Election night probably felt like it was your last day on Earth — here's why

• The US presidential election took place on Tuesday, November 3.
• For many people, the anticipation leading up to that date may have caused some temporary blindness as to whether the future will even happen.
• Psychologists have a name for this self-deception: the "end of history illusion."

If you found yourself waking up this morning a bit disoriented — Did last night really happen? — it might not just be the doomscrolling-induced hangover.

It could be the bewilderment that today would ever arrive at all.

Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: the end of history illusion. It's the misperception that what has already happened is all there ever will be — that the many events in your life have all been leading up to this moment, and the future will only be more of the same.

In this case, it helps describe the feeling you might have had leading up to November 3. With so much at stake and so much anticipation of who will get elected president, you may have simply disregarded the fact that there would even be a November 4, or 5, or any other future date, simply because the present (and the past) live so viscerally in our mind.

Time marches on, of course. As of this writing, the date is November 4. Election night happened. And we still don't know who will get elected president, but soon enough it will be decided.

Intellectually, we all know this to be true. So how come the future still feels so imaginary?

The science of staying the same

Outside election cycles, the end of history illusion shows up most often in personality research.

Psychologists have found that people of all ages, from teenagers to senior citizens, tend to believe their personalities won't change much in the coming years, even though they often concede they've changed a lot when looking at the past.

In other words, we always seem to be in a constant state of finality — of reaching some fully realized self. In turn, we pay little mind toward what lies ahead.

Part of the reason we do this, researchers believe, is that it's comforting to think we are always the best version of ourselves.

"Believing that we just reached the peak of our personal evolution makes us feel good," Harvard psychologist Jordi Quoidbach told The New York Times in 2013. At the same time, "realizing how transient our preferences and values are might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety."

In a now-famous study, Quoidbach, along with fellow Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert and University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson, surveyed 19,000 people between the ages of 18 and 68 about their values, personalities, and preferences. Specifically, they asked people "to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade," the authors note in the study's abstract.

What they discovered was that people of all ages "believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future."

They had, in their minds, reached the end of history.

The only constant is change

The lesson from end-of-history research is that we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves.

As Quoidbach advises, the end of history illusion protects us from doubting our every decision and generating anxiety, which data suggests we've already got in spades due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But illusions aren't reality, and so we may find significant benefit from keeping the quirk of psychology in mind.

Polling research shows people are quite pessimistic about life 30 years from now. Most Americans fear income inequality will widen by 2050, job prospects will fade due to automation, and that climate change will endanger the planet.

Treating these urgent issues as present-day concerns may help counteract our tendency to self-soothe. It may productively rob of us of the comforts of thinking we've reached the end of history, because we haven't.

Sometimes anxiety is productive, and what moves people to vote like never before.