Letting Go of Worst-Case Scenario Mindset
By Yaya Yao
Expecting the Worst Is Supposed to Prepare Me, No?
Imagine this: You get your exam grade back, and you did decently well. But instead of telling yourself “My hard work paid off”, your internal dialogue says: “I can’t afford to celebrate. If I’m too excited, I’m going to let my guard down and bomb the next one.” Sounds familiar? A lot of us tell ourselves not to celebrate our success and instead downplay it because we think it keeps us sharp, attentive, and motivated. If you were to expect a more realistic situation, you won’t continue to try harder, right?
It turns out there’s some truth to that, but also high long-term costs with thinking that way. Let’s take a look at both.
The Benefits of Why We Do It
Expecting failure as a strategy isn’t random. Psychologists have studied this tendency to harness anxiety as motivation for decades through what we call defensive pessimism. In a series of experiments by Norem, J. K. & Cantor, N. (1986) involving university students, the authors found that people who set unrealistically low expectations could successfully convert their debilitating anxiety into a motivating force. A second experiment in which the authors tried to interfere with defensive pessimism impaired performance.
To put it more simply, using anxiety as motivation can lead people to set low expectations as a way of protecting their self-esteem, but this can also discourage them from taking risks or challenging themselves.
This brings us to another important factor: self-esteem. Our performance, especially as students, can feel much more significant when we tie it to our sense of self-worth. A bad grade is no longer a bad grade; it can feel like a blow to our ego. So, by lowering our expectations beforehand, we create a buffer that softens the disappointment if things don’t go as planned. This cognitive strategy is supported by research on emotional contrast avoidance, where a randomized experiment by Gérardy et al. (2026) found that participants who diminished their positive emotions experienced less sadness afterwards compared to participants who were in a relaxed state. This showcases how intentionally downplaying good feelings or expectations can help protect ourselves from an emotional letdown.
On the flip side, expecting positive outcomes can shape our outcomes for the better. Psychologists call this the self-fulfilling prophecy, or behavioural confirmation: our beliefs about what will happen change how we act, and our actions then help bring about the outcome we expect. The idea goes back to sociologist Robert Merton (1948) and was later made famous by Rosenthal and Jacobson's (1968) "Pygmalion" study, in which students whose teachers were led to expect more of them showed greater academic gains.
For this article, we’ll focus more on the pessimistic side of expectations, but there is just as much to say about the power of expecting good things. We’ll explore more on the optimistic side of expectations in the next article, delving deeper into the science behind positive thinking and how it can help you become more successful.
What It Costs You
But here’s the catch. The same strategies that protect you can also keep you from enjoying your wins, which can lead to self-esteem issues, low confidence, and self-sabotage.
Downplaying positive feelings is called dampening, which has a well-established relationship with the maintenance of mental illnesses (Bogaert et al., 2025). Over time, it undermines your belief in your own capabilities. That negative self-talk becomes the story you tell yourself most often, and eventually, it becomes how you see yourself.
Not everyone is motivated the same way, and research suggests our self-esteem plays a role in this. People with low self-esteem are less likely to maintain their positive emotions than people who are high in self-esteem (Wood et al., 2003). And since most of us were never taught to properly cope with negative events and disappointment in a healthy way, it’s hard to imagine a situation where we can feel happy and proud of ourselves without sacrificing the motivation that comes from expecting failures.
Practical Advice to Keep Your Drive and Drop the Harshness
Now I’m not going to tell you to set “realistic expectations” for yourself instead of imagining worst-case scenarios. That advice doesn’t help for most of us who have thought this way for years. Instead, here are some strategies you can consider that keep you motivated without leading to laziness or self-indulgence.
Redefine success and failure as self-improvement: We can get so caught up in measuring ourselves by our successes that failure starts to feel terrifying. This feeling occurs because we put so much weight on the word “success” as being narrowly defined as achieving the results we wanted or hoped for. So, by this definition, when we don’t achieve our goals, we feel disappointed and hurt. A small modification in the way we define success can make all the difference. Redefining success as learning from the process and coming out with more knowledge, expertise, or experience reframes “failure” as an essential part of growth, not a mistake. Under this definition, failure also becomes a learning experience, and that’s simply what it is.
