Sam Johnson

I think so.

So one thing that pops out in our data is that people who are more mindful, which is to say focused more on the present, tend to be less prone to this type of behavior and this type of pattern.

So it's probably the case that we can cultivate mindfulness over a longer period of time.

So certainly there are things like mindfulness meditation that can help you to be more mindful in a particular moment.

And it might be possible that by training ourselves to be more mindful, we can also regulate our feelings better around dread.

It's all of the above, actually, David.

So the way that we think about dread is any kind of negative feelings that you have about things that haven't happened yet.

So we can separate out that definition though, which is kind of the way that we think about this, from what we're actually doing when we measure it.

And when we're measuring this, what we're really doing is seeing, okay, for people who are going to expect to be financially worse off in the next year,

to what extent does that affect their current well-being?

For people who think that they're going to be better off in the next year, to what extent does that affect their current well-being?

And it turns out that thinking that you're going to be financially worse off in the next year is a much bigger deal than thinking that you're going to be financially better off in the next year.

Well, we know that it can produce kind of negative emotional consequences in the present time.

So when we're dreading something that's going to happen in the future, we can start to ruminate about that thing, we can focus on that thing, and it can crowd out other thoughts that we might be having in the meantime.

But I think what the research is really showing is less about what are the kind of negative consequences

consequences in the moment, but more about the way that shapes the decisions that we make about the future.

Yeah, so two main things that we found.

So the first thing has to do with risk, and the second thing has to do with time.

So the thing to do with risk is that people vary in the extent to which dread is a more powerful emotion than savoring.

Savoring is kind of the opposite, where you are looking forward to things that can happen, to positive things that can happen in the future.