Why You Cannot Imagine Feeling Better

It is late, and you cannot sleep. Earlier today something went wrong. Maybe a relationship ended, or a friend went quiet on you, or you made a mistake at work that has grown a little bigger with every hour since.

Lying there, one thought keeps coming back. It is going to feel like this forever.

If someone reminded you that you have been here before and come through it, you would probably agree. It would not help. The person you were last week, the one who felt fine, seems like someone you used to know.

Then a couple of weeks pass. You are making a coffee, or laughing at something on the radio, and you realise you feel all right again. You can barely remember why it hurt so much.

Neither of those moments is lying to you. They are just very bad at talking to each other.

The Two Versions of You

Psychologists call this the hot-cold empathy gap. The idea comes largely from the economist George Loewenstein, who began writing about it in the 1990s.

A hot state is when something is running high in you: hurt, anger, fear, craving, exhaustion, even plain hunger. A cold state is when it is not. The gap is how hard it is to imagine one from inside the other.

From a calm afternoon, you can remember that you were hurt. What you cannot easily do is remember what the hurt actually felt like. And from inside the hurt, calm sounds like something that happens to other people.

Your Body Writes the Forecast

Some of the research on this is almost funny. In one study, people at a gym were asked to imagine hikers lost without food or water. Those who had just finished a workout, hot and thirsty, were far more likely to say the hikers would suffer most from thirst. In another, office workers chose a snack they would be given a week later. The ones choosing in the hungry late afternoon picked the less healthy options, for a day they could not yet feel.

Nobody in those studies was being silly. Their brains were doing what brains do: using how they felt right now as the best guess for how things would feel later, and adjusting far too little.

Now swap thirst for heartbreak.

Why It Feels Like Forever

When you are hurting, your brain makes its forecast from inside the hurt. Memory goes along with it. When you are low, low memories come forward easily. The times you got through it are still there. They are just harder to reach from where you are standing.

There is a well-known study of young academics waiting to hear whether they would be given permanent jobs. They predicted that being turned down would leave them miserable for years. The people who actually had been turned down were, a few years on, about as happy as the ones who got the job.

Why Calm Makes Big Promises

It runs the other way too.

On a quiet Sunday it all seems easy. You will not check your phone in bed. You will not answer that message while you are angry. At the family dinner, you will stay calm this time. You are making promises on behalf of someone who is going to feel completely different.

In one study of people trying to quit smoking, the ones most confident in their willpower put themselves in more tempting situations, and were more likely to slip a few months later. Feeling in control made it easy to forget how strong the pull can be.

That is not a character problem. It is the same shortcut, pointed the other way.

Where You Might Recognise It

• Being certain in the middle of an argument that the relationship is over, then seeing it differently over breakfast
• Rehearsing exactly what you will say to your mum, then losing every word the moment you walk into her kitchen
• Saying yes to everything on a rested Monday and wondering on Thursday who agreed to all of it
• A low patch that feels like the truth about your life, and a good patch that feels like the truth about your life
• Walking out of a session feeling clear, and finding that clarity strangely hard to reach again by Wednesday

Both states are real. The trouble is that each one struggles to believe in the other.

What Actually Helps

You cannot think your way out of the gap. What you can do is let one version of you leave notes for the other.

• Notice which state you are in. Saying to yourself, I am in a hot state right now, will not fix the feeling. It does stop the feeling passing itself off as a fact
• Sleep on big decisions. Ending things, sending things, quitting things. If it still looks right in the morning, it has passed a useful test
• Write yourself a note while you feel steady. What helps, what you tend to believe at your worst, and that it has passed before. Your own words land differently from anyone else's
• Plan for your hardest hour, not your easiest. If evenings are when you scroll, move the charger out of the bedroom at lunchtime, when it costs you nothing
• Keep a short list of times it got better. One line each time a rough patch eases. Your memory will not offer these up when you are low, so keep them somewhere you can find them

A Realistic Expectation

Knowing all this will not make the bad nights feel good. Three in the morning will still feel like three in the morning, and the sense that nothing will change is part of what that state feels like from the inside.

What usually shifts is how much you believe it. Over time, people often notice a quieter voice turning up alongside the feeling, one that says this is real, and it will also pass. It does not take the pain away. It tends to make the worst hours a little shorter, and it means fewer big decisions get made inside them.

If the low feeling is not lifting, or the calmer stretches have stopped coming at all, that is something different, and worth talking to someone about.

None of this is a diagnosis, and it is not a substitute for individual assessment. If you keep finding yourself unable to imagine feeling better, counselling can help you find your way back across. Stabilise is available in Carlton, Melbourne and online.