Sam Johnson

So it's a little bit of a counterintuitive consequence of being more dread filled.

Yeah, so what we can say from the research is why dread is a more powerful emotion than savoring.

So why negative things are so much more powerful than positive things.

And basically the reason is that in the case of savoring something positive that's going to happen in the future, there's kind of a good part of it and a bad part of it at the same time.

So suppose that you were in a relationship and the person that you're in love with is going to be away for a month, say.

Well, when they come back, maybe you'll do something really fun together with that person.

Maybe you'll go out partying or something.

So is that something you're going to savor?

How much positive anticipation do you feel about that?

Well, on the one hand, yeah, it's nice thinking about this thing that's going to happen in a month.

But on the other hand, you kind of want that thing to just happen now.

So you're savoring it, which is a nice thing, but then you're also kind of impatient for it because you want it to happen now.

In the case of dread, it's not really like that.

There's really nothing good about having a dental procedure that's going to happen in three months.

We don't really take comfort in the fact that it's going to happen in the distant future to some other version of ourselves.

We mostly just anticipate that we're going to feel a lot of dread about that.

So whereas thinking about positive things in the future is kind of mixed, thinking about negative things in the future is just really bad.

Probably.

So this would be, of course, speculating wildly beyond our actual data.

But it is probably true that feeling emotions like dread can help us to avoid.