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“If (X candidate I hate) wins this electionI’m leaving the country” is a sentiment I’ve heard from several outspoken political celebrities in recent presidential election cycles. However, they never seem to deliver on their promise. That’s because it’s probably not really a promise, but rather a defense against an emotion that people really hate: disappointment. They soothe themselves with a strategy to neutralize anticipated feelings of helplessness and frustration should the feared event occur.

So if your favorite candidate lost on Tuesday night, you might be enduring that terrible emotion. Some people suffer from this disease so severely that they may be diagnosed with a condition popularly known as “post-election stress disorder.”

Even though this all seems exaggerated, you probably fear some source of disappointment in your life. Maybe it involves your career, your education, or your romantic relationship. If so, you are most likely acting in a way that protects you from this deep and painful emotion; some research found that disappointment can be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding this phenomenon can help decrease your fear of your own emotions and help you make decisions that lead to better outcomes. That might even help you avoid making a stupid public promise to leave America.

Read: What to watch if you need a distraction this week

Athey two scholars described it recently in Annual Review of Anthropologydisappointment is “the messy, frictional, and unsatisfying gap between lived experiences and unfulfilled expectations.” The feeling is similar to regret in that it involves a past event that did not turn out as you had hoped. But while regret implies desire you did something different, disappointment does not necessarily involve your decision agency. Because of this distinction, psychologists write in the journal Cognition and emotion find that regret more often leads to self-reproach, in contrast to the usual unhappiness associated with disappointment, which comes from a sense of helplessness.

For example, you might vote for a candidate and regret it (that is, regret having done so). But if the candidate you voted for loses, that can also give you the feeling that you have no say in how you’re governed—that’s where powerlessness comes in.

The above research sheds further light on the psychological dimension of this difference between regret and disappointment. If a person it disappoints you, which usually leads to your feeling of anger. But if year result it is disappointment, which is usually accompanied more by sadness.

Such findings tend to focus on what psychologists call “disconfirmed expectations,” meaning a difference between what you think will happen or should happen and what actually happens. This involves the neuromodulator dopaminewhich governs both rewards and reward anticipation in our brains.

How it works: Imagine that around 11am, your stomach is growling and you’re thinking about lunch. Your mind wanders to a turkey sandwich you enjoyed last week at a local deli, which gives you a response from your dopamine neurons to trigger anticipation and make you make a plan to go there at lunch. If, when you arrive and receive the sandwich, it’s exactly what you expect, you won’t get an additional dopamine response. But if the sandwich is even more delicious than you remembered, you’ll get an extra neurochemical spritz that teaches you to come back again. But if the delicate is closed, God forbid, your dopamine response will decrease, making you feel slightly depressed, or in a word, disappointed.

No doubt the mechanism evolved to teach us the most efficient way to accumulate rewards such as food and mate, and to avoid wasting time and energy on unnecessary activities. In ancient times, this reward system made you return again and again to a watering hole where prey was easy to find. But if those animals caught on and stopped appearing, you’d have a few disappointments and lose interest.

The most psychologically painful disappointments are those in which the hope for a reward contrasts most strongly with the actual outcome. The closed delicacy involves a small drink of dopamine from which you will probably recover in a few minutes. But if, say, you’re really expecting your boyfriend to propose, and instead he blows your mind, the dopamine deficiency will be much more severe and harder to bear—it may lead to a of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is characteristic of dysregulated and clinical dopamine levels depression.

Disappointment is particularly severe for optimists: they predict above-average results and much better than any negative event. This means that they tend to have higher “disconfirmed expectations” than pessimists. Journaling Emotion in 2010, two psychologists studied how students felt before and after receiving exam results. They finder that people with more optimistic expectations did not feel better than their peers beforehand, but felt worse on average after learning their scores, because optimists tended to be further from reality.

Arthur C. Brooks: Schopenhauer’s Advice on How to Achieve Great Things

Ayour lives are full with uncertain results, often involving the things we care most deeply about. Having positive expectations means that disappointment is a part of life. This has led some thinkers to conclude that the only answer is pessimism. The 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer made this case famous when he argument that “we generally find pleasure not so pleasant as we expected, and pain much more painful.” A takeaway from this: don’t ever expect anything good, or even expect the worst, and you’ll never be disappointed.

Then again, Schopenhauer was well known for being an unhappy person, so maybe this isn’t the best strategy. Better, I think, to maintain hope in the midst of life’s uncertainties—but to distinguish hope from optimism. Many people use the terms almost interchangeably, but they are different. Optimism involves an element of prediction—as we have just seen, EXPECTING a good result in a way that can be borderline delusional. Hope involves the belief that even if a disappointing outcome occurs in a situation, you can do something to improve that outcome—in wORDS of a team of researchers on the subject, “having the will and finding the way”. Because of this, as I have writtenhope is far superior to optimism when it comes to happiness.

Hope does not require you to make any predictions about what might happen. It simply requires you to believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to improve the circumstances and think about what that action might be.

In a weird way, that’s half what people do when they announce a plan to leave America if the wrong candidate wins the election. But the contemplated action—leaving home and going into exile—is foolish and extreme; it would be much better to say, “If the bad guy wins, I will be disappointed, but regardless of the disappointment, I will work as hard as I can to make things around me better.” The same goes for other disappointments in life. If you long for a big promotion, don’t predict whether you will get it or not. Just be honest with yourself that you’re hoping for the reward, and think logically about what constructive actions you can take if you are, in fact, passed over.

Furthermore, because disappointment is part of the useful neurobiological learning process you inherited for your evolutionary fitness, look for the valuable lessons of failure. Psychiatrist Carl Jung thought that when we are disappointed, we can actually choose between bitterness and wisdom – the latter being “the comforter in all mental distress.”

The problem with the country going approach is that it succumbs to bitterness instead of seeking to learn. The same goes for a disappointment, such as a bad breakup. The bitter answer is “I’ll never date again.” A wise response is to figure out how to avoid entangling yourself in the future with someone who shares your ex’s problematic traits (that jerk).

Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s Five Pillars of the Good Life

I wrote this column to soothe anyone who might be suffering from post-election disappointment and provide a better way to cope. But maybe you I’m not disappointed: Maybe your candidate wonand you’re excited right now. This can also be an opportunity for wisdom – if you choose to take it.

Today you taste victory, but remember: defeat is just around the corner, because that’s how life works. Think about this truth and take the opportunity to show some grace to neighbors and family members whose candidate lost and who are disappointed—because they feel today as you will surely feel tomorrow. Think of it as a chance to travel back in time and bring some kindness to console your disappointed future self.