Disappointment is that feeling you get when reality fails to live up to your hopes and expectations. It is a negative emotion, closely linked to both sadness and surprise.

You can be disappointed by a person or people, by events, or just by life in general. You can also be disappointed in yourself and how you behaved, including inaction as well as action. You can even be disappointed when you get what you want—because it doesn't fully live up to the hype that you created in your mind.

Indeed, the hope being dashed can often lead to regret that you spent time wanting something that turned out to be disappointing. This, in turn, can make you feel even more negative. Disappointment is therefore a complex emotion, and not easy to either predict or manage. This page explains more about it, and how you can manage it when it inevitably occurs.

What is Disappointment?

Disappointment is what you feel when reality fails to match your hopes and expectations.

It is therefore very much a case of reality and expectation clashing—and reality being found wanting.

One interesting aspect of disappointment is that it is not recognised as a psychological term. The American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology includes frustration but not disappointment. However, there is no question that disappointment exists, nor that it is a strongly felt emotion.

On Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions (see our page on Understanding Emotions), disappointment appears as a combination of sadness and surprise. Alternatively, we can think of it as:

Disappointment is closely related to frustration. Indeed, Merriam-Webster gives them as synonyms.

However, they are not quite the same. Disappointment is about your hopes or expectations not being met, and frustration is about being actively stopped from reaching a goal or ambition. Frustration is therefore rather more active, and disappointment more passive.

In a discussion on Reddit, one person suggested that disappointment happened when you lost a competition, and frustration occurred when you never had a chance to win anyway. Another said that frustration was a precursor to anger, and disappointment to sadness. Both these seem a reasonable distinction.

Causes of Disappointment

There are several reasons why we feel disappointment. They include:

• The 'arrival fallacy'

  This is when we have been looking forward to something and working towards it, but when we get it, it doesn't make us happy or fulfilled. The reason for this is often that we have looked only at the outcome, and not at the process. If you have been unhappy with the process of working towards something, it is unlikely that achieving it will result in a sudden turnaround of your happiness level—hence disappointment.

• Unrealistic expectations

  We are not always realistic in our expectations. However, we don't always want to admit that—and this can cause a problem when something doesn't live up to our expectations. Disappointment is particularly likely if you have very high expectations.

• Childhood experiences

  Experiences during childhood, especially negative experiences, can colour our expectations of situations and events as adults. This can therefore lead to either a more negative approach to the circumstances, or unrealistic expectations—and either can lead to disappointment.

Coping with Disappointment

There is always a risk of disappointment whenever we have any expectations or hopes.

One way to avoid disappointment is therefore to lower your expectations.

Some people do this. They set the bar for their lives low, and they are therefore very seldom disappointed by the results. However, as our page on Setting SMART Goals explains, challenging goals are much more motivating than goals that will be easily achieved.

When you set your expectations and goals low, you reduce your motivation—and that can easily also reduce or remove much of the joy in life. This is not always true, but those who set their sights low to avoid disappointment often also 'settle for mediocrity', and ultimately may be unsatisfied even with that.

Other people therefore take the opposite approach.

They set themselves very high goals, focus on perfection and become almost 'over-achievers'. However, goals like this are, by their very nature, not always going to be achievable. Perfection is impossible, and there is always something else to improve. Perfectionists are very often disappointed by themselves because they end up falling short of their high expectations.

Both these approaches seem to be linked to personal history and upbringing. It does not entirely follow, but people whose parents expected them to be 'good enough' or work hard, rather than expecting perfection in outcomes, seem to be better at balancing expectation and reality.

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Moving Towards Reality

Both perfectionism and low expectations are ways to avoid disappointment altogether. However, this is more or less impossible to achieve in reality.

Instead, you need to find a way to manage and live with disappointment.

The first step is to recognise that this is what you are feeling. As with almost all emotions, recognition is the first step to being able to manage it.

You also need to simply let your emotions happen, at least for a while. It is no good trying to stop feeling an emotion, because none of us can do that by sheer will-power. We feel an emotion for a reason, and we need to recognise that, and understand that feeling that emotion—even a negative emotion—is acceptable and healthy.

Even as you are living with your disappointment, it is worth reminding yourself that it will pass. Things may feel bad now, but in a few months, the situation will probably be very different.

It is also a good idea to ask for help and support from those around you, especially if you are really struggling to manage disappointment. Others may have a very different view of a situation, and may be able to give you much-needed perspective.

You may also wish to consider exactly why you are feeling disappointed, because this can provide some perspective on the situation.

For example, if you fail to achieve a promotion at work, you might be disappointed because you wanted more money, or the kudos from having been promoted, or the extra level of challenge, or possibly validation for your previous efforts. You might also, if you are honest, be disappointed because now you are going to have to tell people that you failed to get a promotion, and you don't actually want anyone to know about this failure.

Being honest with yourself will help you to deal with your disappointment better.

This is especially true if the real reason is a bit more trivial—less about your self-worth, and more about how you think others might see you, or having to come clean about a failure.

Reframing Disappointments

There are also some actions that you can take to change how you feel about disappointment.

One constructive approach is to reframe disappointments as potential learning opportunities. In other words, if you have been disappointed by events, other people or yourself, what can you learn?

It is important to view this as a positive process. This is not about blame—either of you or of others. That way lies self-recrimination, bitterness and anger.

Instead, you need to consider:

• What exactly happened? You need to understand this fully. It is worth considering what was within your control, and what was beyond it. Our page on Personal Change Management Skills explains more about this distinction.

• Were your expectations reasonable? If you set your expectations too high, it is not surprising that reality failed to live up to them. Take a long, hard look at your hopes, and see if they were realistic—even while remembering that it is not a bad thing to aim high. Could or should you adjust your expectations in future? When examining your expectations, look for words in your head like should, always, and never. They are often signs that your expectations may have been unrealistic.

• Did you do all that you could to deliver on your expectations? Ask yourself what you could have done differently that might have changed the outcome, given the information that you knew at the time. You cannot change the outcome now, but you can use this information to help you in future decision-making.

This is a much more positive approach, one that will help you to break out of disappointment and look towards the future—and that is what really matters.

Dwelling on disappointment only leads to anger and bitterness, and that is not a positive state of mind for anyone.

Our page on The Importance of Mindset explains more about why focusing on learning can be a very positive way to deal with negative experiences.

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And Finally...

It is important to remember that disappointment is part of life. We hope for things, and they do not always happen—or at least not in the way that we expected.

There is probably a reason why we have a saying about being careful what you hope for.

That is not a reason not to have hopes and dreams. However, it is a reason to ensure that you are prepared to cope with disappointment from time to time.

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