Imagine giving advice to a friend. As someone who has spent a lot of time working on my negative self-talk, I know how difficult it can be to show ourselves the same compassion we naturally give to others. So, instead of forcing ourselves to believe something we don’t yet believe, it’s much easier to start with a perspective we already understand: the way we treat the people we care about. If offering kindness, care, and empathy for a friend or a loved one feels easier and more natural, imagine that they are the ones going through what you’re experiencing. For example, imagine your friend comes up to you after getting an 84 on their class assignment. They’re disappointed in themselves because they were one point away from 85 (a 4.0). They ask you “How should I feel about this?”. What would you tell them? That they weren’t good enough? That one point away from 85 means they failed? Probably not. You would most likely acknowledge that they’re disappointed while reminding them that an 84 shows solid improvement. One grade doesn’t define their ability and they can use this experience to improve next time.
Be kind to yourself after a setback. This one might surprise you. In four experiments testing whether self-compassion after a setback would motivate people more or less, they found that participants who responded to a mistake with self-compassion actually spent more time studying for a difficult test following a failure, reported greater motivation to improve their weakness, and exhibited greater motivation to avoid repeating the same mistake than those in other conditions. These findings suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, taking an accepting approach to personal failure may make people more motivated to improve themselves (Breines & Chen, 2012). Why is that? Those who are more self-compassionate tend to have a growth mindset. This means they recognize their mistakes, imperfections, and struggles. This increases a person’s motivation to learn and change for the better to avoid repeating past mistakes. They also have less fear of failure and show greater confidence in their ability to reach their goals.
Not convinced? In another study, researchers found that individuals who believed they could effectively alleviate negative moods through positive coping mechanisms were less likely to engage in dampening or joy killing (Wood et al., 2003). In other words, when people trust that they have healthy ways to cope with negative emotions, they may feel less need to protect themselves from disappointment by suppressing positive emotions in the first place.
Let yourself win. As we have learned above, being compassionate actually makes us more motivated to learn from our mistakes. But how do we actually do this? It is helpful to write down or verbalize your accomplishments at the end of the day, or even after you complete a task before moving on to another. Verbalizing your wins as “I’m proud of myself for achieving/accomplishing/learning about ___ from this experience” or writing this phrase down in a dedicated journal can amplify your positive emotions. Spending more time consciously focusing on your successes instead of your failures reshapes the way you remember your experiences. The more often you bring to mind your past successes instead of failures, the easier it becomes to recognize evidence that you’re capable of doing well again.
You Can Do Well Without Preparing for Failure
Expecting the worst is more common than you might think. So if you recognize this in yourself, you shouldn’t feel ashamed. Many students learn to use low expectations, self-criticism, or dampening their excitement as ways to protect themselves from disappointment. And as I’ve continued to work on the way I respond to my own successes and “failures”, I’ve realized that it’s okay if parts of you still believe that bracing for the worst keeps you safe. You don’t have to fight that belief, but you can choose to update it.
From personal experience, I know how scary it can feel to finally let yourself celebrate your successes when you’re used to immediately looking for what could go wrong. But learning to slowly change this mindset through the tips I introduced above has made me understand that protecting myself from disappointment was never what made me successful. If anything, letting myself experience excitement, pride, and self-compassion has made me more motivated and successful in my academics, relationships, and personal goals.
So the next time you catch yourself saying, “I can’t let myself feel too good about this”, remind yourself that you can do well without preparing for failure. You can be proud of yourself without becoming complacent. You can celebrate a success without jinxing it. And you can care deeply about improving without making yourself miserable in the process.
References
Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality & social psychology bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212445599
Bogaert, L., Moors, A., & Raes, F. (2026). A goal-directed perspective on dampening of positive affect. Psychological review, 10.1037/rev0000619. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000619
Gérardy, M., Bogaert, L., Newman, M. G., Hallford, D. J., & Raes, F. (2026). Dampening of positive affect as an emotional contrast avoidance strategy: An experimental test of the contrast avoidance model. Behaviour research and therapy, 204, 105116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2026.105116
Norem, J. K., & Cantor, N. (1986). Defensive pessimism: harnessing anxiety as motivation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 51(6), 1208–1217. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.51.6.1208
Wood, J. V., Heimpel, S. A., & Michela, J. L. (2003). Savoring Versus Dampening: Self-Esteem Differences in Regulating Positive Affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(3), 566–580. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.566
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