Anticipatory savoring

Deliberately look forward to a future good event to extract joy before it arrives.

Why it works

Anticipation is itself a source of positive emotion, often rivaling the event. Deliberately imagining a coming pleasure recruits the same reward pathways and lets you draw well-being from the lead-up, effectively multiplying a single event into a stretch of enjoyment before it happens.

How to do it

1. Pick a good thing coming up and let yourself imagine it vividly in advance.
2. Build a little ramp toward it rather than ignoring it until it arrives.
3. Avoid over-planning it into a performance; anticipate the feeling, not the logistics.

Evidence

Research on anticipation finds that looking forward to positive events (e.g. vacations) contributes substantially to happiness, sometimes more than the event itself, and savoring frameworks include anticipation as a distinct, well-being-linked mode. A study of vacationers found that the pre-trip anticipation phase, not the trip itself, was where most of the happiness boost showed up, since post-holiday mood largely returned to baseline. (observational)

Correlational and self-report; anticipation can also breed unrealistic expectations that the event then disappoints, so it is not uniformly positive.

Sources

• Nawijn, J., Marchand, M. A., Veenhoven, R., & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2010). Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 5(1), 35–47.

Common mistake

Refusing to anticipate "so you won’t be disappointed", which forfeits the real pre-event joy. Guarding against letdown by not looking forward costs more than it saves.