Why I Almost Lost My Girlfriend & How to Reanchor for Happiness
Careful Where You Drop Your Anchor
Watch Me Do a Magic Trick While I Tell You a Story:
I almost lost out on one of the best things in my life — my girlfriend.
I met her the weekend she moved to Austin, but no romantic sparks flew that day. Six months passed — nothing. Our occasional encounters didn’t go anywhere.
Then a chance conversation at Barton Springs — the beloved local swimming hole — changed everything. On my way home I realized I wanted to ask her on a date.
The problem: she’s a social butterfly.
I couldn’t get her alone for five minutes to ask her out. Weeks went by, and every time I saw her she was surrounded by a phalanx of talkative friends. It seemed awkward to ask her out in a group, and I couldn’t think of a good ploy to get her number. I kept waiting.
More time went by, and I decided I wasn’t willing to wait any longer. I looked her up on Facebook and sent her the lamest date proposal of my life, but she accepted, and the rest is history…a history that almost didn’t happen.
Because I found out I’d caught her in a narrow window of availability. Work brought her to Austin for only a year. Had I waited two more months to strike up that first conversation, we’d lack the time required to find out our relationship had legs, impending departure be damned.
Had my timing been off just a bit, had I hesitated a little longer, I wouldn’t have this amazing person in my life.
Dropping Anchors Left And Right
Did you see that magic? That sleight of hand? That…manipulation?
The bolded bit was me doing what most people don’t — consciously choosing where to drop a psychological anchor. I was manipulating myself.
Researchers have found that even people in happy relationships become happier if they write about how the relationship almost didn’t come to pass and why it was surprising that it did. The same goes for any positive event — dropping a psychological anchor by emphasizing the long odds of an occurrence makes us happier. Acknowledging something as good but inevitable does nothing for us1.
The key is being able to say, I almost didn’t have this great thing.
We all drop psychological anchors, of course. We can’t help ourselves.
Anchoring bias, or “the anchoring effect,” is always at work in our subconscious. It’s one of the ways retailers manipulate us.
It’s easy to assume all anchors work this way — someone else drops the anchor, and we’re stuck orienting our judgments around it.
But we’re constantly casting our own anchors, and failing to do so wisely leaves us miserable.
The Anchoring Effect:
The ancient Stoics wrote about what we call the anchoring effect and developed a suite of exercises to turn it to our advantage.
Modern psychological researchers rediscovered the phenomena in 1958. They found they could influence people’s judgments and decisions by introducing mental "anchors" that might be arbitrary or irrelevant to the topic at hand2.
For instance, if someone makes a small initial stock purchase with a gift card, they go on to buy much less stock with their own money than if they initially bought a larger amount of stock with a gift card3.
If a long-lost uncle dies and unexpectedly leaves you $100,000, you’d be thrilled, right? But if you were expecting $1 million from the estate of a not-lost uncle, you’d probably be disappointed to receive $100,000.
It’s easy to understand this, but hard to overcome. Even when researchers warn subjects that they’re being exposed to anchors that will affect their subsequent judgment and decisions, they can’t fully compensate for them4. The only effective strategy appears to be asking subjects to consider the opposite of the anchor they’ve been presented with5.
Stoics Are Masters of “The Opposite”
Stoics favor reanchoring in ways that generate gratitude and happiness rather than jealousy and anger.
They do this through several varieties of negative visualization. It’s simple: you briefly imagine ways in which your life could be worse rather than concentrating on what it lacks. This is easy, since our lives can always get worse.
You can be sad that you’re not driving a fancy car like your neighbor, or you can be grateful for your adequate car, and happy that you’re free of the massive car loan your neighbor is stuck with.
Concentrating on how you almost didn’t have a great thing, as mentioned above, is another reliable anchor.
Death and loss are great points to anchor around. See my Memento Mori article.
Imagine You’re fired, confined to two weeks of bed rest after surgery, or your significant other almost dies. Can you find a way to be grateful?
My bet is that your mind will find a way to make it happen if you stick with the question long enough.
One fallback option I’ve found effective: “If things had gone better for me, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to level up my discipline/kindness/courage/mental game/skills.”
The Stoics point out that if you’re not consciously anchoring, society or your subconscious will anchor for you, and you’re probably not going to like the result.
Koo M, et al. It's a wonderful life: mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2008 Nov;95(5):1217-24.
Sherif, M., Taub, D., & Hovland, C. I. (1958). Assimilation and contrast effects of anchoring stimuli on judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(2), 150–155.
Itzkowitz, Jennifer; Itzkowitz, Jesse; Schwartz, Andrew (2023). "Start Small and Stay Small: Anchoring in App-Based Investing". The Journal of Behavioral Finance.
Wilson, T. D., Houston, C. E., Etling, K. M., & Brekke, N. (1996). A new look at anchoring effects: Basic anchoring and its antecedents. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 125(4), 387–402.
Bradley J. Adame. Training in the mitigation of anchoring bias: A test of the consider-the-opposite strategy. Learning and Motivation, Volume 53, 2016, Pages 36-48,
When I tell my brain to practice something (which comes from other human beings), I fill a resistance against the telling. On the other hand, when I read any exquisite produce of any human brain, like a poetry, like a novel, like Shakespeare, like Tagore, like Marcus Aurelius, like Newton, Darwin, Stephen Hawking, I feel somewhere it lights up my brain with excitement, and amazing pride as Homo sapiens; THERE, my brain try to SEEK help, refuge. The brain takes up according to its psych state of developmental stage and THAT HOW MY BRAIN DOES.
Tricking with your own mind or trying to mitigate it with a purpose has serious limitations. Your mind fills like you are working on it NOT with it. And that moment it feels belittled. And the entire exercise fails.