently: today’s broken heart tends to do a poor job predicting how it will feel a few months from now, because it doesn’t factor in its own capacity to adapt.

The study that tested this directly on romantic breakups

This general pattern was put to a very specific test in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2008) by Paul Eastwick, Eli Finkel, Tamar Krishnamurti and George Loewenstein.

They followed 69 first-year students at Northwestern University, each of whom had been in a relationship for at least two months, over nine months. Every two weeks, those still in a relationship predicted how bad they would feel if it ended. For the 26 who broke up during the study, the researchers compared that prediction with the distress they reported feeling in the following weeks.

The result was consistent with the impact bias: those who broke up had overestimated their distress.

What’s interesting is where the error lay. According to the authors, it came entirely from overestimating the initial blow; the pace at which the distress eased was predicted well. The error was larger among those who were more in love, those who thought it unlikely they’d soon start another relationship, and those who had played less of a role in deciding on the breakup.

It’s a study with a small and very young sample, so it’s best read as a solid clue, not as a law.

Why it’s so hard to believe this while it’s happening

There’s an additional reason, almost a matter of cognitive design, why this bias is so persuasive from the inside: when predicting the future, the mind uses the intensity of present distress as its reference point, without correcting for the fact that this distress will, over time, change in nature.

It’s easy to imagine today’s pain projected endlessly forward and much harder to imagine a future version of yourself that simply feels differently, because that version doesn’t yet exist as an experience you can consult. Wilson and Gilbert describe one piece of this phenomenon under the name focalism: when imagining the future, we focus on the event and forget everything else that will fill those days.

It’s, at bottom, the same limitation the Tao Te Ching points to when it talks about heaven and earth: not even the observer inside the storm can see the storm’s end, but that doesn’t mean the storm isn’t going to end.

What all this suggests, in practice

Neither the Tao Te Ching nor Gilbert’s or Eastwick’s research suggests you should pretend to be fine, or that today’s pain isn’t real or important while it lasts. What they point to, instead, is this:

• The certainty that “this is never going to pass” is, itself, a predictable bias, not a reliable read on the future.
• Distress itself comes with automatic adaptation mechanisms that don’t require conscious effort to switch on, and that the mind, in the middle of pain, tends to underestimate.
• In Eastwick’s study, the initial blow of the breakup was less intense than the participants themselves had predicted, especially among those most in love.
• Distrusting the feeling that “this is forever” isn’t denying the pain: it’s recognizing that this particular feeling has a track record of being wrong, measured across more than one study.

This same idea, that forcing or resisting a state almost always prolongs it more than letting it run its natural course, connects with the first article in this series, on why resisting breakup pain makes it last longer, and with the same idea applied to another area of life in what the Tao Te Ching teaches about leadership and negotiation.

If you notice that, after a reasonable amount of time, this distress isn’t easing at all or is severely interfering with your day-to-day life, the attachment style test can help you better understand your own relational pattern, and our article on secure attachment describes what a bond that doesn’t depend on constant validation from the other person tends to feel like, by contrast.

And if what persists is, above all, the difficulty imagining your life without that relationship at its center, the emotional dependency test is a good place to start.

Sources

• Lao Tzu (anonymous trans.). Tao Te King. Biblioteca Digital, Instituto Latinoamericano de la Comunicación Educativa (ILCE). Chapters XXIII and XL.
• Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617-638.
• Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Affective forecasting. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 345-411.
• Eastwick, P. W., Finkel, E. J., Krishnamurti, T., & Loewenstein, G. (2008). Mispredicting distress following romantic breakup: Revealing the time course of the affective forecasting error. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(3), 800-807. Authors’ PDF